for Thomas Lynch

The sun had dried the haggard to a crust,
whilst up on Riley’s roof they hammered slates.
The donkey’s hooves were puffing up the dust

as we listened to the roofers’ repartee – they cussed
each time their new apprentice made mistakes.
The sun had dried the haggard to a crust.

‘You need to watch your bloody work. A hefty gust
might see you boost the unemployment rates…’
The donkey’s hooves were puffing up the dust

below, tired of the heat and apparently nonplussed
that soon he’d face the derby’s starting gates.
The sun had dried the haggard to a crust.

Racing themselves, the roofers said they must
‘Get the whole shebang finished before eight’,
when donkey hooves would puff the racetrack dust.

The thatch was gone; the new slates ‘more robust’;
the starter’s gun discharged on real estate.
The sun had dried the racetrack to a crust
where donkey hooves were puffing up the dust.

by Andy Brown

This Friday from 6pm at IES in London, three fantastic poets will be giving a free reading: Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe. Sign up to attend via Eventbrite.

The public reading is part of the New-Next Generation contemporary poetry conference on Friday and Saturday, organized by the Poetry Centre and the IES, which features more readings (from Helen Mort and Nick Drake), and discussions about the publishing and reviewing of contemporary poetry. Register separately for the conference on the IES site. All are welcome.

‘The Last Thatch’ is copyright © Andy Brown, 2014. It is reprinted from Exurbia (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Andy Brown’s most recent book of poems is Exurbia (Worple Press 2014). He also collaborated with David Morley on the Worple Press collection Of Science. Previous books include The Fool and the Physician, Goose Music (with John Burnside), and Fall of the Rebel Angels (all Salt). A selection of his poems appears in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade. He recently edited The Writing Occurs As Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2014) and is co-editing, A Body of Work: Poetry and Medical Writing, with Corinna Wagner, for Bloomsbury (2015). He is Director of the Exeter University Creative Writing Programme and was formerly an Arvon Foundation Centre Director. Read more about Andy Brown’s new book on the Worple website, and you can find out more about his academic work on the University of Exeter site.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes 6-8 books a year by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections (2014/2015) include Andy Brown’s Exurbia, Isabel Galleymore’s Dazzle Ship, Martyn Crucefix’s A Hatfield Mass, Julian Stannard’s The Street of Perfect Love, and Clive Wilmer’s UrbanPastorals. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

A dark blue hourglass on the bookshelf fills
with evening light. I turn it over, watch
the sand slip through its waist, narrow as a wasp’s
& count the time it takes the sand to fall…

Outside, the Western Ocean cracks its whips
against the stacks of rock at Castle Point,
those hulking blocks of granite that once slipped
onto the sea, now ground to sand & quartz.

Inside, the Irish Theological
informs us there are two types of slipped disc –
‘hard’ & ‘soft’. The first hits suddenly,
the other’s slow, like the changes of our love.

Kept indoors by the rain our daughter laughs.
She points out to the bay & voices ‘blue’
& I can’t help but feel that we’re the halves
the sand of her young life now trickles through.

by Andy Brown

‘Slippage’ is copyright © Andy Brown, 2001. It is reprinted from Of Science, edited by David Morley & Andy Brown (published by Worple Press in 2001) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Of Science is a sample of poems by contemporary poets who are also trained as scientists. The writers of this selection are drawn from the fields of freshwater ecology, mathematics, marine biology, neural physiology, ethnology, computing, phenomenology and biochemistry. The mode of selection is modelled on the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, in the spirit of Miroslav Holub’s notion of ‘serious play’, with the shared belief of Wordsworth and Coleridge that ‘poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.’ Read more about the book on Worple’s site.

Andy Brown is Director of the Exeter University Writing Programme, and was formerly an Arvon Foundation Centre Director. He collaborated with David Morley on the Worple Press poetry collection Of Science. His most recent book of poems is The Fool and the Physician (Salt Publishing). Other recent books are Goose Music (with John Burnside), Fall of the Rebel Angels (both Salt) and The Storm Berm. A selection of his poems appears in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade. He edited two collections of correspondences with authors, Binary Myths 1&2, and is editing a book of essays on Kelvin Corocoran (Shearsman). He is also co-editing A Body of Work: Poetry and Medicine 1750-present with Corinna Wagner, for Bloomsbury/Continuum. Find out more about Andy Brown’s work from his blog.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook 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.