In this episode we hear Aleksander Mazey read from his forthcoming collection, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition.
Alex's two previously published books are prose writings of cultural criticism, strongly influenced by the sociologist, critical theorist and poet, Jean Baudrillard. The influence of Baudrillard is also present in this first collection of poetry, allowing him to move between genres and between elements of high and low culture and to embrace or confront the reality of the superficial and virtual.
The poets Alex read from were
Tao Lin, you are a little bit happier than I am, 2006;
Philip Levine, The Simple Truth, 1994.
Alex's own collection will be published by Bad Betty Press on March 28th.
Alex Mazey won The Roy Fisher Prize from Keele University in 2018 and was the recipient of a Creative Future Writers’ Award the following year. He is a contributing researcher for the international academic journal, Baudrillard Now and author of both Living in Disneyland and Sad Boy Aesthetics. Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition is his debut poetry collection available from the award-winning, Bad Betty Press. |
CREATURE
Lizzie Ballagher
Seal
You taught me to search
for seals
in unexpected places.
One winter day,
slick in a slack tide
beside gravel dumps
in the muddy estuary
of the Thames:
a sleek head bobbing—
you saw him first.
Then none again—not one—
until near your life’s close
when in a place we counted holy
(cliffs plunging headlong
into the chop and slap
of a summer sea
and clouds curtaining
the Exmoor sky
in holiday mockery),
when we were grumbling
about unseasonal cold,
a grey seal raised her head:
just yards from where
we stood on the shoreline;
watched us, inquisitive.
Shoulder-deep in brisk waves,
our daughter turned.
The seal swam round her,
garlanded her legs,
clapped for her
to frolic in the water.
They played.
No one spoke.
We held our breaths.
Today is animal—
the furred tongue of torpid heat licks,
laps me round—unwelcome blanket
in the furnace of the day.
Even at daybreak, skies steam.
The dragon-breath of dawn kindles.
Thunder stamps, rocks Earth.
Chasing its tail, wind snorts,
shakes dust. Lightning kicks
from hangdog clouds.
Herds of cumulonimbus
bellow over the day’s
slow savannah.
When nights wheel with stars, fireflies
ignite tiger-eyes in striped thorn-scrub.
Sudden dusk cowers down.
In the rippling, muscular presence
of mid-summer, I crouch.
Stop still. Quiver.
Newts
They come, in spring, by night,
without a sound:
dun-and-silver shadows slipping
between last year’s rotten leaves
when flag-irises shoot yellow arrows,
when mud begins to warm,
when the water’s just right,
when the moon’s in the best quarter….
One morning later, I see
delicate toes splayed on the surface
as they feed, turn, dive, leaving
thin trails of bubbles.
They are acrobats:
quicksilver
in the dark tent
of spring’s fevered lake.
I, Bear
In wilderness silence, I hear you:
your stealth, as—so clumsily—
you swish across the ice.
Man: whatever you think,
this is not your kingdom—
nor your realm to claim—but mine.
Trespass on the northern ice
and you’ll learn my speed:
fast as Boreas—glissando.
You’ll learn my need
of sweetest flesh—watch as I wait
at seals’ tight breathing holes.
You’ll turn to face my patient stalking,
taste the bite of my keen teeth,
the grip of jaws to clamp,
strip you to snow bones.
Then you will know the clutch
of my fierce claws.
I, bear, am sure-footed:
loping,
loping.
I, bear, do not grow weary,
do not grow wet,
and need no water…
do not turn bleary,
do not go blind
in blizzards’ white.
I, bear, need little light
in my ice-bright province
to search you out.
I, bear, can smell my prey
from twenty miles away when I face
into the whetted knives of wind.
Beware, you silky seal,
and humankind unkind:
you are my choicest meal.
I, bear, will search you out.
Tear you. Beware.
Ballagher's focus is on landscapes, both interior and exterior; also on the beauty (and hostility) of the natural world. She has studied in England, Ireland, and the USA; worked in education and publishing, and is now preparing a second volume of poetry. Her poems have appeared in print and online in all corners of the English-speaking world, most recently in Canada. lizzieballagherpoetry@gmail.com
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Pat Winslow
Pheasant in the Frost
You stand
feet hooked to hard tussock
head a dob of jam
on a strip of clotted cream
body a plump oval
of tawny gold.
You peck
half-heartedly and move off
flapping
to keep warm.
Every living thing
knows what it must do.
The pussy willow
is locked in
trees hold fast
to leaf and bud
crows and gulls
scope the land
and you
peck peck peck
until a dog walker
makes you chortle in panic
and rise into a hedge
leaving behind
a fine feather
for a Sunday hat.
Peewits
Because they swung down
like pendulums from east to west
and the straight line of an aeroplane
was anathema to their strategy
because the strategy relied on
swoop, cry, roll and rise again
and their wings were flat
and round as spatulas
because their whoops were electronic
and not small and twittery
and they wore their crests
like exotic hats
because they strutted like grandmothers
looking for china in a car boot sale
and were twitchier than your average twitcher
and hunkered low
because the floodplain glittered with sunshine
and the grass revealed itself
and the river was full of sky
and the mayflies were dancing
and the hawthorn smelt of urinals
but still looked cheerful
and the post van disappeared
over the hill
and the rim of a bicycle wheel gleamed
as it leaned against the hedge
and the wind was gentle
and the air was warm
and they were everywhere.
The Sisters
After Aardvark Groomed by Widows by Leonora Carrington
They come to the golden ark
milk-creatures
yielding to the bosom
the proffered spoon and terracotta bowl
to be brothed in salt and herbs
washed clean.
Snouty gatherers wait their turn.
A calf hangs limp.
There’s an art to the soft wimpled gaze
into nothing.
A nun sweeps the past into enchantment.
All death is magic.
The care of the living must go on –
a thing with wings
a steadying hand on a broad white back
acts of simplicity.
Praise those whose task it is to mend
and send away.
Praise the ministry of ochre
dust and clay.
The Chewing Factory
Slab-heads, great hoofy chunk beasts
hefty-heaving through iron gates to the field.
Their mouths set to work immediately.
A fugue that synchronises like clocks.
Again and again, their muscular tongues
renew the gleam of their nostrils.
Their bodies are huge maps rippling in the sun,
continents and islands straddling white sea.
Hay barn stomachs dance the grass about.
Cuds emerge like tight wads of Kleenex.
All day they stand, their gable ends to the wind,
eyeing the world and magnifying it.
It’s a miracle how grass gets to be so fat,
how sap ends up creamy suds in my blue jug.
To a Pig in Time of Trouble
Do not go to that well-done edge of time,
to the steamy conveyor belt of sliced white
and department store wallets. Keep shovelling
leaves and kitchen parings, up to your shanks
in mucky water, your flanksides wobbling,
your thick skin scumbly with pellety ticks
chasing between the paintbrush hairs.
Stay, setae one! Put your neat trotters
to the ground and dig deep. Be a refusenik.
Who will make mini-tornados of hay
and rattle the gates with its pudding head?
Don't let them chop you into pretty pieces,
my kettle truffler, my bucket skirmisher.
Play dead, lie piggo, run away.
Pat Winslow has published seven collections, most recently, Kissing Bones with Templar Poetry. A winner of several notable competitions over the years, she enjoys commissioned collaborations with film-makers, composers and artists. |
Fiona Perry
Animal within an animal
In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb,
an animal within an animal. Mine wandered around my body
coordinates unknown, a displacement that caused
a tendency to make trouble for others, so relentless efforts
were made to anchor it into a more suitable position;
to stave off licentiousness, to stem the flow of hysterical
suffocation, to convert lasciviousness into maternal care.
Once again, the man downstairs adjusts his tie
in the looking glass. All moustachioed authority and advanced
scientific knowledge, he is here to coax and cajole
that wild beast with fetid and rank smells to the nostrils;
tallow candle when it is blown out, vapour of bird’s
feathers (especially partridge or woodcock), of man’s
hair or goat’s hair, of dead mouseling, of pig trotter, and such like.
But my pet refused to return unto its own place, even
when they lowered my body into a bath of lungwort, juniper,
flea-bane, camphire, and green anise (boiled in water). She shifted
only slightly, pricked her ears, when offered sweet and aromatic
fumigations. Hither and thither, she flailed, so I tore the whalebone
from my belly, mounted my broodmare and galloped away.
In the medical notes, perplexed, they surmised this untameable
creature remains a spinning needle on a compass.
Fiona Perry grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in Oxfordshire. Fiona mines memory, mythology, family stories, allegory, dreams, and most recently, scientific discovery to create poetry and short fiction. Her written work features in print journals including Lighthouse, The Alchemy Spoon, Skylight47, and Into The Void. They also appear online in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Blue Nib, Utopia and Abyss & Apex. She has contributed two poems to the “Poetry Worth Hearing” podcast. Fiona’s first collection of poetry, Alchemy (Turas Press, Dublin), won the Poetry Book Awards (2021) Silver Medal and was shortlisted for the Rubery Prize. Her flash fiction, Sea Change, won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards (2020). |
Roddy Maude-Roxby
Mostly Cat
the cat looks round the door
makes eye contact and retreats
as if he had something to say
without the means to speak
the little female enters now
while I am still in bed
she pushes with her head
my hand responds
her front paws pump my chest
as if expecting milk
she bites at my diary book mark
to catch anything ribbon like
at last or at least she settles now
on the rocking chair to sleep
no use to say ‘Stop it’ to a cat
dogs know words unknown by cats
cats purr of course
dogs use their eyebrows
cats are somewhat like the weather
may be sunny all day
Roddy Maude-Roxby is an actor, painter and poet. |
Eva Wal
The Whale in the Void
The glazing of pain shimmering in a great cold
Peter Huchel
Once my psycho-therapist told me that pain caused by emotions had exactly the same effect on the body as physical pain.
I used to throw away letters of my mother unopened. Ventriloquist letters, taletelling its toxic content. Finally, I banned my mother.
Since I changed my surname, I have received all kinds of whale-gifts, as my chosen name is Whale. I chose it because at that time whales were my saviors in the abyss of dreams.
Today I open my mother’s Christmas present, and another whale appears, freed from his brown paper shell, shimmering on the cover of a book.
This whale is here to fill the chilly, peaceful void the ban had kept open for so many years.
He’s the messenger, the transmitter of my mother’s words; his blow falls over me like a shower of crushed ice. The unrequited love of a mother who never gave birth to a whale.
The hunted, the harpooned, the humiliated, the almost extinguished creature, the feared leviathan, the target.
We are harmless, don’t you see?
Did you know a whale’s skin is as thin as a paper-tissue? Yet it can wear scars like a million interwoven ways of figure-skaters on the vast polar ice.
The whale’s got big fat to store memories, hurts, violation, the unrequited love of a child.
The whale’s body used to be industrially exploited, a reminiscence of the utmost cruelty of war: flesh and bone and blubber turned into gelatin, margarine, make up, lamp- and lubricating oil, soap, fodder, insecticide, nitroglycerine.
It wasn’t his fault.
How the pain rises, grows, spreads, roots, bones, needles, stings, fingering, nailing, teething, biting, bitching, pinching, drilling, moving inside the flesh, cutting it up, never leaving, usurping, numbing the brain, silencing the tongue, swallowing words, gulping guts, looming, smoldering, scolding, freezing, molding, rusty, bloodred, dark, conjuring all colours to buzzing white, glistening, blistering, bursting, yelling, screaming, hoarse, harsh, hush, hush, hush, hush…
Can the size of a fully grown blue whale ever be an exaggeration?
He’s diving deep, ready to forgive, but he never forgets.
She has sunk
She is in the abyssal sea
flawless painless motionless
She is just there
floating in the currents
She comes again, blows fantastic, majestic fountains of water
forever proud and beautiful
A marvel of the ocean, a mammal at home in two worlds or none
Thaw wind sweeps over the traces of figure-skaters
holding each other tight, and the blue whale is my savior again.
I keep the book and send the letter back.
Sylvia Whale
Eva Wal
2023/24
Eva Wal is an visual artist and a poet who lives in Bonn and on the countryside nearby. She published her first poetry pamphlet Marmorsee, marble lake, in 2009. In 2017 she encountered Oxford Stanza 2 poets in Bonn on the occasion of Diana Bell’s art project as part of the Bonn-Oxford twinning. It encouraged her to write in English and woke her interest in English poetry and also in translations. As the result of an ongoing collaboration, she was able to publish the pamphlet Poems In The Hourglass, Gedichte im Stundenglas, with German-English poems in 2022 through the Bonn-Oxford link. Eva runs creative writing workshops for adults at the Arp Museum near Bonn as well as workshops for children and youth. She loves interdisciplinary collaborations with artists around the world and is up to all kind of adventures in art and poetry.
www.evawal-kunstprojekte.blogspot.com
“Whale in the Void” is written in English only.
Sylvia Whale is an alter ego who wrote only this poem. |
Deborah Cox
God’s creature
An odd creature has joined our church
- she has Medusa hair.
Though manicured, she has green skin
- she isn’t quite all there.
At first we thought she was naive
- but now we know her plan.
She wants to turn our men to stone
- but we hold all the stones.
She’ll take you with her eyes, she will
- her feet lead straight to hell.
We’ve studied both her eyes and feet
- they never can keep still.
We killed that character today
with just a look or two;
false sympathy, a prayer request
passed on from pew to pew.
Deborah Cox was born in New York but educated in England where she developed a love of English literature. She graduated from Durham University with a First in the subject and went on to have poetry and essays published before completing her Masters in Film Aesthetics at Oxford University. She then founded Little Ox Press which publishes books written and / or illustrated by children. She is currently working on a second novel and continues to write poetry. Her personal website is DeborahCox.co.uk. |
Stephen Wren
Inside creature
The glass encloses me.
I share tetrahedra
with other particles.
My lap is silicate.
A local order beams
to form a non-crystal.
The glass exhibits me.
My pliancy has tongues
and sounds do detonate.
My face is moving charge.
The world beyond the glass
cannot detect my frame.
The glass unfreezes me.
I try so hard to pose
as one being with heart.
I cry on other motes.
Dr Stephen Paul Wren studied at Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) and worked in industry for many years. He transitioned back into academia at Oxford (St Hilda’s College) before joining Kingston University in 2018 where he works as a Senior lecturer in pharmaceutical chemistry. Stephen's poetry can be read at www.stephenpaulwren.wixsite.com/luke12poetry and you can find him on Twitter @Stephen34343631. His book ‘Formulations’ (co-written with Dr Miranda Lynn Barnes) was published by Small Press in 2022. His book 'A celestial crown of Sonnets' (co-written with Dr Sam Illingworth) was published by Penteract Press in 2021. Also, Stephen's poetry has appeared in places such as 14 magazine, Marble Broadsheet, Consilience, Green Ink Poetry, Tears in the Fence, Fragmented Voices, and Dreich magazine. |
Caroline Jackson-Houlston
MAY DAY BANK HOLIDAY, PORT MEADOW, 2020
A Robin-photographer interchange
Climate change cancelled all my Christmas gigs.
You know the stuff—snow-covered holly twigs
Topped with a Robin—that’s my classic pose.
No work last winter, due to lack of snows.
May is usually the ‘Cute Nestlings’ spot.
With 60 kph of gale, it’s not.
With every worm and insect out of sight,
How come I’m here up to my knees in white?
Because it’s not snowflakes, it’s hawthorn flowers.
It’s just tree-dandruff coming down in showers.
You’ve a bright notion for a piquant shot?
Stand on that lily pad? No, I will not.
Because they’re the monopoly of frogs.
The industry is going to the dogs—
Hard-line Nature Equity’s union rules:
No frogs on holly, no robins in pools,
Even on May-confettied lily leaves.
Don’t get me started. You would not believe
The intellectual property and patent
Jungle out there. It’s nothing but a blatant
Suppression of the artiste’s right to choose,
By multinationals; protest is no use.
The bright side’s double rates for videos.
They forecast snow; it’s cold enough, God knows.
Quick, there’s a jogger coming. Take your snap:
Two profiles, one head-on. Call that a wrap!
TO A MOUSE, ON TURNING IT OUT OF ITS NEST IN THE DARIOLE MOULDS
‘It’s got to go!’
The mouse is living in the oven,
in the plate-warmer, with the cake tins.
We tried violence last time.
My husband cornered the previous one with an air rifle
in the open country of the lowest bookshelf
between the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
and the plug sockets.
It faced him down.
Three inches of teenage woodmouse
triggered
paralysing existential guilt
long enough for a dash to P. G. Wodehouse
and a vanishing act.
So, this time it was the live trap, then
decanting you into the small-pet carrier,
shivering at the relentless light
the incomprehensible all-round air
of the perspex walls.
We let you out two miles away, in a lay-by,
with berrying trees,
and six foot of dry ditch,
and even a waste bin.
Was this a bracing freedom from enclosure
or an extreme rendition, handing you over
to chill deracination, like a tiny John Clare?
'Hello, I’m Caroline Jackson-Houlston. As an eco-poet, most of my writing is about the relations between the natural world and the now rather less natural human beings that share it. I frequently use dramatic monologues to construct different, though necessarily artificial, viewpoints. These pieces are from projected collections. The first is likely to be part of an illustrated pamphlet based on the prompts for a day at a science fair encouraging children to write about nature. The second comes from a fully drafted but as yet unpublished book, 50% Banana.' |
Corinna Board
Cowrie
Under the egg-smooth dome,
a pair of serrated lips –
a mollusc portcullis protecting
your long-gone tenant.
You sat on Nan’s top shelf;
crouching tiger, empty husk,
too precious to play with.
I remember how it felt to touch
you – the electric thrill as I ran
my fingers over your knife-edge
opening, pressed your coolness
to my cheek, tried to understand
how you could hold an ocean.
Brown-banded carder bee
I scoop it up with a leaf in case it isn’t dead.
Its wings are skew-whiff, sugar glass-brittle,
body curled into a question mark, coated
in russet fuzz. I explore its mechanics
with a pencil tip – the impossible ratio
of abdomen to wing, eyes bright little pins,
antennae a Dali moustache.
If you had never seen a bee, it might seem
otherworldly: an alien life-form or a
minuscule spaceship, crashed on the grass.
But it’s a dead bumblebee, nothing on Earth
can jumpstart its stalled machinery.
Silverfish
If the moon were a creature,
she would be you.
Waning crescent,
quicker than mercury.
Midnight dancer,
dusting fingertips with constellations
of precious metal.
Little fish,
sliver of shimmer,
floorboard swimmer.
You show off your silver
then disappear.
Just like her.
Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in Oxford. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. She particularly enjoys exploring our connection to the more-than-human. Her work has appeared in various journals, and she was recently commended in the Verve Eco-poetry competition. Arboreal, her debut pamphlet, was published in January. Find her on Instagram @parole_de_reveuse or X/Twitter @CorinnaBoard. |
Richard Lister
Richard Lister draws you into stories of intriguing characters, images and places. In his recent collection, Edge & Cusp, his poems ‘capture life like a vibrant painting’ with ‘fiercely original descriptions’ and so provide ‘a truly beautiful collection that will leave you changed.’ Richard enjoys enabling people to further develop their poetry through running engaging and creative workshops. These include Whetting the Appetite; Weaving the Strands: Using Research and Lines of Thought and Resonance: powerful last lines’. An active Mole Valley Poet, his work is published in twelve international magazines including Acumen, Orbis and Ekphrastic Review and is carved into the Radius sculpture. He’s lived and worked across the UK, in Cambodia during a civil war and in Malawi: ‘The Warm Heart’ of southern Africa. Contact richardnwlister@gmail.com 07484100450. |
That concludes this episode of Poetry Worth Hearing. You can listen to it on https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-21-e2g692v
Please listen and share. Comments or submissions for future episodes should be sent to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com. Submissions should be a recording of not than 4 minutes of unpublished poems with texts and a short author bio.