All entries for March 2010

'All Over the Open Pages of Wet England'

David Morley : 31 Mar 2010 12:19 |  Tags: Amounderness Carcanet David Morley Lancashire Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'Powdered with peonies scattered like stars': Jane Draycott's poetry

Jane Draycott’s previous collection The Night Tree (2004) was exceptional. At the time I celebrated her patient intelligence of practice, and concision of address, not only in every poem in that book but in the very philosophy of perception informing her poetics. I believe she has ground in common with Samuel Menashe. Like him, she has the wisdom to leave things out; she has a gift for the music and tone of a poem; and she won’t be rushed into betraying her vocation through lack of care or pursuit of fashion.

Jane Draycott's Over is an acutely musical book: Sean O’Brien was right to praise it recently for its ‘quietness’. It is quietly mesmerizing. Its sequence of twenty-six poems based on the International Phonetic Alphabet sounds at first like an Oulipean exercise. The music of Draycott’s language allows the poems to exceed and escape their framing, becoming something quite other than the sum and sound of its sections:

A match struck

in the house of ice.

Deep-sea flame fish

calling, the heart

harpooning. Something

in the dark is flashing.

Gold in the blood,

everything you know.

The fire on the little sandy beach.

The bear at the window.

No one escapes.

‘Whiskey’

For me, the clinching moment of this admirable collection is the extract from Draycott’s translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl. The language is marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original, gorgeous and natural this old poem can be. I look forward to the complete translation if the extract is anything by which to judge it:

And I saw that the little hill where she fell

was a shaded place showered with spices:

pink gillyflower, ginger and purple gromwell

powdered with peonies scattered like stars.

But more than their loveliness to the eye,

the sweetest fragrance seemed to float

in the air there also. I know beyond doubt

that’s where she lay. My spotless pearl.

Over, Jane Draycott, Carcanet Press, pb., 66 pp., £9.95, ISBN 978-1-903039-92-2

My thanks to Fiona Sampson of Poetry Review where this piece first appeared.

David Morley : 30 Mar 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Carcanet David Morley Jane Draycott Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Growth Rings in Poems: Poetry in Translation

Growth-Rings in Poems

Antonio Machado claimed that, ‘In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it’. It might be a smart move to invent your translator while you’re at it. Robert Frost’s over-celebrated remark that ‘Poetry is what is lost in translation’ may make poets feel unattainable, but what Frost went on to say was, ‘It is also what is lost in interpretation’ which makes attainability a little problematic. And it says more about the nature of poetry than it does about the process of translation, or of criticism for that matter. Few enough writers realise that good translation, like good criticism, is a vocation and practice as thorny as original composition.

In fact, for many creative writers, translation shares the table with writing, just as for literary translators it is another form of creative writing. Translation is always a negotiation. To paraphrase Ngugi wa Thiong’o, translation moves beyond and around language. Some words are charged with particular meanings in their host language; that does not entail their carrying those associations into another tongue.

It is not only the spectrum of meaning that is considered in excellent poetic translation. There are polyphonies of factors: the physical sound of the poem’s internal movement; the speed, shiver and intent of word-notes, taken individually, within a line, and within a whole poem. And what about the meanings of the sounds of words, the tongues and voices ringing and ringed in the grain of poetic lines, and the notion of locality in how a word is spoken and understood?

The Dutch poet and archaeologist Esther Jansma may have a view given that she established the age of wooden artefacts from growth-rings in the wood which could be applied to timber in The Netherlands. Are there growth-rings in a poem’s language and form? Her translator writes in her introduction to the excellent What It Is that ‘if a source poem is rhymed, some translators see the rhyme as somehow “separate from” meaning… I feel that if rhyme is used, it is part of a poem’s meaning…’. Author and translator held a painstaking negotiation over every draft, and their teamwork makes for a very convincing, clear, almost scientifically-eyed poetry:

If we have to dress, when all is said at last

against the cold or in something’s name

in what remains of this or another past

tales and aides-memoire which simply claim

that we were here and nothing more

in time which existed before today…

from ‘Archaeology 2’

With the exception of Jane Holland’s persuasive and energetic versioning of The Wanderer, the books under review are all ‘beyond and around’ translations in that they are neither re-imaginings nor imitations. That does mean they are any less under-imagined than Holland’s delightful appropriation of the Anglo-Saxon original. She states ‘the switch from Christian to secular beliefs and the switch from male to female narrator were acts of reinterpretation…Those who find this change too much of a strain…should consider that each age must reinvent the classics rather than simply ‘translate’ them…’. She is correct of course except there is nothing simple about translation, whereas reinterpretation (pace Frost) sets up another force field for the reader.

The translator makes a choice of an author’s work, decides the posterity of certain poems. For example Driven by the Wind and Drenched to the Bone by the Argentinan Daniel Samoilovich is a beautifully selected collection or sharp, startling, colourful lyrical poems. Conversely, I got the underwhelming feeling in Starve the Poets! that the selection of work from ‘controversial Chinese poet’ Yi Shah shows him to full disadvantage. The translators have done almost too good a job in rendering into English - what seems to me - a self-regarding, self-important, sexist set of work. It’s almost as if Yi Sha had taken the least attractive tonal elements of Bukowski then done his best to divest his poetry of the quality of mercy. The trouble is that we passed through this kind of phase some time ago: half-pretending to enjoy poems that yielded you zero as a reader except corrosion of precious attention. Eye-wateringly, this appears to be one of the stated intentions of the author except he believes he’s being laconic, as opposed to tedious:

Walking across life’s stage.

Just now

as I handed him a cigarette

he gave me a light

Walking across life’s stage

In the flickering flames

I got a glimpse of his cigarette lighter –

well, what d’you know?: it was shaped like a mini-

fire extinguisher

from ‘Crossing the Stage’

Many poets argue that all writing is translated in that it is translated from silence. Midnight and Other Poems by the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti reads like a series of skilful resurrections, through language, of a silenced majority:

After the dust and smoke

have cleared from the house that once stood there

and as I stare at the new emptiness,

I see my grandfather wearing his cloak,

wearing the very same cloak –

not one similar to it,

but the same one.

He hugs me and maintains a silent gaze,

as if his look

could order the rubble to become a house…

from Part 1 ‘Midnight’

‘Midnight’ is clearly an ambitious sequence, a montage of images from the land of his birth, and rewards being read aloud. One gets the feeling it is written to be heard, and can be considered part of a wider debate about language, land and dispossession, rather like the interesting poems in Flowers of Flame by some new poets of Iraq.

Moving finally to the resonant and gloriously complex Prague with Fingers of Rain by Czech writer Vítězslav Nezval, first published in 1936, and translated here by the brilliant Ewald Osers. This is an expertly evocation of Prague’s interwar liveliness and polyvalence. What’s especially exciting is how landscape and streetscape are rendered clearly and precisely within an apparently ‘surrealist’ confection of forms and strategies. Unlike the tired strategies of Yi Sha, we are only just catching up with such approaches (John Hartley Williams and Luke Kennard spring to mind). It is unlikely you will have read anything else quite like this collection, not only in terms of meaning and structure, but also ricocheting forms and acutely-judged sound.

Many thanks to Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, in which this piece first appeared.

What It Is: Selected Poems, Esther Jansma, translated by Francis R Jones, Bloodaxe Books, pb., 96 pp., £8.95, ISBN 978-1-85224-780-5

Lament for the Wanderer, translated by Jane Holland, Heaventree Press, pb., 22 pp., £4.00, ISBN 978-1-90603-806-9

Driven by the Wind and Drenched to the Bone, Daniel Samoilovich, translated by Andrew Graham-Yooll, Shoestring Press, pb., 60 pp., £8.95, ISBN 978-1-904886-60-0

Starve the Poets!: Selected Poems, Yi Sha, translated by Simon Patton and Tao Naikan, Bloodaxe Books, pb., 96 pp., £9.95, ISBN 978-1-85224-815-4

Midnight and Other Poems, Mourid Barghouti, translated by Radwa Ashour, Arc Publications, hb., 240 pp., £14.39, ISBN 978-1-906570-08-8

Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, edited by Sadek Mohammed, Soheil Najm, Haider Al_Kabi, and Dan Veach, Michigan State University Press, pb., 96 pp., £14.50, ISBN 978-0-87013-842-3

Prague with Fingers of Rain, Vítězslav Nezval, translated by Ewald Osers, Bloodaxe Books, pb., 64 pp., £8.95, ISBN 978-1-85224-816-1

David Morley : 28 Mar 2010 19:53 |  Tags: Arc Publications Bloodaxe Books David Morley Esther Jansma Jane Holland Mourid Barghouti Nezval Poetry Poetry Review The Practice Of Poetry Translation Vitazslav Yi-Sha |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wild Bees: The Poetry of Martin Harrison

Joy in making, seeing and connecting; simplicity without simplification: complexity without complication: that’s a single-breath summary of Martin Harrison’s hugely impressive poetic technique, a technique I feel caught out by in all the nicest ways. His work was entirely new to me yet I felt immediately at home in these fresh, vivid poems. I’m sure most British readers will feel the same especially if they are familiar with the techiques of Robert Frost, Les Murray, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver and Allen Curnow. Yes, those influences are there but Martin Harrison is very much his own maker: he’s simply assimilated the best of these poets as he travelled through their diction.

Harrison has travelled the world; his early years were in England. There’s a fine and painful poem about his father, a travelling wine salesman and amateur poet in Northern England who in the evenings ‘jotted screeds of ‘nature poetry’’:

He called it doing the accounts.

Sincerely, he hoped I’d do more, with more success:

but “study money, not poetry” was his long-lived, bleak

advice. In his 80s now, his steady observation:

“I’ve given up making sense of things. Work only

for yourself.” A palimpsest is what’s scraped away:

a scarping which reveals a trace, a ‘beneath’ that’s covered

over with new scrawl. Are memories like that trace?

‘Letter from America’

Harrison spent some time in New Zealand before settling in Australia. He’s an exported - now imported - writer of unusual range and observational skill, and that sense of being outside things helps him write some of the most brilliant metaphyical nature poems of our time, for example in ‘The Platypus’:

…it can shift from one medium

to another—from scrabble to dig to swim.

Fur, blood and bones, it lives out a warm theorem:

how cells communicate with mode and shape.

It’s pure exuberance of style. No post-modern,

it benefits from natural history. No victim,

it even shows how to adjust thoughts to

that maya, that dream, where illusion’s both true

and false…

In poems like ‘The Platypus’, ‘The Coolamon’, ‘Stopping for a Walk in Reserved Land Near Murra Murra’, ‘Late Western Thought’ and the two ‘Letters from America’, Martin Harrison takes a natural setting or creature and explores it scrupulously, writing it sideways - or should I say Harrison allows the pressures of the developing poem to write him sidelong: images blinking in at themselves, birdlike in their movement through his mind’s eye and the mind of the reader.

Sometimes the process risks sentimentality, but that’s one of the recognised hazards when writing such technically brilliant and emotionally alive poems, and Harrison gets it right each time. I recommend Wild Bees with extreme prejudice; this book altered my mood, my whole day and made me write a new poem.

Many thanks to Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, in which this piece first appeared.

Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems, Martin Harrison, Shearsman Books, pb., 168 pp., £7.95, ISBN 978-1-84861-008-8

David Morley : 25 Mar 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Australian David Morley Martin Harrison Poetry Poetry Review Prose Shearsman Books The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Raven in Ravening: the Poetry of John F. Deane

The Raven in Ravening

In an anguished polemic titled ‘Dream of a Fair Field’ published in The Furrow the fine Irish poet and editor John F. Deane wrote, ‘The ground of all my living and writing has been an attempt to fashion a language and imagery suitable to the translation of Christian faith in these modern times, and for this I have suffered ridicule and rejection … How can [a poem] bring a sense of integrity and morality to a political system in our own country that works by subterfuge, aiming at perpetuation of power rather than the good of the citizens when political life has become shameful and overtly dismissive of the deeper values by which Christianity ought to flourish. A poet may be noisily praised and lauded in public but is ignored and dismissed as having nothing ‘real’ to offer to the ‘real’ world. …’

I quote from this essay because the poet intends it to be read and considered: the piece is republished on Deane’s personal website. If we accept that these are legitimate assertions and questions for a poet of faith then Deane’s beleaguered response is perfectly understandable. However, the stance of his language gives the impression that Christian faith is already cornered - cornered by the ‘‘real’ world’, even though Deane is sharing that corner with his God. Poetry gets him (and his faith) out of this corner. Poetry serves his cause (and his God) clearly and beautifully. The poems in A Little Book of Hours release little worlds; Deane’s perplexity becomes articulate energy and the means for clear-eyed self-exploration—exploring if not quite never answering those questions in his essay. Here is an indicative quotation from the poem ‘Towards a Conversion’. In Deane’s poems an ecological sense of conversion, of ‘translation’, is always tangible within his spiritual perceptions:

… I walk over millennia, the Irish

wolf and bear, the elk and other

miracles; everywhere bog-oak roots

and ling, forever in their gentle

torsion, with all this floor a living thing, held

in the world’s care, indifferent. Over everything

voraciously, the crow, a monkish body hooded

in grey, crawks its blacksod, cleansing music;

lay your flesh down here you will become

carrion-compost, sustenance for the ravening roots;

where God is, has been and will ever be.

I admire the spoken music here: the mind’s flight-path for the crow across lines and stanza; and the transformational release of the raven in ‘ravening’. Good news for his readers that all the poems in the book are as wide-awake and as interesting as this example. The long elegy ‘Madonna and Child’ is the masterwork, eventfully spiritual, almost a dream-work in the way it stirs at memory – memory which is both observed and imagined. In ‘Dream of a Fair Field’ the poet mourned the loss to contemporary poetry of the language of the ‘Song of Solomon’. In ‘Madonna and Child’ he liberates and refreshes this same language for his own invocations and revivifications:

As an orchid among buttercups is she, as a peach tree

among brambles in the wood; as exile

in a hostile land, as drudge among the very poor.

Michael Symmons Roberts wrote in a recent Poetry Review, ‘The relationship between creative freedom and religious belief is far from limiting…religious faith was an imaginative liberation…’. That’s true of John F. Deane when he is creating poems. However, in the same way that the composer John Tavener’s work has been seen as more of a challenge to the world than a consolation, Deane’s poems offer ‘the rising recurrent sorrow of the merely human before loss, its unacceptability, its disdain’ (‘Madonna and Child’). These are beautiful, solemn, gravid poems, best read aloud for, like John Tavener, Deane has to be heard to be believed.

Many thanks to Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, in which this piece first appeared.

A Little Book of Hours, John F. Deane, Carcanet Press, pb., 100 pp., £9.95, ISBN 978-1-85754-970-6

David Morley : 24 Mar 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Carcanet David Morley John F Deane Poetry Poetry Review The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Currents of Myth: the Poetry of Moniza Alvi

The Currents of Myth

A writer’s fidelity to reality can make for good art but only because our own reality is partly an art. The art of memory makes stories and myths of us all. Rereading Moniza Alvi’s first five collections of poems in Split World was a numinous experience. They make for a strong book, made more sinewy by the fact that the poems are skilfully chosen by the author. She does not elaborate any flaws by repeating them; the author scalpels them out. By doing so, Moniza Alvi makes her readers more aware of talismanic variations in her handling of language and subject, especially their binding of myth and fairytale. As I read her selection alongside the old published versions, I grew more appreciative of what I consider the most interesting aspects of Moniza Alvi’s project. The real (and unreal) country at Alvi’s shoulder is her imagination, an other-world of myth, power and strangeness all of which are considerably demonstrated by this selection and by her excellent new collection Europa.

K.K. Ruthven once tried to define myth as partaking ‘of that quality acribed to poetry in Wallace Stevens’ meticulously evasive aphorism: they appear to resist the intelligence almost successfully’. In Split World it is Moniza Alvi’s fidelity to what she does not know that gives her work power; that throws her poems open to possibility; and this aspect is most illuminating about reality and identity when Alvi engages with, and creates for herself, the currents of myth. Myth and fairytale work for Alvi as ways of knowing herself through the enticing genre that Marina Warner describes in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers as ‘promiscuous and omnivorous and anarchically heterogeneous, absorbing high and low elements, tragic and comic tones into its often simple, rondo-like structure of narrative’. These qualities came to the fore in collections such as Carrying My Wife and How the Stone Found its Voice, the latter reminiscent of fairytale strategies in the ‘Games’ and ‘Quartz Pebble’ poems of Vasco Popa:

Was it widthways or lengthways,

a quarrel with the equator?

Did the rawness of the inside sparkle?

Only this is true:

there was an arm on one side

and a hand on the other,

a thought on one side

and a hush on the other.

And a luminous tear

carried on the back of a beetle

went backwards and forwards

from one side to the other.

                       ‘How the World Split in Two’

The personal can also be mythic, as Alvi’s earlier collections showed in her writings on her Pakistani heritage: ‘Azam passes the sweetshop, / names the sugar monuments Taj Mahal. // I water the country with English rain, / cover it with English words. / Soon it will burst, or fall like a meteor.’ (‘The Country at My Shoulder’).

Where myth and tale coursed through Moniza Alvi’s previous books, it waterfalls into the ocean in her new volume Europa. The whelming language and whirlpool patterns of the central sequence ‘Europa and the Bull’ are remarkable for their apparent solidity. A curved wave of narrative carries the pattern. Simple, candescent images crest the fluid dynamics of its language (I admire that the ‘lie’ here is white without being named so):

She was softening, melting,

collapsing onto the sand.

And a beast was stepping towards her

dragging the sea behind him –

light in step as a dancer,

white as a boulder,

a snowy mountain,

a ship’s sail,

a lie.

Orchid-white,

violet-white,

rose-white,

not white at all.

A bull blessed with the costliest

golden horns, each gleaming

to outshine the other.

             ‘V: Europa and the Bull’

Writing this piece must have required a sea-surge of imaginative concentration, and there is a sense of the poem overflowing its pages’ shores. The poem floods across the whole book, leaving pools and traces of images in other poems; at times making whole poems that address the subject of abduction and rape from other points of view: ‘King Agenor’; ‘Europa’s Dream’; a mermaid ‘slit / down the muscular length / exposing the bone in its red canal’; or a rape victim trapped in a Volkswagen Golf in ‘The Ride’ - ‘Nothing else for company. / Just the bolting forwards - // and a neighing / heard through water.’

Writers are often told (or so they tell themselves) to write what they know, but the problem is we do not usually know enough about what we know because we do not know ourselves. Cynthia Ozick once said, ‘The point is that the self is limiting. The self—subjectivity—is narrow and bound to be repetitive…When you write about what you don’t know, this means you begin to think about the world at large. You begin to think beyond the home-thoughts. You enter dream and imagination’. This statement describes clearly what makes Moniza Alvi a fine poet and why her poetry eludes and finally escapes some of the more exploitative definitions that have been foisted upon it.

Many thanks to Fiona Sampson, editor of Poetry Review, in which this piece first appeared.

Split World: Poems 1990-2005, Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe Books, pb., 304 pp., £10.95, ISBN 978-1-85224-802-4

Europa, Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe Books, pb., 64 pp., £7.95, ISBN 978-1-85224-803-1

David Morley : 23 Mar 2010 15:12 |  Tags: David Morley Moniza Alvi Myth Poetry Review Poets The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Battle Between Books

I have run out of shelf space. Even the ‘pretend shelves’ – those Stonehenge temporary structures of plank and brick that end up standing for years – even they are crammed and complaining. You remove a single book and the rest of its companions close the gap with relief: there is no getting back up there. Like a packed tube train, the door slams and the whole shelf slides off – no room, no room.

New arrivals can be shocked; they have to be strong to stay. But old travellers must fear against strong newcomers, especially when they come as an army. Thus, the arrival of the twenty volumes of the mighty Oxford English Dictionary and its two-volumed polyglot lieutenant, The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary led to sharp skirmishes and fall-outs. The Oxfords won, at such cost my local charity bookshops are now almost all abandoned anthologies. The Writers’ Room at Warwick University is home to thinner survivors of this combat – at least two hundred reviewed poetry volumes sought a new home there.

The books say there is no room, but what they mean is there is no space. But there is always space on this desk, or across this bright and flickering desk at which we sit right now, writing and reading to each other. Above and beyond the books I get sent for review, or which I buy for that matter, there are always a snow of extra books which, like overhearing a world outside my mind, find me home. And I think these often surprise more than the books you think you like or were looking for in order to create more books of your own. Here are three which arrived unprompted - and are staying.

Andrew McMillan is studying creative writing a Lancaster and is the co-editor of a good, new magazine called “Cake”. A press that is new to me, Red Squirrel Press, published his first pamphlet last year. Every Salt Advance is a delightfully imaginative debut. The key to it is generosity. He’s a young poet, and sometimes young poets play up the most cynically to gain a reader’s attention. But here, there’s no pose, no urbanity or cringing English irony. He writes feelingly and allusively (a mark of good apprenticeship) and believes in language as a vehicle for play. He believes in language, not in using poetry as a means to a different end than poetry can offer.

Angela France’s Occupation is published by Ragged Raven Poetry, and I read the poems through with interest before leaving the book to work away in my mind for a few weeks. Did it stay in there? Did it possess me? It stayed and unfolded itself. Occupation has a depth to it which shouldn’t seem so surprising except that so few poetry books are possessed by any resonance beyond one reading or hearing. I remember a mental test that Charles Tomlinson applied to poems: does the language of the poem stand up to any sustained pressure? does the poem crumble into lettered debris after one or two readings? Angela France should be better known for making poems that are keenly focussed and wonderfully made. (I would argue that George Ttoouli’s recent first poetry book Static Exile possesses a similarly striking kind of depth and resonance. I am also aware that George and I work together at Warwick but that I’d still think this were he working on the Moon.)

The English Sweats by James Brookes is a really solid and inventive pamphlet, published by Pighog Press. Pighog are a new press but their publishing standards are astounding. Beautifully produced and printed, I’d have liked even if James Brookes had joined George Ttoouli on his Moon mission. For James is a former student of mine so you might regard my words as puffery, but I am also certain that James is going on to be one of our most interesting poets; and every volume of the long dictionary is standing to attention knowing they have another friend on the earth.

David Morley : 22 Mar 2010 14:48 |  Tags: David Morley Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry Warwick Prize For Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Iris by Night: Robert Frost

One misty evening, one another's guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.
There came a moment of confusing lights,
Such as according to belief in Rome
Were seen of old at Memphis on the heights
Before the fragments of a former sun
Could concentrate anew and rise as one.
Light was a paste of pigment in our eyes.
And then there was a moon and then a scene
So watery as to seem submarine;
In which we two stood saturated, drowned.
The clover-mingled rowan on the ground
Had taken all the water it could as dew,
And still the air was saturated too,
Its airy pressure turned to water weight.
Then a small rainbow like a trellis gate,
A very small moon-made prismatic bow,
Stood closely over us through which to go.
And then we were vouchsafed a miracle
That never yet to other two befell
And I alone of us have lived to tell.
A wonder! Bow and rainbow as it bent,
Instead of moving with us as we went
(To keep the pots of gold from being found),
It lifted from its dewy pediment
Its two mote-swimming many-colored ends
And gathered them together in a ring.
And we stood in it softly circled round
From all division time or foe can bring
In a relation of elected friends.

David Morley : 16 Mar 2010 23:51 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reciprocity

by John Drinkwater

I do not think that skies and meadows are

Moral, or that the fixture of a star

Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees

Have wisdom in their windless silences.

Yet these are things invested in my mood

With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,

That in my troubled season I can cry

Upon the wide composure of the sky,

And envy fields, and wish that I might be

As little daunted as a star or tree.

David Morley : 15 Mar 2010 22:52 |  Tags: David Morley Poetry Prose The Practice Of Poetry Warwick Prize For Writing |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Le Poesie Nouveau Est Arrive

David Morley : 10 Mar 2010 11:43 |  Tags: David Morley Poetry The Practice Of Poetry Warwick Prize For Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poem as NASA Image

Photos below: NASA

The images of the Indian Ocean and North America were produced by astronomers at Nasa's using images from the Terra satellite more than 435 miles (700km) above the Earth's surface

The Blue Marble series was pieced together from thousands of images taken over many months by the satellite's remote sensing device MODIS, of every square kilometre of the Earth's surface.

David Morley : 03 Mar 2010 14:46 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dove Release

Dove Release

NEW FLIGHTS AND VOICES

edited and introduced by David Morley

DOVE RELEASE

New Flights and Voices

(ISBN 978-1-905208-13-5) published byWorple Press 2010)

Worple Press, PO Box 328,Tonbridge, KentTN9 1WR

www.worplepress.co.uk

theworpleco@aol.com

The Capital Centre and the Warwick Writing Programme invite you to the launch of Dove Release: New Flights and Voices, a major new anthology of new poetry from Warwick University edited by the award-winning poet David Morley.

The Poets: Toby Aisbitt, Katie Allen, Vicki Benson, Peter Blegvad, Zoë Brigley, James Brookes, Phil Brown, Claire Bunyan, Peter Carpenter, Nick Chen, Swithun Cooper, Nicola Davidson, David Devanny, Rebecca Fearnley, Chloe Todd Fordham, James Harringman, Emily Hasler, Luke Heeley, Jane Holland, Gavin Hudson, Thom Hutchinson, Poppy James, Sholeh Johnston, Charlotte Jones, Luke Kennard, Gwenfron Kent, Will Kerr, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Anna Lea, Emma Lowe, Ailie MacDonald, Liz Manuel, Jack McGowan, Michael McKimm, Jennifer McLean, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Maxwell, Jennifer Mellor, David Morley, Jon Morley, John Murray, Ruth Padel, Kathryn Parratt, Siavash Pournouri, Sarah Rabone, Rowan Rutter, Fiona Sampson, Nima David Seifi, Sam Sedgeman, Nicola Seth-Smith, Bethany Startin, George Szirtes, Cari Thomas, Claire Trévien, George Ttoouli, Simon Turner, Jonathan Ware, Hilary Watson and Andrew Webb.

Dove Release presents a decade of poetry at The University of Warwick. It features poems by sixty writers, most of them poets in their twenties, including some winners of the Eric Gregory Awards, as well as work by more senior poets. What unites them is a course at Warwick University called 'The Practice of Poetry'.

Judge these 'new flights and voices' for yourself by joining David Morley, guest poets Peter Blegvad (MC), Jane Holland, Luke Kennard, Glyn Maxwell, and student and alumni poets on Thursday March 18th.

Drinks from 7.15 pm The Foyer, Millburn HouseReadings from 8.00-9.15 pm The Studio, Capital Centre.Places are limited so contact capital@warwick.ac.uk as quickly as possible if you would like to attend. Places will be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.

David Morley : 01 Mar 2010 16:43 |  Tags: Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem