Poem by Elaine Feinstein

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the significant poet Elaine Feinstein (pictured) to its pages this Friday. She read for my Oxfam series last year, and then again recently in London at Foyles (with Michael Schmidt), where she launched her excellent and moving new collection from Carcanet, Talking to the Dead. Feinstein was born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicester, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She has written fourteen novels, such as The Border, Loving Brecht and Dark Inheritance. She has written radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies; one of these, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, was short listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. In 1993, she was Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore, and in 1996 in Tromso, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her novels and biographies have been translated into French, Spanish,German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, and Chinese; and her poetry into French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva were first publishedin 1971, and remain in print from OUP/Carcanet in the UK and Penguin in the USA.

Her poems have been widely anthologised, and two were included in The Oxford Book of English Verse (edited by Christopher Ricks). Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova was published in 2005. The poem below is from her latest collection.

London

For Natasha

A full ginger moon hangs in the garden.
On this side of the house there are no stars.
When I go to bed, I like to soothe myself with
streetlights, lit windows and passing cars.

When my grandchild comes to sleep over
I find we share the same preference.
She doesn't want to draw the curtains either.
'I like to look out on my town, my London...

Have you seen London from above?' she asks me.
'It's like a field of lights.' And her grey eyes widen.
Her eight year old spirit is tender as blossom.
Be gentle to her now, ferocious London.


poem by Elaine Feinstein
from Talking to the Dead (Carcanet, 2007)
reprinted with kind permission of the author

Oxfam Reading Time Out London's Critic's Choice

Good news, this reading has been selected as a Time Out London Critics' Choice for the week of March 28-April 3!

7 POETS FOR 2007 SERIES

Oxfam Spring Poetry Reading

Thursday, March 29, 7pm

Oxfam Books & Music

91 Marylebone High Street, W1 (near Baker Street tube station)

Featuring:

James Byrne is the editor of The Wolf magazine and a respected young poet in London. His first collection Passages of Time was published by Waterways in 2003 and he is currently finishing a second book. He has worked for the Poetry Translation Centre and has recently given readings at the Groucho Club, The Green Mill (Chicago) and for Poet in the City. Earlier in 2007, James received a shortlist for this year's Eric Gregory competition.

Melanie Challenger is an award-winning writer. She co-authored Stolen Voices with Zlata Filipovic. She adapted the Anne Frank diaries into a choral work which was televised by BBC from Westminster Palace in 2005. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2005. Her recent collection, Galatea, is from Salt.

Janice Fixter writes non-fiction and poetry. She has a D.Phil. in Creative Writing from Sussex University. Her poems have been widely published. She has a new collection due out in 2007 published by Tall Lighthouse. She lives in South London.

John Fuller's Collected Poems (Chatto and Windus) appeared in 1996. His collection Stones and Fires won the 1996 Forward Prize, and among later collections, Ghosts was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Award, and The Space of Joy (2006) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has also published two collections of short stories and seven novels, of which Flying to Nowhere was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the most recent, Flawed Angel, appeared in a Vintage paperback last November. He is also a critic, an anthologist, and a writer for children.

Patrick McGuinness won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and in 2001 he won the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine. His books include a collection of poetry, The Canals of Mars, from Carcanet, academic works such as Symbolism, Decadence and the' fin de siècle': French and European Perspectives (University of ExeterPress, 2000). Most recently, he edited the Collected Poems of Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, wherehe lectures in French.

Nigel McLoughlin is a prize-winning poet and the author of four collections of poetry. He was co-editor of Breaking The Skin, a two-volume anthology ofnew Irish writers published by Blackmountain Press in 2002. His new collection, Dissonances, is to be published (with an accompanying CD) byBluechrome in September 2007. He is Field Chair in Creative Writing and Course Leader for the MA in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. He is currently writing a textbook on poetry for Palgrave Macmillan.

Jeffrey Wainwright is a poet whose Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) and Out of the Air (1999) are published by Carcanet . He has translated plays by Péguy, Claudel, and Corneille. A book on the purposes and styles of poetry, Poetry the Basics, was published by Routledge in April2 004. His book Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill,was published by Manchester University Press in 2006. Carcanet will publish his new collection, Clarity or Death!. He is Professor in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Hosted by Todd Swift, Oxfam Poet-in-Residence

Admission free, suggested donation £6 - all proceeds to Oxfam.

Please RSVP: Martin Penny

Telephone: 020 7487 3570;

email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

Not Since 1878

While all media attention in the UK was yesterday on Northern Ireland and its cleavages, Quebec, a multilingual province of more than six million people the size of Europe, went to the polls in an election that, once again, confronted the issue of whether it should secede from Canada or retain its union with the federal government.

Last night, the (somewhat) pro-federalist Liberal's Jean Charest (pictured) won light backing for a minority government - the first in the province for 130 years. It will be curious to see how Charest manages to keep things going for more than another 18 months or so, like this - but he may learn a trick or two from Harper, Canada's right-wing PM.

The good news is that the PQ (the separatist party) came third.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/quebecvotes2007/story/2007/03/26/qv-liberals20070326.html

Congratulations to Derek Mahon

Eyewear is glad to report that Derek Mahon, the Irish poet, pictured, has been awarded The David Cohen Prize for Literature at an award ceremony hosted by the British Library on March 22. According to the prize's site:

"this biennial prize, valued by writers as the most coveted literary award in the British Isles .... is awarded to a writer from the UK or Ireland in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature. The winner of the 2007 David Cohen Prize for Literature will be presented with a cheque for £40,000. ... The winner of the David Cohen Prize is selected by a panel of judges comprising distinguished authors, literary critics and academics. The prize does not accept submissions, nor does it publish a shortlist. The panel for 2007, chaired by the Poet Laureate, Professor Andrew Motion, includes Liz Calder, Anne Enright, Jackie Kay, Hilary Mantel, Rt Hon Lord Chris Smith, Sir Peter Stothard, Boyd Tonkin and Jeremy Treglown. ... Previous winners of the David Cohen Prize for Literature are V S Naipaul (1993), Harold Pinter (1995), Muriel Spark (1997), William Trevor (1999), Doris Lessing (2001), Beryl Bainbridge and Thom Gunn (joint winners, 2003). In 2005 Michael Holroyd became the first biographer to win the prize."

Mahon is a worthy winner, author of several good poems that will last. His winning of the prize sees a kind of (fitting) closure of acceptance within the circle of friends (The Belfast Group) that comprised Heaney, Longley and Mahon. Heaney has the Nobel, Longley the Queen's Gold Medal, and Mahon the Cohen.

It now remains for the jury in 2009 to seriously consider the presiding genius of contemporary English poetry, Geoffrey Hill, worthy of such an accolade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Mahon

As an aside, Mahon was very kind to me, when my first collection, Budavox, was being prepared for publication in 1999. He was shown the poems in the manuscript, and, through a mutual friend in Dublin, agreed to write a brief quote for the cover, which read "Swift is a voice for our times" - which I have always felt was a delightfully witty double-edged sword, echoing as it does Ben Jonson's "not of an age, but for all time".

Poem by Barbara Smith

Eyewear is glad to welcome Barbara Smith (pictured) this Friday. I met Smith recently in Galway, where we both read, and enjoyed the conversation. Born in Dublin in 1967, her work has appeared in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, in journals such as Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Garm Lu, Agenda, nthposition, The SHOp and west47online. A chapbook, Poetic Stage came out in 1998, and a collection, Kairos, is forthcoming.


Trench Monument

It wasn’t the flies so much as the reek
caught downwind that giddied passers by.

The lush green of new moulted shoots
smoothed the vale down to the river.

Behind, a stand of pines on the crown of the hill.
The buzzing became an engine purring

closer towards the hill crest.
Carcass caverns loomed stark lying

as they had done, in November permafrost.
But now, in spring, white maggots blindly crept

from thawing flesh remnants, writhing, vying
for their own stale warmth, feeding the biomass,

reducing the remains to a future fossil.
Particles of dust, carbon atoms:

emissions in a shell-shocked future.


poem by Barbara Smith

Tanya Reinhardt Has Died

Sad news.

Regular contributor to nthposition, Tanya Reinhardt died in New York on 17 March age 63. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky, and taught at the universities of Tel Aviv and Utrecht.

In December 2006, she left Israel and taught at New York University. Tanya was married to the poet and translator Aharon Shabtai.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2038790,00.html

Chapman

Chapman 109 is just out, with a cover feature on Stewart Conn, at 70.

Chapman is "Scotland's quality literary magazine" and I am glad to note that I have six poems in the current issue.

Do check out their site at www.chapman-pub.co.uk and subscribe. As per an earlier post, it is important to support the magazines that form, and inform, poetry in the UK.