Hebden Bridge

October 26, 2020April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Wool skies turn over heavy cloud,
the pages of a good book stuck somewhere
between wickedness and flood. A gurgle
of rain meadows, pitches unfit for sport,
long hedgerows littered with chap-sticks, cider
bottles, and damp tubes of old fireworks:
their excitements decidedly past tense.

This is the place you still call home,
an answer arrived at just by asking
the wrong question too many times.
The landscape an impossible pattern of fields,
drystone and cart tracks, brickwork lines
tangled around dark farms,
terraces milled in childish strokes
of grit; raw-edged and smoky.

The canal churns through creaking locks,
bleak with weed and fat perch and reeds,
where shadows of imported carp
nudge blunt snouts through the thickened silt.
Men sit switching stories on damp canvas,
stools sunk low in the towpath,
one hand on a sandwich, another dipped
in the red husks of maggots, the fresh bait
struggling free, fluffed like rice, writhing too.

Shop-fronts boarded or bought-up, shaken dry
and franchised into nowhere: chrome and steel,
exposed light-bulbs, railway salvage,
their high chairs polished by the acutest music.
You can still buy crystals, eye talismans,
and stone webs for catching dreams; false
promise as unorthodox practice, strung out
on silk. Commerce the one sure way to heal
the wounds time has forced you into keeping.

Fifteen pubs. Three per thousand. More yesterday.
Rooms where you can watch the same face age
through its endless afternoons.
Doorways hung with pretty chimes, wicker
and knotted twigs, scents of incense,
marks of incest, park benches warped
in a fug of weed and needles.
Out beyond the council blocks lie
the sewage plant and dump, broken dye-works
and coal silos; industrial leftovers clumped
with white goods and rust, jaws and iron arms
crushing waste, weary of reconstitution.

Hold on, there are still the old mills, oak woods,
and carpets of bluebells, millponds
still with sediment, and the great moors swept
hard like a birthplace for the wind.
The whole place picture perfect, yes a land
where poetry comes easy, skimming the dark crags
and fattened beeches growing high
above the river murk, voices cheering, drowning
out the yeasty spume and froth, brimming deep,
lower even than the world.

by Daniel Fraser

Listen to Daniel Fraser reading ‘Hebden Bridge’

This week’s poem by Daniel Fraser is the second in a trio of poems by our new ignitionpress authors! Last week we featured Isabelle Baafi’s poem ‘PG Tips’, and you can read it here. We are very excited to be launching three new pamphlets by Isabelle, Daniel, and Kostya Tsolakis online on Friday 6 November. Please join us! The event will be live-streamed to our YouTube channel. You can find more details about the launch and sign up to attend it here.

We recently announced the winners of this year’s Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, and you can read the winning poems here. Our awards event this year will be held online and everyone is welcome to attend! It will feature readings by the winning poets in both the Open and EAL categories, and a short reading by this year’s judge, Fiona Benson. To register your attendance, please visit this Eventbrite page.

Of this poem, Daniel writes: ‘This poem is named after my hometown. In some ways it’s a kind of settling of scores with my first landscape, both the image it presents to the world and the darker undercurrents below the surface, and contradictory ideas of home. This idea of contradiction and the relation of image/process are central to the way I try to write poetry just as, however far I move away from it, the landscape of Hebden Bridge continues to be too.’

‘Hebden Bridge’ appears in Daniel’s new pamphlet Lung Iron. It is a highly accomplished debut that takes small observations, encounters and moments of awkwardness, intensifying and expanding them in order to explore the place of the word and our place as human beings in the economies of nature and history. These immersive poems thrive in the uncertain space between the natural and industrial, aware of their presence yet always feeling the pull of that something other which lies beyond them.

Daniel Fraser is a writer from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. A graduate of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), his critical work draws on the philosophy of Karl Marx, Maurice Blanchot, and Catherine Malabou. His poetry and prose have featured in: LA Review of Books, Aeon, Acumen, Anthropocene Poetry, X-R-A-Y, Entropy, Mute, Review 31 and Dublin Review of Books among others. His poems and short fiction have both won prizes in the London Magazine. You can read more about Daniel on his website, read an interview with him on the Wombwell Rainbow site, and follow him on Twitter.

ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects.

Since its establishment in 2017, two pamphlets (A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed) have been selected by the Poetry Book Society as their Pamphlet Choices, and all the pamphlets still in print are available to buy from our online Shop. Each pamphlet costs £5 and you can buy three for £12. You can find out more about the poets and their work on our dedicated page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

PG Tips

October 19, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Listen to Isabelle Baafi reading ‘PG Tips’

This week’s poem by Isabelle Baafi is the first in a trio of poems by our new ignitionpress authors! We are very excited to be launching three new pamphlets by Isabelle, Daniel Fraser, and Kostya Tsolakis online on Friday 6 November. Please join us! The event will be held via Zoom and livestreamed to our YouTube channel. You can find more details about the launch and sign up to attend it here.

‘Hunger made me’, reveals one speaker in Ripe, and the desire to be satiated fills these poems. Desperate women hide grains of rice in their hair, baked beans evoke a strained father-daughter relationship, plantains endure the fire. Yet hunger takes many forms, as the risks and rewards of its satisfaction are weighed, and cravings for intimacy are charged with danger. ‘When we’re born, we’re someone else’s’, but in this daring exploration of identity and survival, we hear a thrilling new voice come into its own.

Regarding ‘PG Tips’, Isabelle writes: ‘This poem explores the psychology of postnatal depression. It was inspired by the experience of a family member.’

Isabelle Baafi is a writer and poet from London. She was the winner of the 2019 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Her work has been anthologised by Verve Poetry Press, 20.35 Africa and The Caribbean Writer, and has been published in The Poetry Review, Anthropocene, Finished Creatures, and harana poetry. She is a Board Member at Magma Poetry. You can read more about Isabelle on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Wonderful

October 13, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Over the years they’ve climbed
to the very lip of the sash,
her fingerprints.
And where she’s knelt, bowing
upwards, a golden reed
the marks have scattered
a constellation of effort;
the hours, days, weeks,
of learning how to grow.
She loops her fingers
around my thumb,
and my heart unlocks. You see,
it’s that she’s touching
me, and whenever someone
touches me (especially
her) I want to cry.
I want to tell her
I love her. But instead
I say, mommy’s sad
today. She slips
from the bed
to the floor, walks
to her little stool:
opens the window.

by Helen Calcutt

This week’s poet, Helen Calcutt, will be launching her new pamphlet online with Verve Poetry Press on Tuesday 20 October from 7.30-8.45pm and you can join her! She’ll be reading alongside Carrie Etter, Louise Fazackerley and Shazea Quraishi, who have also recently published pamphlets with Verve. Sign up for the launch here.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In September 2017, Helen Calcutt’s brother Matthew took his own life. He was 40 years old. ‘… the phone rang / and when I answered it / you’d killed / yourself, and that was the start / of you being dead.’ This is the starting point of an astonishing new pamphlet of poems by Helen Calcutt. At times harrowing; at others hopeful – always deeply felt and beautifully realised. These poems display the poise and precision of a poet already at the height of her powers, writing the un-writable, weaving the terrible into something relatable and filled with the light of understanding. How do we survive the tumultuous presence of grief? How does the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide affect, our identity, our creativity, and our ability to love? How – in a world shattered by incomparable change and severe loss – do we build a life from the wreckage? Because we do. Somehow, we do. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Helen Calcutt’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Brooklyn Review, Unbound, Poetry Scotland, Wild Court, Envoi, The London Magazine and others. Her debut pamphlet, Sudden Rainfall (Perdika, 2014) was a PBS Choice. Her debut collection, Unable Mother, was published by V.Press in 2018. She is the editor and creator of the anthology Eighty-Four (Verve Poetry Press, 2019) which was a Sabotage Best Anthology shortlisted title, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, and raised money for CALM’s prevent male suicide campaign. You can follow Helen on Twitter and find out more about her work on her website.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – Helen’s pamphlet is the latest addition to this prize-winning series – and a debut performance poetry series, which had seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

Flow

September 14, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

from Flow

The sun is a puppeteer,
stretching the shadows along the day.
They enter the river,
hover like harriers over shimmering reeds.
If the evening fades golden they fold into feathers.
First wings of egrets then black doves of dreams.
When the wind is enraged they huddle like wrens.
Then in the morning the parting of ways.
Some to be gnomons, some to be glades.

[…]

Long quiet here, secluded, safe.
The river has tolerated, sheltered,
Long been their second home.

It was not the river’s fault.
It was the rain; it was the wind.
It was not their fault either.
It was the spin of the earth.
It was the Big Bang.

But the rain fell. The river swelled.
Then the invasion. The run on the bank.
The nest eggs washed away.

The sand martins leave.
No pianos on carts.
They just leave.
They have seen it before.
They may not return.

[…]

Retirement now.
Slow blood
through delta veins.
Long earned,
short right to digress.
And then the sea.
‘The mouth’, we say?
It’s been talking
since spring.

Words by Phil Madden; images by Paul L. Kershaw

There is just time to enter the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition – it closes for entries today (14 September) at 23.00 BST! Our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson, and as always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1,000, with £200 for the runners up. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Text is copyright © Phil Madden and images copyright © Paul L. Kershaw, 2020. It is reprinted from Flow (Grapho Editions, 2020) by permission of the author and illustrator. For more details and to see additional images from the book, visit this page.

Notes from Grapho Editions:

These excerpts from the beginning, middle, and end of the book are from Flow, the fifth collaboration between poet Phil Madden and Paul L. Kershaw, printmaker and printer. Phil and Paul have won a number of awards for their books, including the Judges’ Choice Award at the Oxford International Fine Press Fair.

Through a series of words and images set across the open spread, Flow explores ideas around the movement of water, from estuary to spring. The poems have been written over recent years but not with any specific intention of them being part of a collection. They have been gathered together as the project developed and the idea of upstream progress became central. The images are a mix of the representational and abstract and are relief prints. Occasional small wood engravings combine with much larger shapes and textures. The book has been printed using an Albion press and a cylinder press. There are 50 copies in the edition and it is available to buy.

You can find out more about the book on Paul’s website, where you can also learn more about Phil and Paul’s ongoing collaboration.

City of forbidden shrines

September 2, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was almost born in the lunar month of padded clothing
in the solar term of almost summer
in the season of ringing cicadas
in the city of forbidden shrines

almost spent a girlhood watching sandstorms
tearing through the almost golden sunlight
I almost scraped dust off my knees each day for fifteen years
almost painted paper tigers each year to burn

I could almost hold all the meanings of 家 in my mouth
without swallowing: [home, family, domestic
a measure word for every almost-place I’ve ever been]
like the swimming pool turning almost blue
or the mausoleum of almost ten thousand oranges

here I would have never breathed an ocean
never held mountains in my hands
except in almost-dreams
in which long white clouds drift
almost close enough to touch

by Nina Mingya Powles

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is closing for entries soon! Our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson, and as always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visitour website.

‘City of forbidden shrines’ is copyright © Nina Mingya Powles, 2020. It was originally published (in a slightly different form) in Literary Shanghai, and is reprinted here from Magnolia, 木蘭(Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Magnolia, 木蘭, Nina Mingya Powles’ first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. A journal of sound, colour, rain and light, these poems also wield their own precise and radical power to name and reclaim, draw afresh their own bold lines. Learn more about the book and buy a copy here.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), and several poetry pamphlet collections including Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017) and Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Find out more about Nina’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have published over ninety poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Security Alert

August 26, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Before you read this
I have to ask you some questions:
Could you tell me if you are any of the following:
migrant, immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, émigré,
clandestine, sans papiers, foreigner,
or a son or daughter of any of the above
or if you LOOK like as if you could be any of the above?
In which case please
state your name, date of birth
height, weight, inside leg measurement, blood group, hospital records,
skin colour, income,
preferred sandwich type.

Are you in receipt of any loans or any imported meat products?
Do you intend to stay in this country longer than two minutes?
Do you intend to study anything that is not maths?
Do you have a wife, husband or both?
Please sing the national anthem when I say the word ‘Queen’
And answer the following questions:
why is Britain great?
why is everywhere else not so great?
what is the Anglo Saxon word for great?
do you wear red, white and blue underwear?

Please step this way.
To see if you have answered all these questions truthfully,
we need to do a rectal examination.

by Michael Rosen

There are just a few weeks left to enter our International Poetry Competition! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in each receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Our latest podcast, with American poet Maya C. Popa, is now live! You can find it on our website and via the usual podcast providers – just search for brookespoetry. Maya discusses her exciting new collection, American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), and you can find the poems she reads and talks about on our Podcasts page.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

‘Poetry can stick up for the weak’ according to Michael Rosen, or it can ‘mock the mighty’; it can ‘glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.’ In these powerful new poems Rosen is clear about his own choices. Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio is a book about anti-Semitism, racism, fascism and war, Trump, Le Pen, and the Tory assaults on the NHS and education – the stupid and the sinister, the ridiculous and the revolting. In his first collection for grown-ups since Don’t Mention the Children (2015), Michael Rosen confirms his reputation as the heir to Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness, or dare to ask, like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, why the silly emperor is not wearing any clothes. Read more about the book and buy a copy on the Smokestack website.

Michael Rosen was born in North London in 1946. After university he worked for the BBC on Play School and Schools TV. He has written and edited over 140 books, including Mind Your Own Business, Wouldn’t You Like to Know, Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy, You Tell Me, No Breathing in Class and Quick Let’s Get Out of Here. You Can’t Catch Me! won the Signal Poetry Award. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, won the Smarties Prize. He currently presents Radio Four’s long-running Word of Mouth. His most recent books include The Disappearance of Emile Zola, The Author, Workers’ Tales, Reading Rebellion and So They Call You Pisher! He was Children’s Laureate from 2007-2009 and is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s, University of London. Find out more about Michael’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). David Cain’s Truth Street, an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre, draws on eye-witness testimonies of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

Intermittent Fasting

August 18, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You remember I held your pinkie
as we watched from the curtain?
Father’s hands tight in prayer
around mother’s soft neck. You remember
we thought he’d wring her like a chicken?

Your wedding day—Mother sat next to the empty
reservation, her quivering hands
giving you away. White knuckles
clutched the programme with bad print.
Remember as you danced
out of our father’s name,
mum collapsed—beautiful workhorse
with his broken world on her back.

by Summer Young

‘Intermittent Fasting’ is copyright © Summer Young, 2020. It is reprinted from Sylvanian Family (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy it here.

Summer Young is a poet from Norwich. She completed a BA in Creative Writing at The University of Winchester, and now lives in London where she co-runs Lemon Curd Magazine. Her work has appeared in Vortex Literary Journal, Asterism Literary Journal, and Lemon Curd Magazine. You can follow Summer on Twitter.

Sylvanian Family is Summer Young’s first pamphlet. Reading it is like folding yourself into a deceptively miniature world, a cat’s eye view of a dystopian Wonderland. Here, shoe prints are rabbit snares, a mother is a mountain, the trellis-like family home encompasses a complex ecosystem of cockroaches and fireflies, mice and sea urchins. In this arresting debut, Young invokes the visceral candor of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and confronts trauma with a fierce and virtuosic wit. Read more about the pamphlet on the Bad Betty website.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

My mother’s aria

August 10, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My mother went into labour holding a sledge hammer
in a house with no floorboards or hot water.

My mother went to a hospital with black iron gates
6 weeks early in snow in December.
My dad took cheese sandwiches;
Wear your hair down he said.

I was backwards moving forwards
leaving my shoulder behind – my mother roared
while outside the snow got deep.

We are sorry for your loss, we will take care of your wife.
But my mother roared
and the doctor arrived from the Opera

wearing a cape to reach into my mother
and pull me out broken
to my mother’s singing.

We will look after your wife, they told my dad,
as the doctor in his cape left to catch the last aria.

by Hannah Jane Walker

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is open for entries! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘My mother’s aria is copyright © Hannah Jane Walker, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Hannah Jane Walker is a writer from Essex. She makes work that uses poetry as a way of talking, in theatres, public spaces and for radio, working with BBC Radio 4, the British Council, and Apples and Snakes. With collaborator Chris Thorpe, she has created interactive shows exploring questions which seem too simple to ask, winning a Fringe First and touring the world. Her plays are published by Oberon and her performance poetry by Nasty Little Press, whilst she has published poems in anthologies by Forest Fringe and Penned in the Margins. She often works with vulnerable groups, collaborating to create artworks. She is an Associate Artist for Cambridge Junction and National Centre for Writing. You can find out more about Hannah Jane on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox, and Hannah Jane Walker.

Primers Volume Five now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love: from childhood and daughterhood, through motherhood in all its array of emotions and experiences, and to beloved brothers and fathers. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An essential, insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

My Brother as a Mezzotint

August 3, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Eager to admire your scans’ monochrome tones
you lean forward in your wheelchair
study the luminous screen:
eclipsing your spinal cord, two dark moons;
the titanium caging your neck, pure black;
grey meat spills from your iliac’s white wing.
The locum’s chest is slim, boy-like,
his tired eyes rimmed by glasses
and concern, he answers our questions
with open hands. Not your own oncologist
he’s unsure why his prognosis seems new.
Returning down the corridor you say I’m glad
it was you who was with me, reach across
to flatter an old woman on her tiger-stripe throw
as we pass wheel to wheel, then you charm
from the receptionist, so young and so plump,
the secret of her hidden tattoo.

by Claire Cox

The Poetry Centre’s military veterans’ poetry workshop is being featured all this week on the British Forces Broadcasting Service’s radio station. Tune in online at 11.30 BST each weekday. You can also find out more about the workshop and the anthology that resulted from it on the BFBS website.

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘My Brother as a Mezzotint’ is copyright © Claire Cox, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch TONIGHT (Monday 3 August), which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm.

Born in Hong Kong, Claire Cox has an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University, where she was awarded the Blackwell’s Prize for best student. She is currently a funded part-time, practice-based research student at Royal Holloway, University of London, studying poetry and disaster. She is also co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Envoi, The Butcher’s Dog, Lighthouse and Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Two Lies: the deer

July 28, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

creep as only deer can
they don’t consider it creeping though –
we parade on their backs
high gloss patina-on-death
like palanquins for heartbreak
but I suspect their hearts hold only
tubers sinew bone and teeth

on the last day
you didn’t know me anymore
from under the morphine’s heavy brocade

so the deer (unmoved) move are moved
through patterns of light and sound
by some deer-shaped force within;
or they’re still as the character for deer
always bending its fine head
to the ground forever

or maybe
you knew but couldn’t say
mixing as you were
with light and sound
your words moving away

no the deer in lacquered heels creep
crowned in grief through bracken halls
they creep towards us
under dimmet’s low eaves
embroidered with sorrow
they’re creeping for us

and yes
it’s me hold me close
hold me higher still
I’m coming I’m home
I’ll see you soon

by Krystelle Bamford

Our latest podcast features Jennifer Wong, who talks to Niall Munro about her exciting new collection Letters Home 回家. Jennifer reads and talks about three poems, and explores topics such as the Chinese family, her use of Cantonese and English languages in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘Two Lies: the deer’ is copyright © Krystelle Bamford, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch on Monday 3 August, which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm. We’ll be sharing poems from the other two poets featured in the latest volume of Primers over the next fortnight.

Krystelle Bamford’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Under the Radar, and a number of anthologies. She was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Raised in the US, she now lives in Scotland where she has worked at Canongate Books, completed a Creative Writing MLitt at the University of St Andrews, and gave birth to two wee, radge kids. You can read more about Krystelle’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.