Extra

March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Listen, you are and you aren’t.
Yes, to make the action believable
moment by moment; otherwise no.
Today: expectation – part joy
part disbelief. Don’t overdo it. The feeling
barely surfaces, but we see it.
Don’t blink. There should be
infinity in your gaze.

The weather, Plato, whatever
it takes to look like friends
having coffee. And no big gestures –
you hardly figure till the sobbing
makes you turn, brings you in.
Then puzzles, embarrassed; but
pain too, recognition. Indirectly you
heighten the drama.

III

So you’re leaning to look
back a last time. Not sad or happy,
more uncertain. That’s it – ongoing
uncertainty. Compose your face
with dark and light, to reflect the story.
The final shot is what stays. Like those
Russian horses in the rain by the river.
If words help, keep them to yourself.

by Jennie Feldman

‘Extra’ is copyright © Jennie Feldman, 2022, and is reprinted here from No Cherry Time (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, brought up in London, and graduated in Modern Languages (French) at Oxford. After a career in radio broadcasting, as well as teaching and editing, she became a freelance writer and translator.

Until recently she spent much of her time in Jerusalem; there she was a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Humans Without Borders, which transports chronically ill Palestinian children from the West Bank to hospital appointments in Israel. (She has written on this, and on other Palestine-related subjects, in the Times Literary Supplement.) She is now based in Oxford.

No Cherry Time is Jennie Feldman’s third collection of poems. Her first, The Lost Notebook (2005) was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Prize, and her second, Swift, came out in 2012. Both were published by Anvil Press Poetry (now Anvil / Carcanet), as were three books of translations: Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975 (2005); Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 (2009), co-authored with Stephen Romer, which was awarded a special commendation by the judges of the 2011 Popescu Poetry Prize; and Jacques Réda, The Mirabelle Pickers (2012).

Jennie Feldman’s most recent publication is Chardin and Rembrandt by Marcel Proust (David Zwirner Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in various journals, among them Agenda, London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In its geographical sweep – from Israel-Palestine (“Where a hillside’s being shaken /out of the dream”) westward across Europe – No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of estrangement, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean (“Sea Between the Lands”) that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians.

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.

Slow Rock

June 24, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

slow rock
being limestone
pines
for rain
pockets springy needles
is not the sea
forgotten
but sounding its breath
in an airy maze
where woodpeckers
up the tempo
& who’s that
red-capped, furtive
(other hand gripped
to his mobile)

perspective
shrinks him

shoals of bedrock
leaping mid-city
console our short-lived
urgencies
nothing
you can’t ride out
on these smooth backs
for a while
(the skyline livid)

by Jennie Feldman

Two announcements! This Friday 28 June 2013, Oxford is host to an exciting poetry event: ‘Irregular Folk Does Poetry’, which features the talents of a number of visiting and local poets, including Jack Underwood, Amy Blakemore, William Davies, and Charlotte Geater. The event will take place at the Perch on Binsey Lane in Oxford, and begins at 7.30pm.

And Oxford Brookes is currently displaying The Booker Prize, 1969-2008: an exhibition. Visit Oxford Brookes University’s Glass Tank exhibition space in the Abercrombie Building on Gipsy Lane between 17 June and 14 July to see this new exhibition, which is both an introduction to the fantastic material housed in the archive and a reflection upon Brookes’ role as custodian of the archive for a decade.

Notes from Anvil Press:

In Jennie Feldman’s second collection, Swift, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, Swift ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters – with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society’s margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem café. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. A Hawthornden Fellow, she lives in Jerusalem and Oxford. Her first collection, The Lost Notebook, was also published by Anvil, as were her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, and the bilingual anthology Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, co-edited and translated with Stephen Romer and shortlisted for the Popescu Prize 2011. You can read another selection from Swift on Anvil’s website.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

Bonfire on the Beach

March 5, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Tragedy was short-lived:
where the pine log had split its sides

dying, a spider elbowed out
and flared a brief nothing.

Old as planets the four faces
round this sun. A smudge

on the sand, like a mistake,
will mean we’ve gone.

by Jennie Feldman

Notes from Anvil Press:

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. Her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, are also published by Anvil. A former award-winning radio producer and presenter, she is married with two children and lives in Israel. Her new collection Swift will be published by Anvil in April 2012.

In her first collection The Lost Notebook, from which ‘Bonfire on the Beach’ comes, visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into lamplight in ‘Moth’, the poems are on the wing, “sourcing the radiance of things” in response to the dark. A lost notebook inspires a sequence that interweaves themes of sea, music, memory, love and the charge of language.