Between two monarchs bitter feuds are commonplace
And swarms are never slow to mobilise.
From miles away you’ll sense them massing for battle,
You’ll sense an appetite for hostilities, a violent thirst.
Cowards and dawdlers are dragooned into action.
Sounding the war-conch with droning wings
They stream into the breach, fizzing with fury,
Nerves set like wires, venomous bayonets fixed.
Back as far as their sovereign’s chamber
They’ll defend and engage, resolved to kill or die.
Or out of the blue yonder into the field
They’ll pour from the hive, countless as rain.

by Simon Armitage

The Poetry Centre would be delighted to see you at ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium for practitioners, a collaboration between the Poetry Centre, the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. We will explore one theme current in contemporary writing: poetry about the environment, and two concerns of poetics: prose poetry and the lyric and poetry and publishing. Each panel set up to discuss these issues will be composed of a mixture of UK-based academics and writers and academics/poets from IPSI. The symposium will take place at Oxford Brookes University, and places are limited. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

The Poetry Centre recently launched the Oxford Brookes 2017 International Poetry Competition, which is judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort. Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

This excerpt from Still is copyright © Simon Armitage, 2016, and reprinted by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Still is a sequence of poems in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images are ahead of their time. Still is published on the centenary of the battle, which is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Consequently, Armitage’s thirty poems are versions of the infamously tense Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect.

Designed by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums, Still is an 74pp large-scale landscape publication with introductory texts, contemporary maps, fold-outs and decorated endpapers. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur and, most recently, Pearl, which won the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He has published two novels and four works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a SundayTimes bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band The Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes such as the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. He is currently the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, and you can hear recordings of his recent lectures on the Oxford University website. You can also read more about Armitage’s work on his website. 

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)  

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

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.

Rain-junk.
Sky-litter
Some May mornings
Atlantic storm-horses
clatter this way,
shedding their iron shoes
in potholes and ruts,
shoes that melt
into steel-grey puddles
then settle and set
into cloudless mirrors
by noon.

The shy deer
of the daytime moon
comes to sip from the rim.
But the sun
likes the look of itself,
stares all afternoon,
its hard eye
lifting the sheen
from the glass,
turning the glaze
to rust.
Then we don’t see things
for dust.

by Simon Armitage

On Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit thePoetry Society website for more details.

The Dermot Healy Poetry Competition has just been launched by the Five Glens Arts Festival and is now open for submissions. The deadline for entries is 15th July 2014. The prize money is 1,000 euro, and shortlisted entrants will beinvited to read their work at the festival. To find out how to enter, visit the Five Glens website.

‘Puddle’ is copyright © Simon Armitage, 2013, and reprinted from his book Stanza Stones (2013) by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published nine full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has published two novels and three works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a Sunday Times bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band the Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, most recently the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. You can read more about Armitage’s work on his website.

The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region’s abounding rocks. Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Read more about it on the Enitharmon website.

The many layers of stone and sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the colours released by the carver’s tools will likely never return to shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large, of humankind. You can learn more about the Stanza Stones Project, and watch a short film about it, on the Ilkley Literature Festival website, and listen to Simon Armitage discussing the book with Guardian Books Editor Claire Armitstead on the Guardian’s website.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-­artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-­five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

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.