Tag: featured poet

Books/

A poem by Lynne Hjelmgaard

I first met Lynne Hjelmgaard at a Brighton Stanza meeting, and knew straight away she was a poet I wanted to hear more of and would enjoy workshopping with. Lynne has had an extraordinary, almost nomadic background – from New York via Denmark, Paris, Rome, London and the sea. The range of her experience and poetic wisdom is an inspiration to me, and I’m very pleased to have one of her poems on my blog.

The poem reproduced here is from A Boat Called Annelise, a sequence based on a period in Lynne’s life when she lived on a boat and sailed around the world. It’s beautiful and dreamlike, yet grounded in vivid, lived detail.

  
Because of the beauty of the ship herself

When we found her
it happened quickly,
when we left her
it felt like a divorce.

We had worked our way into Annalise:
the pungent smell of her deep shadowy bilge;
dawn-walks to showers
in mouldy leather shoes.

(Wet on the trip in
wet on the trip out.)

Annalise peeled away
layers of ourselves.
Old meandering patterns
shed like unwanted winter clothes.

We learned to care
for her bronze, steel and wood,
devotedly washed and rubbed
all her curves and corners.

Her decks cracked and creaked,
rigging throbbed and hummed,
sails fluttered and snapped,
hull pounded and leapt,

the booming sea-roar crouching to pounce,
until Annalise lifted her heavy rounded stern
in the very last unbalanced moment,
and reduced seawater to slush.

In harbour, ships’ wakes and rolls
rocked us sleepily secure,
water gurgled under her hull
like gentle, shaking bells.
We slept ’til she opened our ears
to all natural sounds.

Our ship made music.
Our ship was music.

 

Lynne Hjelmgaard‘s latest book, The Ring, was published with Shearsman Books in 2011. Her new sequence, A Boat Called Annalise, was a runner-up in the 2012 Poetry Wales Purple Moose Pamphlet Competition.

Courses/

A poem by David Borrott

I think there were only three men on the course at Ty Newydd, so I don’t know how that felt for them. David Borrott consistently came up with fresh, original work, and had a deadpan delivery I particularly enjoyed. Faced with the challenge of writing a poem in which ‘lethargy’ is personified by a sea anemone he managed to mix poignancy and humour brilliantly (‘… I have so many arms to do nothing with’)

I did ask David for a biog but he’s been a bit coy, nevertheless I do know he is widely published and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. There is footage of him reading at Poets & Players here on YouTube.

I love this piece for its tragi-comic and slightly surreal treatment of everyday culture, all wrapped up in a lovely ironic swipe at both art criticism and that creative writing staple, the ekphrastic poem.

‘felicitous blending of figure and landscape’
by David Borrott

Two youths are fighting on the high street.
One wears a daub of blood on his white shirt,
the other’s fists are tight as apples;
a clench of excitement runs through the watching people,
their faces like a row of broken plates.
Dummies in the glass expand the crowd –
‘Next’ says the shop sign.

On the stone plinth of the town centre monument,
a woman with XXXL breasts is smoking.
She rests earthmotherly on the steps.
Smoke rises from her hand and her nostrils,
stroking the air with its grey curls.
Its filaments reach to the lowest green of a sycamore.
Her overblown curves temper the harsh lines of the war memorial.

A man is pissing down an alley.
It is night and a soft untroublesome rain persists.
Street lights reflect in the rancid puddles,
touches of orange amongst the grey and brown.
His fawn jacket is darker at the shoulders,
his half-cocked trousers are shadowy, vague.
It is almost as if he hovered there on the jet of his stream.

Published on Magma’s website as a longlisted poem in their competition.

Books/

A poem by Jenny Lewis

At Ty Newydd recently I was fortunate enough to be working alongside some wonderful poets, and with their permission I’ll be featuring some of them here.

The first is Jenny Lewis. I think Jenny was the most experienced of all of us, with many, many strings to her bow, and yet she wore her expertise with generosity and humility. Her comments were insightful and supportive and she produced some lovely work. It was very fitting that she won the competition set for us at the end of the week, with a very clever sestina. Jenny explained that it had been rejected by a certain poetry magazine, and so she’d rather lost faith in it (the poem that is), but Carol Ann Duffy wasn’t having any of that. “Who was the editor?” she barked.

Taking Mesopotamia

Anyway, I’m delighted that Jenny agreed to have a poem featured here. This is from her latest collection, Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014). Of it, Bernard O’Donoghue writes: “Jenny Lewis’s quietly angry book is an account of the Iraq wars – mostly imposed from outside – of the past hundred years. Taking Mesopotamia – a brilliantly ironic title for our times – controls its anger through an accomplished and flexible technique in verse and prose. It is compulsory reading, even for those who don’t normally read poetry: an eloquent rejoinder to those who say poetry can’t, or shouldn’t, concern itself with public matters.”

Do visit Jenny’s website to get a feel for everything she’s up to, and for more details of her publications.

MOTHER

Childbirth was like being excavated:
my belly rose on whalebone wings,
pain soared about me like a bloodied angel:

then you were born

I saw you with my own eyes
I held you day and night:
you lay in my arms, a glowing pupa.

At Kut-al-Amara you were back-lit,
the moon pointed you out against the ridge –
when Turkish gunners stopped your spade

you fell slowly, shedding iridescence

each night in dreams I fail to catch you –
your bones the fragile quills of rescued fledglings
you placed by the stove for warmth

From Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014) First published by The Oxonian Review, 2012.

Jenny LewisJenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis’s published works include When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia 2002), Fathom (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2007) and After Gilgamesh (Mulfran Press, 2011) a verse drama for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford. Her forthcoming collection Taking Mesopotamia (March 2014, Oxford Poets/ Carcanet) expresses the revulsion and despair that ordinary people, especially women, feel towards war. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.

Poems/

Two poems by Rebecca Varley-Winter

Mount Caburn to Lewes

Ah, nature. We’re very lucky in Lewes to be nestled into the South Downs, with beautiful views of rolling hills round every corner. With that in mind here’s something nice for the weekend. A lovely poem in Obsessed with Pipework called ‘Clouds’ caught my attention and I tracked down the poet, Rebecca Varley-Winter, who kindly agreed to let me reproduce ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ on this blog, for your delectation. Don’t say I don’t spoil you.

Clouds

I am not godly
but when they move like this
on a hill I’ve seen daily
and walked over antlike
and, wreathing, make of its reaches
a land never travelled,
deep in mist, so softly distant
that in the apple gold light
it condenses to a myth
or figment of the ground,
shifting, departing already –
by water and earth
I bow down, I bow down.

 
Hill

Home being this hill,
lover’s hip,
day lengthening on it,
stretching a shape
where thought drapes,
the shade of this place –
without this hip bone
shoulderblade twist,
a grass wisp
tuned to the gold shift
on a known shape, heavy,
what would I be? Swift
the wind could pass
straight through my heart
without shelter, at last

Both ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ first published in Obsessed with Pipework 62.

About Rebecca Varley-Winter:
I’ve been writing poems for ten years. ‘Clouds’ and ‘Hill’ were both inspired by a shapely hill near where I grew up on the Isle of Wight, and a lot of my poetry is rooted in that landscape. Lately I divide my time between London and Cambridge, where I’m working on a PhD on modernist poetry; I also make enthusiastic noises about music at www.forfolkssake.com. It’s good to share, so here are the names of some young poets I admire: Ollie Evans, Amy De’Ath, Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Scott Annett, Justin Katko, Mendoza, Laura Kilbride, Holly Pester, Jessica Pujol, Nat Raha, Matthew Gregory, Kate Tempest.

Image: ‘Mount Caburn to Lewes’ by Sue Haseltine