Stopped on the track mid echo of screams −
mewls of hawks, clipping the tree tops −
not for that, but for gaps in what’s read as a wood
(could be roe deer, muntjac or the loaded
breath of the dead and rotted-down
held to itself, weighing down),
we hear quiet restored to leaves drifting,
bloating one creak, a snap; that instant relief
from gold bars twinkling.

by Kate Behrens

News from the Poetry Centre! We have a number of exciting events coming up over the next few months and hope you’ll be able to join us for some or all of them! Please book spaces via the links below.

On Tuesday 19 March from 7-9pm we’re helping to host an open mic evening for LGBTQ+ History Month and the Oxford Human Rights Festival. Then on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow. And finally (for now!), on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford– don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our events page, and remember that in addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, you can also follow our work on  Facebook,  Twitter, and  Instagram. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Notes from Two Rivers Press: 

‘Beech Wood’ is copyright © Kate Behrens 2019. It is reprinted from Penumbra and published by permission of Two Rivers Press.

In Penumbra, Kate Behrensʼ third collection, the poems are linked by themes of dislocation and heredity. If the dead are ever-present here, so is love: the absence of, rewards and longing for it, the endurance and effort of it. We are led from the poetʼs bohemian childhood to the complex grief, in middle age, that followed the death of her painter father, and on to individual animals, people, and even trees that are differently uprooted or burdened. Everything is haunted here, but the boundaries of death and love are permeable, nature full of revelation. Read more about Kate’s book on the Two Rivers website.

Kate Behrensʼ two earlier collections, The Beholder and Man with Bombe Alaska were published respectively in 2012 and 2016 by Two Rivers Press. Other poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Blackbox Manifold, Mslexia,The Arts of Peace, an Anthology of Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The High Window and Stand.

Two Rivers Press has been publishing in and about Reading since 1994. The brainchild of Peter Hay (1951-2003), one of the town’s most creative champions, the press grew out of his delight in this under-loved town and its recessed spaces. Nearly two decades of publishing and over 70 titles since its inception, Two Rivers Press has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country.’ The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with Reading University, Poets’ Café, RISC, MERL and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. Read more about the press on its website, or follow it on 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.

Between the chair and table
a musculature
of negative shapes.
The apple-tree thrives
on the ashes of others.
All that I give you
leaves me richer.
Only as corpses
are we entire.
If I hold back my knowing
you might find your own.
You can steal my car
but not my dance-floor.
The hole in the stone
makes for a wish.
The oyster tastes only of sea.
Thanks to what binds me
I am free for a moment.
The lopped-off branches
speed up the greening.
The sun in the monastery
slants through a void.
Love lies hidden
in what is missing.
This bird invents
from a handful of notes.

by Kate Behrens

This week’s poem from Kate Behrens and next week’s from Tom Phillips both come from Two Rivers Press, and are scheduled to coincide with an exciting reading by these two poets and the Press’s editor, Peter Robinson, on Tuesday 19 March at Oxford Brookes. The reading will take place at 6pm in Headington Hill Hall, and all are welcome. There is no charge, and refreshments will be provided! For more details, reply to this message or visit this page.

‘Disguised as the Air’ is copyright © Kate Behrens, 2012. It is reprinted from The Beholder by permission of Two Rivers Press.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

In The Beholder, Kate Behrens’ first collection, those fleeting moments between people, or between individuals and nature are distilled without judgement or resolution. A deer trapped in a garden makes a dangerous leap for freedom. Someone hangs onto a sense of beauty in the face of a life that is ugly and collapsing or confuses a landscape with long ago childhood play. Things are revealed obliquely, as if by homing in on a subject, its true meaning would evaporate. Nature confronts the poet with its deliberation, pointing up the mysterious gulfs between it and us from a solitude that infuses so many of these poems. The physical setting is often a Europe that feels unfamiliar — flats in cities, the burning horizon seen from a train, or the view from a window seen through the eyes of two traumatised people. But there is celebration here too, as in the ways children can heal, inspire, and teach us how to live, and in nature’s capacity to nourish. For more details about the collection, visit Two Rivers Press’s page here.

Kate Behrens was born in 1959, one of twin daughters to two painters. A runner-up in the 2010 Mslexia poetry competition, who reads regularly at the Poets Café in Reading, she lives in Oxfordshire, and has one daughter.

Two Rivers Press was founded in Reading in 1994 by Peter Hay (1951–2003), an artist and enthusiast for the town and its two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames. In nearly two decades of publishing and with over seventy titles since its inception, it has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country’. It focuses on local poets and a significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment. Bold illustration and striking design are important elements of its work, used to great effect in new editions of classic poems, especially ones with some Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and in collections of contemporary poetry from local poets such as Reading Poetry: an anthology edited by Peter Robinson. It has recently published A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens, an anthology with a very distinguished list of contributors, also edited by Peter Robinson. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poets’ Café, RISC, Museum of English Rural Life and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. You can find more information at the press’s website, and on its 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.