Protectorates

Featured ~ drniallmunro

for Rudolphe Douala Manga Bellfor Bell

Daughter countries are posed on a map
their borders ruler-straight.

A native tongue is in a mother’s gift.
One sense of the word “gift” in German

is contagion. In the aftermath of empires
language is a broken promise —

the past, a looted house
where the gate hangs loose.

Beneath crowded trees, apples rot.
And yet, below the graft lines

new growth lurches,
scion wood flourishes.

How to wipe clean the axe
after the edge cuts through?

Some branches are reverting to type.
After slash burning, a host of coppice shoots

rallies from the trunks. The unsung
is always trying to have the last word.

by Clementine E Burnley

This week’s poem is the first of three from new pamphlets being published by the Poetry Centre’s own ignitionpress. The pamphlets, by Clementine E Burnley, Fahad Al-Amoudi, and Laboni Islam, are being launched online on Saturday 12 August and everyone is welcome to attend the event! Please register for the launch via Zoom.

Kinship, soil, belonging and displacement – these far-ranging poems pulse to the heartbeats of personal and historical moments from the African diaspora. Here memory and place enmesh. The quantum effects that guide migrating birds, an unnamed girl, a royal pearl and a brutalised immigrant co-exist alongside the joy and longing of family ties. In her debut pamphlet, this profound and compassionate poet creates a new space alive with songs for the unsung.

Clementine E Burnley is a Cameroon-born British writer who lives in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in Emma Press’ Anthology of Britain, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Magma, and The Poetry Review. She’s an alumnus of Obsidian Foundation, Purple Hibiscus Workshop, and an Edwin Morgan Grantee.

Established in 2017, ignitionpress is an award-winning poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received four Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections and the press won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award in 2021.

You can find out more about ignitionpress on the Poetry Centre website.

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.

No space for tiny dying

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

there is no moon tonight. this has its consequence. for
you. it is something akin to glimpsing the flight path of
monsters. sleeplessness is to grieve in small sections.
dust by chisel. minutiae explosions happen to the right
of your face. a communion of worry dolls accompany
your skull. wince upon orbit. you’re awake & twitching
over gravity. how wordlessly you splinter in the dark.
supposing you only have forty years left to lick parch-
pink rock? devour soil. circling its bounty desperate
brown. in the lost hours you float guilty. eating your own
goodbye. now invisible. now from a teaspoon. the
connection to survive is always hold me. let us last it out.

by Jess Murrain

from One Woman-Horse Show, Bad Betty Press, May 2022

Jess Murrain is a queer poet of British-Caribbean heritage working mainly in performance, live art and theatre. She won the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2021 and the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2023. Her wider practice explores film-poetry and she is one of Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 21/22. She is also co-founder of ‘Theatre with Legs’, an experimental company based in Bradford and London. One Woman- Horse Show is her debut poetry pamphlet.

Bad Betty is an independent small press, committed to publishing the most exciting, innovative new poetry in the UK and abroad, showcasing stories less often told and voices less often heard. Bad Betty is the winner of the 2022 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, and a regional finalist for the 2023 British Book Awards Small Press of the Year. Their books include five Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections, a Michael Marks Pamphlet Award winner, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, and longlistees for the Laurel Prize and Polari First Book Prize. Bad Betty produces live poetry events across the UK, and is supported by Arts Council England.

‘The epitome of bold independence, Bad Betty publishes books of a rare breed.’ The Big Issue

The Humanist

May 3, 2023May 9, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

She stands at the sink
runs the cold tap over
wrists raw with eczema,
moving her hands
like a child cradling a doll,
wrist bones kissing,
sore skin drinking in relief.
She cups her hands,
lets water pool over
the blisters in her palms
that match the blisters
on the tops of her feet.
Her ‘stigmata’, she jokes.
though she has no
corresponding wound
in her side. No faith.

by Degna Stone

‘The Humanist’ is copyright © Degna Stone, 2022, and is reprinted here from Proof of Life on Earth (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

You live and then you die. That’s the only certainty there is, right? Using love as its guide, Proof of Life on Earth, the debut poetry collection by Degna Stone, looks at all the stops between our arrival and our departure. These poems examine matters of the heart (both the metaphorical and medical kind), of race and discrimination, of the body, mind and self – each in forensic detail, attentive and curious of what moves, shapes, and makes us alive.

In between are the landmarks which populate the rich terrain of this collection; not only of our lives through youth to adulthood, but of history, of the long shadows of empire, and of landscapes themselves – especially those of the northeast of England, evocative, rugged and monumental. Stone’s deft and scalpel-sharp poetry explores human existence shaped by mortality and experience, and asks what it means to do more than survive – to live in defiance, openness and awareness.

Originally from the Midlands, Degna Stone is a poet and poetry editor based in north east England. They are co-founder and former Managing Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and a Contributing Editor at The Rialto. They received a major Northern Writers Award for poetry in 2015. Proof of Life on Earth (Nine Arches Press, 2022) is their debut poetry collection.

You can find more about Degna on their website.

Praise for Proof of Life on Earth

“What a joy, at last, to hold Degna Stone’s debut. They are a spellbinding poet: passionate, political and precise. Their poems lay bare the human heart and what it means to love and be loved in a world full of trouble. Unafraid of the ragged seams of life, they hold us, all our sorrows and failings, with the deepest compassion, urging us to be bold, take the risk and make the world better.” – Liz Berry

“Degna Stone’s measured words, structure and style offers their first full collection as a philosophy on life. It evokes fear as they grapple with the near death of their husband, although simultaneously provides a meditative spirit as they root themselves in wild, beautiful English landscapes as a coping mechanism. Yet there are poems which surprise us, too, knee-jerking us into sharing their harsh realities of life. With Proof of Life on Earth, Degna Stone slides smoothly into a deserved position as one of the polished poetic voices to emerge this year.” – Dr. Kadija Sesay

“Proof of Life on Earth takes the weight of a woman’s heart and balances on the scales of life and death.” – Nick Makoha

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan

April 26, 2023April 27, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

“Let the storm wash the plates”

— Edwin Morgan, ‘Strawberries’ (1968)

let the stems winch the petals

let the finch pinch the pitcher

let one cloud raise an eyebrow

let the lot love what’s left

let the red letter shopfronts

let the black flag an issue

let the blue note the effort

let the green light the pilot

let the slug soil the laundry

let the iron clap its hands

let the hands clap the irons

let the bets cook the bookie

let the child have a cookie

let the lit sleeper lie

let the dogs have their daycare

let the ghouls ride our horses

let our screws skew the bullseye

let our boots print the cosmos

let our ships breach the veil

let our throats weep their data

let the waves skim the profits

let the wind scratch its eyelid

let our mates do a runner

let the crabs do us justice

by Adam Crothers

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations

‘Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan’ is copyright © Adam Crothers, 2022, and is reprinted here from Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
Why a book of misquotations? Because what’s captured in Say It Again is the jittery, jumbled essence of truth: that wisdom and edict alike are constantly customised, iterated, adjusted. Nothing stays the same. Here are gathered the sage words of philosophers, statesmen, artists and authors alongside proverbs, sayings and scripture – all distorted with varying degrees of deliberation.

The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.

The major theme of each is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

Quotations are used to motivate, intimidate, compel, amuse and persuade. But perhaps the quotations themselves need a little manipulation. This curious, critical, playful volume whips away carefully arranged context and sees what happens when well-known words become a little less familiar. We’re saying all the right things, but not necessarily in the right order.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His books are Several Deer (Carcanet, 2016), which won the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize in 2017, and The Culture of My Stuff (Carcanet, 2020).

Infinity Songs

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Far removed, stretched out beneath the stars
I celebrate myself
and dreadful voices fill the sky,
fanning out as they pass one another.

I loafe and invite my Soul
to the endless dewy woods.

Here and there, lights crouched in groups of four
grizzle and nip at the darker shadows
and become undisguised and naked.

They rage and snatch
for every atom belonging to me.

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing:
houses and rooms are full of perfumes
from the infinite swamps and flatlands.

The dogs of autumn, of the wind.
The black evening echoes.
A spear of summer grass.

The moon sits twinned in the mirror.
It has no taste of the distillation
—it is odorless. I am in love with it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume.
It is for my mouth forever.
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

I will go to the bank by the wood,
and what I assume you shall assume;
roadways that stretch out like sails
through the shadows and horrors of the night,
as good belong to you.

by Walt Whitman / Émile Verhaeren (collage)

‘Infinity Songs’ is copyright © Walt Whitman and Émile Verhaeren, 2022, and is reprinted here from You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing.

The major theme of each Hipflask is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing. There’s romance, of course – but other kinds of entanglement as well, all awash with delight and frustration, rage and joy, hope and perplexity.

Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916) was a prolific Belgian poet, art critic and multiple-times nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an influential American writer known for popularising free verse, and who was subject to censure for poems deemed obscenely sensual.

Sidekick Books is a London-based small press founded in 2010 by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving. We specialise in collaborative books, mostly made up of poems. Our guiding ethos when we began was to explore alternatives to the single-author poetry volume, and to mix poetry with other genres and types of book. Our books have been nominated for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, been featured in The Guardian and BBC Wildlife Magazine, and won the Sabouteur Award for Best Collaboration. We’ve put on various joint readings and events with other presses and organisations, including The Poetry Society, and we’ve thrown book launches as toga parties and immersive theatre.
Read more about the press on the Sidekick Books website, and follow Sidekick Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Cox’s Bazar

April 6, 2023April 7, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You plant the jackfruit’s anonymous, nubbled face and wait in the
boiling sand for something to happen.

A goat’s eye flashes gold. A girl swings on the tubewell for a cup of
water.

You plant peas to grow in the monsoon and put on your best shirt.
Yellow for optimism.

What is missing about the blank page is denied. Decimated, you
would like to cohere.

Inside an airless, windowless hut, you try to re-write Stevens: Ten
Ways of Looking at a Passport. ‘I have never seen a passport, how
does it begin?’

Toothmarks in the linebreak. You want to put the art back into heart.

When your brother ran towards the Tatmadaw, crying ‘Jayzu, Jayzu’,
you turned and ran. Jahaj of air. Jail, lock and key.

Without ‘art’, it’s just ‘he’, meaning brother. Come here, brother, but
he isn’t listening.

Your mother bribes the army guard to write a letter, asks about the
non-trial. Will the guard deliver? Hope’s lottery. There is no policy
on answering the letters or the law. The page a windbreak. To write
is to petition.

The ‘I’ severs you in the photograph, so we repose. Someone else
must always be next to you. You cannot work alone.

Cyclonic clangour of rain. Sword-water in the Naf. The helicopter pumps
into Bangladeshi airspace and fires on anyone swimming away.

The poem bare as a pulse, a knife. Siblings in graves.

The poem bare as a knife, a pulse.

Your father remains stuck at the border. ‘Genocide Zone.’ Nobody
is reporting from there, so nothing is said.

The child draws pictures of a burning house. Singing out of history
in makeshift schools.

You plant and write. Plant and write. What else is there to do? Peas
on you roof grow beside the ashfire. You knot back the twine and
forecast clouds.

You write: ‘blot out’, ‘jail of air’ and the words mean the same in
the morning. Myanmar waits for the incendiary. The Saudis send
money for guns. When you ‘like’ the post about ARSA, your cousin
gets a note under his hut.

‘Ze zaga añra félai ay zaígoí’. ‘There are places we leave’ you say.
‘There are places we never leave. Home is a dream inside a nightmare.’

The first line of your first poem begins: ‘I am afraid of someone I don’t
know’.

Last night your mother peeled back the tarpaulin and asked: ‘what
are you doing, my son, why can you not sleep? Sleep!’ And you
replied: ‘Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’.

Ignore the honking of the UNHCR truck, check the download speed
for ‘100 Poets in English’ (to learn poetry, to learn English) Reload.

Already they are looking to blame the same someone. The Chinese
highway needs to be paid.

Looking at you. Between Paan branches brittled by soil erosion.

Why is it you live in the middle of the largest refugee camp in the
world and they’re calling it ‘a lost treasure’, a ‘forgotten’ national park?

They ask you to plant trees to ‘save the environment’. Yes, you think.
A few more trees to hide the smell of the latrine.

How do you write about ‘environment’? You try for the present, the
sensory, but your eyes sting, your ears hum and the smell is flesh
and smoke.

‘I want to write about family, but I have no family.’

The idea of the eternal traveller does not hold. To think of poetry as
orphic. To unthink memory: to unriver the severed head.

As if the world were a wound flapping its bandages.

As if the world were a wound. As if…

You wake up and poke your pen through the ash.

English ale. ‘Dada eta ki gari?’ High speed trains. This is where I am going.

An envelope stuffed with Taka. A bookmark. To hold nothing, to
hold your place in the book.

by James Byrne

‘Cox’s Bazar’ is copyright © James Byrne, 2022, and is reprinted here from Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.

James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). Other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), WITHDRAWALS, Soapboxes (both KFS, 2019 and 2014) and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar, Oystercatcher, 2014).

Byrne received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He currently lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Byrne is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). In 2017, with Robert Sheppard, he edited Atlantic Drift, a book of transatlantic poetry and poetics (Arc, EHUP). In 2019, he co-edited, with Shehzar Doja, I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. Byrne’s poems have been translated into several languages and his Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) was published in Spanish in 2019 by Buenos Aires Poetry (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez).

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.

Self-portrait as Bartlett pear

March 29, 2023March 29, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Pausing
I consider
me fat
slightly
disfigured
heavy-hipped
and the pear, its honey
juice scenting all fingers.
An early child, my parents found
me awkward. I know a fruit now
can be the size of the world, and self-sufficient
without self-doubt, memory milks petals
the first to appear on the trees, blossom
filling the orchard with light.

by L. Kiew

‘Self-portrait as Bartlett pear’ is copyright © L. Kiew, 2023, and is reprinted here from More than Weeds (Nine Arches Press, 2023) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

More Than Weeds, the debut poetry collection by L. Kiew, explores the language of migration and how it is used in relation to plant and animal species, as well as peoples. These knowledgeable and verdant poems draw deeply on botanical and ecological detail and reveal secret histories thriving in the gaps between definitions; here are precious seedlings, unforced flowers, tongues of leaves, tangled roots and rhizomes.

With roots in decolonialising botany and horticulture movements, and influenced by the impact of the climate crisis and regenerative gardening practices, Kiew’s poetry is alive and thronging with the interconnected nature of things – and the formative forces of nurture, family, food, refuge and love. Human and plant voices speak for themselves of experiences of belonging and displacement, as well as encounters with violence. These vivid poems that ask us to scrutinise what is really contained or constrained by demarcations – whether those of weed or wildflower, or of borders and hostile environments.

A chinese-malaysian living in London, L Kiew earns her living as a charity sector leader and an accountant. She holds a MSc in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Edinburgh University. Her pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books in 2019. Her debut collection, More than Weeds, came out in February 2023 with Nine Arches Press.

You can find more about L. Kiew on their website and follow them on Instagram and Twitter

Praise for More Than Weeds:

“L Kiew’s poems are inventive and iridescent. More than Weeds navigates ecology, migration and identity with a subtle and complex skill. Animated, strange, acutely-observed, the world in these poems is given an arresting voice.” – Seán Hewitt

“L.Kiew’s radically sensuous debut speaks from the wet earth up. Charting the aftermaths of past empires, inner city and rainforest habitats are interwoven through an ecology of tender co-nurture. Intimate with food insecurity and climate threat, fierce poems stand with migrants fleeing where “the logger’s axe made ghosts of us”. Sharing the “lemony silence” of transplanted knotweed, and the “treelace” of harvested latex, More than Weeds gives us new eyes through which to know our world.” – alice hiller

“Poems in More than Weeds grow, shapeshift and inhabit different spaces of language, emotions, and imagination. There are poems about the family, journey, and love – they crawl and dash off the page, alive and surprising like rabbits glutting grass banks by Inverness station. There are also poems that stay and endure, rewilding themselves into the psyche, like seed heads exploding afternoon showers. A beautiful and resonant collection.” – Romalyn Ante

Bringing Back the Day

March 22, 2023March 23, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It wasn’t flash, a slackered June afternoon,
yet we wanted it. The grass shrewd with stones,
drizzle steaming our jeans, knuckled light.

We got up, dusted pepper of our fingers
and set about bringing the day home.
I wound in a stream, snipped swallows off lines.

You bundled a rape field into the car
and the wind switched off its lamp, Holding
one end, you another, we rolled a wild verge,

ripped nettles in perforated strips.
Crows drifted over, scorching their shadows
into each other, we grabbed those wings

the way we hadn’t quite kissed. The sun
was a lemon cord; I tugged once. It was light.
It all packed so small we forgot about it until April,

when there was no choice but to drag the day out,
drape it throughout the house. Floors crawled,
wallpaper flinched, flicked up sparrows.

I called your name and dog roses uncurled.
The sky was a balloon rising over the bed.
We lifted both hands and held on.

by Angela Readman

‘Bringing Back the Day’ is copyright © Angela Readman, 2022, and is reprinted here from Bunny Girls (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Angela Readman is a poet and story writer. Her poems have won awards including the Mslexia Competition, The Charles Causley Prize and The Essex Poetry Prize. Her short stories have won The Costa Short Story Award, The Mslexia Competition and the New Flash Fiction Review competition. Her story collection Don’t Try This at Home (& And Other Stories) won The Rubery Book Award and a Saboteur Award. In 2019 And Other Stories published her first novel Something Like Breathing. In 2020 she won the Working Class Nature Writing Prize. In 2021 she was awarded a Society of Author’s and Author’s Foundation grant for her story collection The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles (Valley Press, 2022.) Bunny Girls is her second collection with Nine Arches, following her late diagnosis with autistic spectrum condition. She lives in Northumberland.

Out of the doll’s house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.

Here in Readman’s skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe’s body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

Praise for Bunny Girls:

“Heady as a nosebleed, Bunny Girls vacuum packs syrup-sticky snogs, Moomins and the wingbeats of swans. Readers are lured into Wendy-houses and knocked out by fighting fish, platinum blonde wigs and working-class grit. Readman finds playthings everywhere and handles them as seriously as we must. Saucy and daft, her poems pull us out from our bodies to dance it all off under discoballs. Another belting book. The North East is lucky to call this top-notch poet one of our own.” – Jo Clement

“Angela Readman is one of our best writers of girlhood and this collection evokes nostalgia and longing for the danger and the glitter of it. These sensuous, beautiful, sometimes surreal poems, take thrilling leaps with a Plathian precision of language. They dive and weave and nod and wink. They also show how a neurodivergent lens can bring a magical perspective to the everyday and re-vision the world so that ‘Walls are rivers waiting to happen’ and ‘The alphabet is a song wiring ‘I am here’ all through your body.’” – Kate Fox

“Angela Readman manages to write poems that exist in a dream place, a place between reality and fantasy where even the most mundane experiences are delivered into something strange and incredible. These wonderful, vivid poems are shot through with vulnerability, a sense of awakening and more – wit, intelligence, a shrewd observation of life – so that the reader feels like they are being shown the small places of significance that the world contains, the profundity of the everyday. Reader, expect to be swept away, carried along in Readman’s world, and to emerge like a lamp that has been switched on, bright with the power of the poem.” – Wendy Pratt

You can follow Angela on Twitter.

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.

It won’t be a normal year

March 8, 2023March 23, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

March 2020

I recognise something of myself
in the panicking woman by the sheds
who counsels us to only plant
low-maintenance things this year
and a few quick crops for pleasure.

She almost acts out dashing in
under cover of dark to harvest.
They’re thinking of shutting down the plots
or saying we can only do an hour.
People take the piss, treating it like parks.

There’s a keening edge in her voice.
Her man looks down, stirring the gentle ash
left at the end of their little bonfire.
You can tell they’ve been through years together –
not years like this but still.

She works a while at weeding
and when we go to say goodbye she says
Sorry – I know it’s the way I cope,
to say the worst and hope for better.
Her sorry eyes. I do the same myself.

We’ve learnt, over the fifteen years,
which plants like the dry light soil.
We know the old guys who have been here forever.
Know how to keep the weeds at an ebb –
bindweed gone, couch grass in abeyance.

It’s the last day bonfires are allowed
before the season proper begins.
Birdsong. Buds on bare apple branches,
leaves opening out like hands. Rhubarb stretches
dragons’ wings. We take down the brassica nets.

We squint our eyes against the drifting smoke.
I almost say out loud, I can almost
see apocalypse. The future is acres
of bramble, nettle, the flourishing
of flag-waving luscious seeding grass.

by Ramona Herdman

‘It won’t be a normal year’ is copyright © Ramona Herdman, 2022, and is reprinted here from Glut (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Glut, by Norwich-based writer Ramona Herdman, is a darkly funny and open-hearted book about, as the poet describes, “how we live together and find meaning through the various rules and rituals that surround food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love.”

In these candid and playful poems, appetites of all kinds are explored, from cocktails and cheeseboards, to sex and power. Herdman deftly presents the vulnerable underbelly of human experience, but with kindness and empathy. Poems in Glut look at relationships, interdependence, addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, pain and chaos. Yet overarching all these is vitality and a lust for life.

Victoria Kennefick, the TS Eliot Prize-nominated poet, observes: “It is appropriate that this miraculous collection ends on the word ‘love’ as the poems pulsate with that most essential of emotions: ‘Come home safe / Come home love.’ Glut is a true and rare gift.” You can read more about Glut on the Nine Arches website.

Ramona Herdman’s latest pamphlet, A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press), was shortlisted in the poetry category of East Anglican Book Awards. Her previous pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. One of her poems was chosen for the Poetry Archive’s WorldView 2021 and another won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, 2017. Ramona lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers.

You can read more about Ramona’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.