The Potter’s Field

~ oxfordbrookesuni

or A Wanderer’s Song

Since I am a stranger, since I am a guest,
Bury me in the Potter’s Field, that which is called
The field of blood. Here is calculated
The utility of a kiss on a bearded
Cheek, by night, beneath the olives,
In the smoky light of torch and legend.
He who lies there will lie forever
Between the hanged and the crucified
And moulder in frightful balance.
Bury me in the Potter’s Field,
Because it was bought, in the words of the book,
To bury strangers in. Wayfarers, rovers
Lay claim to it: those who seek
Peace in movement, security in rootlessness,
Are otherwise suspicious, and usually keep
Their silence, if not always about the same;
Their shadows are dusty from the road
And a little denser than most—
So bury me with my shadow:
The weeds will grow blacker in the Potter’s Field.

by Ivan V. Lalic, translated by Francis R. Jones

from The Passionate Measure
Anvil, 1989
Copyright © Ivan V Lalic 1989
Translation copyright © Francis R Jones 1989

Translated poetry is sometimes regarded as a second-hand or inferior form of poetry, but in the hands of an imaginative translator as close to the poet and the poetry as is Francis Jones, one feels that the poems might well have been written originally in English. And Lalic himself, a Serbian with idiomatic English who translated a lot of English poetry into Serbian, thought that Jones’s translations were a perfect mirror of his poems.

This poem is from what is possibly Lalic’s finest collection, published in Jones’s translation in 1989. It needs no comment and is a good example of Lalic’s marvellous work. He was born in 1931 and died in 1996. Anvil hopes to publish his Collected Poems in English in 2008.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

In Praise of Aunts

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I conjure Aunts, sly laughers,
Aunts not of the blood
but of the spirit; invite
from their cold cots for scones and tea
Aunts who could cheat
and fib for fun, playing Old Maid
in silent riot, keeping a card
up a knickerleg; Aunts who would never
hurt a child to do it good;

Aunts without men, good sports,
bachelor Aunts eternally retired
who liked dogs, who could whistle,
Aunts with pockets, pocketsful
of small timely treats,
and not wincing at stickiness
nor at blood as they strode
through the war, through the wards,
voluntary servant goddesses.

You women long at peace,
rooted in sycamore scrub
beneath St. Peter’s topsyturvy stones
without memorial: I will praise
your names, your dented hats and bulging shoes,
who pedalled across my dream
last night with shining spokes and hubs
and cracked halloos and glimpse of knees,
old children in your upright childless bones.

by M.R. Peacocke

from In Praise of Aunts (Peterloo, 2008)

M.R. (Meg) Peacocke’s poem “In Praise of Aunts”  is the title poem of her new collection (Peterloo, 2008).  Her previous volumes are: Marginal Land (Peterloo, 1988), Selves (Peterloo, 1995) and Speaking of the Dead (Peterloo, 2003).  All her volumes have received exceptionally favourable national review coverage.  Reviewing her first volume for London Magazine, Stephen Knight wrote “Like Larkin, Peacocke has that all-too-rare gift of knowing how to make a memorable poem”, and reviewing her second volume for Stand, John Lucas wrote of her “truly inventive elegance, wit, and immaculately-controlled feeling” and described Selves as “a gem of a collection”.  Her third collection received full-page coverage in Guardian Saturday Review. 

Meg Peacocke was born in 1930 and grew up in South Devon.  She read English at Oxford and after teaching, travelling, marriage and bringing up a family of four, a training in counselling and work in a children’s cancer unit she moved to a small hill farm in Cumbria where she still lives.

Peterloo Poets was founded by Harry Chambers, still the Publishing Director, in 1976. Its masthead is “poetry of quality by new or neglected poets”. Peterloo publishes between 8 and 10 volumes of poetry a year, runs an annual poetry competition – the 2008 competition will be the 24th – and, since 1999, an annual International Poetry Festival.

“From time to time it has seemed to me that the Peterloo Poets series is a haven of poetic sanity in a world of modish obfuscation.”
Michael Glover, British Book News

Lamb

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We left him sleeping peaceful in the night
but they have tied him down, bony wrists
wrapped in a sheepskin cuff, lashed tightly to the rail.

He was fierce after we left, they say:
shouting, tearing at the drip. Hard to believe it
of this gentle man, but this morning,

unbound for the time we’re there, he cavils,
clawing at the needle in his arm, moaning
and stubborn, baring his teeth at us

when we refuse. I stroke his fettered hand,
his paper forehead, murmur comfort,
courage, anything. He shakes me off, tossing

his head, red-eyed, an angry ram. Ha!
I must remember who I am: his child,
just a child, why do I question him?

So I hold my tongue, but stay. Lift up the cup,
with its candy-striped concertina straw,
to his splintered lip and he, in resignation, sucks.

Yes, we make a meagre congregation, father,
disobedient. The flesh, indeed, is weak.
Still, remembered echoes of his sermons come:

a promised child, the tangled ram, the sheep-clothed son;
last-minute rescues, legacies, and lies.
The promised and the chosen, certain hopes.

How, from these stories, are we to be wise?
His word was clear and sure before, but now
his raging, rambling, shakes this listener’s heart.

And yet, to be here, of some small use,
is a kind of peace. Three spoons of food,
oil for his hands, his feet. Then at last,
at last, returning to gentleness, he sleeps.

by Isobel Dixon

This poem is taken from the painful sequence ‘Meet My Father’, gathered in A Fold in the Map, which forms a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey into death.

A Fold in the Map is a nod to Jan Morris’s Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere, where the traveller’s state of in-between-ness is explored. Robert Frost said “a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a home-sickness, a love-sickness” and in these poems of love and longing for home, family, and other loved ones, Isobel Dixon draws on a rich store of natural imagery, illuminating the ordinary at times with a touch of wry humour. Her vivid poems will speak memorably to travellers, lovers and all those who mourn.

Isobel Dixon was born in Umtata, South Africa, grew up in the Karoo region and studied in Stellenbosch, and then in Edinburgh, before the world of publishing lured her to work in London. She now lives in Cambridge. Her poetry has been widely published in South Africa, where she won the Sanlam Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize for her collection Weather Eye. Internationally, her work has been published in The Paris Review, Wasafiri, Avocado, The Guardian, London Magazine, and The Tall Lighthouse Review, among others, and has been translated into Dutch and Turkish. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including several of the British Council New Writing volumes, and she read on the first Oxfam Life Lines CD. She does regular readings around the country, often with a group of London-based poets, and has also participated in two group pamphlets Unfold and Ask for It by Name.

For further information, and to read more of Dixon’s poems, go to Salt Publishing.

A Bowlful of Tongues

~ oxfordbrookesuni

As we are swallowed by the city’s
lips, open like a kiss,
we all find something to shout about,

the jib of the rain sheared pure
from the backs of pullover clouds
by the falling nuts and bolts
of swearing sprayed by sentimental truckers.

A booing flight of volleyed songbirds
drop shadows all across villa park, croaky throated
with joining in that famous folksong sung
by the proud Tilton singers,
who have proved, that if you keep right on,
eventually, paradise will be yours.

If you happen too quick you’ll remember
to forget the grief that greets as you look back
at the big bloke you’ll never meet until
it’s too late, confronting those who’ve lost
the plot banged against the bumper in front.

Spaghetti steams with a hiss pop cackle of radios
on the blink and a tape of the Status Quo unspooling
like the roads straightening beyond Birmingham calling
in our accent crafted from bitter and graft.

When you bleed out from the Heart towards wherever
it is you feel comfortably zipped,
through suburbs coupled up to share a name
and Somewhere towns someone, somehow,
must love,
but not us,

by Matt Nunn

Matt Nunn was born in West Bromwich in 1971. This poem comes from Happy Cos I’m Blue, his second collection. He is a freelance writer and poetry workshop leader and lives in Birmingham. ‘A Bowlful of Tongues’ was commissioned by BBC Radio to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the opening of Spaghetti Junction.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy Happy Cos I’m Blue, please visit the Heaventree Press website. 

Break of Day in the Trenches

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The darkness crumbles away,
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand,
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Helpless whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl’d through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe – 
Just a little white with the dust.

by Isaac Rosenberg

from Poetry Out of My Head and Heart (2007), edited by Jean Liddiard

An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library’s removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including  ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ and ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ by the major First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg’s mentor. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg’s complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and the poet Gordon Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister Annie, Whitechapel librarian Morley Dainow, schoolteacher Winifreda Seaton, and patron Frank Emanuel. All are published here, most for the first time.

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890 to Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. His family moved to the East End of London in 1897, and after a rudimentary education Rosenberg at 14 was apprenticed to an engraver. Wealthy patrons enabled him to study at the Slade School of Art (1911-14) and for nine months in 1914-15 he lived in South Africa. The only poems to be collected in his lifetime were self-published in a pamphlet form – Night and Day (1912), Youth (1915) and Moses (1916). Enlisting in the Army in October 1915 he served on the Western Front until his death on night patrol on 1 April 1918.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

SIX

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am getting sick of trying to temper my tantrums. It’s true that it’s very frustrating when the tortilla doesn’t just slide out of the pan. I don’t care about the number of the beast it’s too predictable. Six – in six days work was complete and Larry Fagin invited us over for dinner. Who is the sky who is the universe who made the universe who wills the birds as the butterflies as the flowers which drop at the feet of the gods.  Six sheep rapt on shore. A covenant was made with the children of Israel. She wondered if he really loved her. My other wife is a Cadillac.  I came with my wife six times we loved it so much. Sheaf or sheep or sheer. They tried not to face the facts that they were being lied to by the men in power but after a while they realized they’d rather be fishing anyway. Votes count. Six days you shall labor. I lived in Mexico for six years and therefore compared to you I am exotic. Backstage at Radio City Music Hall past the Rockettes’ dressing rooms three camels six sheep two donkeys and a horse keep a woman awake each night. Desire tremble your rhyme this is my hand your hand we are kissing in time.

by Daniel Kane

from Seven by Daniel Kane (Landfill, 2004)

Copyright © Daniel Kane

Seven is a prose poem that mixes everyday emotions, jokes, memories and found language with an increasingly mystical vision of numbers in the universe. In the penultimate section, the Apocalyptic number of the beast (666) is impatiently dismissed, but recollection of the Biblical six-day Creation introduces a more lyrical mood, which breaks into rhyme with the final sentence. As Gertrude Stein said: ‘A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.’

Daniel Kane is a Senior Lecturer in the School of American Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (University of California, 2003). His long prose poem ‘Ostentation of Peacock’ can also be read online here.

Landfill Press was founded in Norwich in 2004 as a publisher of contemporary poetic sequences

The Flight of the Sparrow

~ oxfordbrookesuni

‘My lord, although we cannot know
The mysteries of the afterlife
The span of time we spend on earth
Appears to me to be like this:
Imagine sitting in your hall
In winter, feasting with your chiefs
And counsellors – your faces glowing
From flames that crackle in the hearth.
Outside, the wintry night is lashed
By winds and driving rain and snow.
Suddenly a sparrow darts in
Through a door, flits across the hall
And flies out through another one.
Inside, cocooned in light and warmth
It can enjoy a moment’s calm
Before it vanishes, rejoining
The freezing night from which it came. 

Such is our journey through this life.
But as to what’s in store for us
Beyond the doors of birth and death
We are completely in the dark.’

by James Harpur

from The Monk’s Dream
Anvil, 1996
Copyright © James Harpur 1996

James Harpur had two new collections of poems out in October 2007, but this is from an earlier book, The Monk’s Dream. It is a good example of his skill in using an anecdote to telling poetic effect – the vignette of the sparrow comes from Bede’s A History of the English Church and People, 11:13. Harpur’s style combines plainness, i.e. under- rather than over-statement, and elegance. His two new collections are The Dark Age, with poems focusing on the “dark ages” of Europe and the struggles of early Christianity; and Fortune’s Prisoner, a translation of the poems from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

Born in 1956 of Anglo-Irish parents, Harpur studied Classics and then English at Trinity College. He now lives in Co. Cork, Ireland. As well as his three collections of poetry from Anvil, A Vision of Comets, The Monk’s Dream and Oracle Bones, he is author of Love Burning in the Soul: The Story of the Christian Mystics, from Saint Paul to Thomas Merton (Shambhala, 2005).

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

This is the last Weekly Poem for 2007 – a very Happy Christmas and New Year to you all.

The Bus Driver is Accused of not Wearing Uniform

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Traffic Court, Spanish Town, Jamaica.
11:45 am. Judge Marianne James presiding.
How does the defendant plead?

Your honour, I plead guilty to half
the offence – I had on a blue cotton shirt
buttoned up and tucked in

to brown pants, your honour. What’s so wrong
in that? Brown pants like the kind
men wear on Sundays,

the kind we travel in –
dignified looking pants your honour
that Gloria just iron the morning.

Is not the navy blue Government
tell us to wear – I know. But the material
they give us so weak

it always sporting holes. I won’t drive
in rags, your honour! Mi mother raise me
better than that.

So I plead guilty to shame
and good manners – splashing cologne
on mi chest each morning and

never boring mi ears or growing
mi hair wild like them criminals today
who jump on buses

to hold knives against wi neck.
I notice I don’t see them
in court today, I guess

bad bwoy never out of uniform;
always wear the same dirty merino
and cut up shorts, proving

that him come from nowhere
and answer to nobody. Your honour,
I plead guilty

to a pair of brown pants
and having old time ways that say
a man must leave his house

in clothes that don’t tear,
clothes he can wear proud
on his Judgement Day.

by Kei Miller

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. His first collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones, was short-listed in 2007 for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. He is also the editor of Carcanet’s New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology.  Kingdom of Empty Bellies was his first book of poetry; There Is an Anger That Moves will be published by Carcanet in October 2007.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy Kingdom of Empty Bellies, please visit the Heaventree Press website. 

On a Photograph of Air Raid Wardens, taken after All-Night Bombing of the West End: 1940

~ oxfordbrookesuni

It could almost be a detail from Vermeer
as could the catch-light of their helmets
domed and gleaming, pictured here
among the ravaged London streets:

two wardens, one with a decorated china jug
and pouring tea out for the other
who warms rough hands around his mug
as if either might have asked Shall I be mother?

At any moment anything may happen –
somebody’s world become a heap of stone
or something precious be forever broken,
an orphaned child found wandering alone –

as it still happens, as we check the TV screen
for daily close-ups and a body count
rather more Goya than Vermeer, obscene
in every detail he’d record in paint.

This is what we witness, surrogate wardens
of remote streets, far enough removed
to keep watch from our homes and gardens,
feeling our tender consciences reproved

by unknown victims of a different war,
of ideologies beyond the reach
or comprehension of this decent pair
who stand here in the street together, each

intent on what they celebrate, those small
residual habits, tender domesticity
incongruous and brief, a welcome interval
allowed for kindness, pouring a mug of tea.

by John Mole

John Mole writes for both children and adults. “On a Photograph of Air Raid Wardens after All-Night bombing of the West End: 1940” comes from his latest collection for adults The Other Day (Peterloo, 2007), his first volume since the warmly-received Counting the Chimes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2003 (Peterloo, 2004) which includes the poet’s own selection from nine previous collections plus 30 new poems.  Writing in the T.L.S., Bernard O’Donoghue praised John Mole for having written “some of the most engaging poems of the past quarter-century.”  John Mole is a jazz clarinettist and is currently the City of London’s Poet-in-Residence.

Peterloo Poets was founded by Harry Chambers, still the Publishing Director, in 1976. Its masthead is “poetry of quality by new or neglected poets”. Peterloo publishes between 8 and 10 volumes of poetry a year, runs an annual poetry competition – the 2008 competition will be the 24th – and, since 1999, an annual International Poetry Festival.

“From time to time it has seemed to me that the Peterloo Poets series is a haven of poetic sanity in a world of modish obfuscation.”
Michael Glover, British Book News

-wards

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The snow falls thickly,
a strong wind moves
the white-fronted geese flying south,
grey wings out of cold,
calling in half song,
half bark.

An early moon, knife-edged,
shining indiscriminately,
cuts light on anyone.

The train takes me north,
scooping into the cold
air, sharp and clear,
where there is no sound,
not one –
the fields unravelling,
the trees running backwards
in my wake,
behind.

by Judy Kendall

From The Drier The Brighter (Cinnamon, 2007)

Like many of the poems in The Drier The Brighter, ‘-wards‘ plays around with the graphic surface of the poem, in particular the font and punctuation. The more extreme experiments with punctuation and use of space elsewhere in the collection are here more muted and mainly appear in the title which is in italics and begins with a hyphen. These typographical choices highlight the transitory state of the voice and content of the poem – left hanging, neither ‘to-wards’ or ‘back-wards’, but in transit, like the voice in the poem, disorientated, not knowing which way is forward or backward. Is the speaker moving forward or are the fields outside the train running backwards?

The poem also owes a debt to Chinese parallelism. Each idea is repeated, often in successive lines, and sometimes in the same line. ‘The snow falls thickly’ (l.1) refers to winter weather, movement, and extremity. This is followed by a parallel line containing three more indications of winter weather (wind), movement (moves) and extremity (strong). This use of parallelism also reinforces the idea of movement as lack of movement – being caught in movement, and not in arrival.

Judy Kendall is a poet and translator whose recent poetry collection The Drier The Brighter came out with Cinnamon Press in 2007. She has spent several years teaching in Japan and Africa but now works as a lecturer in Creative Writing and English at Salford University.

Cinnamon Press is a young, fast-growing small press based in North Wales and publishing writers from Wales, the UK and internationally, as well as the poetry journal Envoi. The list is mainly poetry, but also includes some fiction and cross-genre books.