The cracked walnut
beside the porcelain cup

is not a porcelain walnut
and a cracked cup

but as she who finds
her lover’s words in her mouth

and their friends who discover
their faces alike

the walnut shell seems
another drinking vessel

and the cup appears
ever more breakable.

by Isabel Galleymore

Tomorrow (Tuesday 11 November), the Emergency Poet visits Brookes! Between 11-3pm, the EP’s ambulance will be parked between the Media Centre and the John Henry Brookes Building on Headington Road. Come along for your free poetry prescription! This event is part of the Poetry Centre’s ongoing collaboration with the local mental health charity The Archway Foundation. Whether you’re from Brookes or not, all are welcome!

And tomorrow evening, the Next Generation Poets are in town. The Next Generation list, released every decade and organized by the Poetry Book Society, marks out the poets to watch from Britain and Ireland. At 7pm, Blackwell’s on Broad Street will host a reading featuring two of the twenty Next Generation 2014 poets, Jane Yeh and Luke Kennard, who will be reading alongside New Generation (1994) poet Susan Wicks, and local poet Rachel Piercey. More details about the event can be found on the Blackwell’s website, and more information about the Next Generation Poets 2014 from the promotion’s site.

‘Cracked Walnut and Cup’ is copyright © Isabel Galleymore, 2014. It is reprinted from Dazzle Ship (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Isabel Galleymore was born in 1988. She held a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012 and her poems have appeared in magazines such as Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Rialto. She is currently writing her critical PhD thesis on metaphor and ecopoetics at the University of Exeter and co-edits The Clearing, an online magazine of nature and place-based writing. Find out more about her book from the Worple website.

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 Urban Pastorals. 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.