Oxford Poetry Winter 2023/24 (96)

No editor today is worth their salt until they've written an editorial about that major technological breakthrough of our age, whose impact is already shaping the way we think and write. I am of course talking about the Golden Shovel poetic form, two fine examples of which are offered by Chaun Ballard in this issue of Oxford Poetry. The form's invention is attributed to Terrance Hayes, whose poem ‘The Golden Shovel’ is published in his 2010 collection Lighthead, though the form – essentially a combination of quotation and telestich – has a rich historical genealogy (Dick Higgins's Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature is a great place to do this sort of historical digging). Nevertheless, Hayes crystallised a possibility to its purest expression when he took Gwendolyn Brooks's poem…

Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize, judged by Will Harris. The three winning poems are published in this issue. Below, Harris offers a brief appreciation of each poem. FIRST PLACE: Miruna Fulgeanu, ‘Esmerine’ (page 11). ‘A beautiful, pained poem whose elegiac “she” hovers throughout, unresolved, an object that can't be digested. The poet describes the gap in the maternal relationship so acutely that, in doing so, they hold up language itself to the light. “Esmerine” manages to be heartfelt and self-aware, examining the flawed construction of poetic images and finding in them – for all they might be wanting – the raw potential for consolation.’ SECOND PLACE: Jo Davis, ‘Last Tuesday’ (page 38). ‘It's so hard to be funny in a poem. There's always the question…

Most people go in and leave unchanged, whereas if I walk into the deep woods, she disappears. Still, I stand by the purple azaleas and talk as though she can hear: As a child, I was only kind to my dolls for fear of their inevitable insurrection. She likes me – sometimes leaves up-rooted moss in the shape of a mother for me to find at the field's edge. I have said ‘tree’ or ‘moon’ for ‘person’, but it's no use having people stand in for people. Once I wanted to confess, I have been in a bad, sad orbit, but I knew she had been the whole badsad since the beginning. I have already said everything I could choose to say. Like the cheek flattened against a window peering…

Are you there on the other side of the snow? It snowed the day you broke it off and even though the girls and I made snow caves, and tried the cold against our hearts, and traced new windows on old cars, I felt stuck in someone's wheeze for months. Now gusts look like punching the air, flakes so far apart the background might make a come-back while the foreground holds the door and asks where do I go – go – go – a gift of things so light it looks like your kind of giving. And what was I thinking it seems to say as two land on my cheek and fade? I used to wish for a room for you – cool, mostly blue stone, and blown…

At the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the trees were black. The grove of seared branches made me think I was still in bed with my face in my hands. When he joined me that week, Italy seemed louder, the moon cast shadows. Sharing insalata di polpo on that terrace in Sorrento, I forgot how to swallow. Meanwhile, boys in Amalfi drew nets of redfish. Men hacked trees while I peeled oranges, watched my fingers bleed. What if I had fallen on that rock like he thought I would? Or was it that he proposed it & didn't worry, or that he assumed my losing my footing was inevitable – the descent was beyond me? So often I thought I was at risk for something I could not control. Vesuvius, for…

Sometimes ache isn't anything towards or from. Sometimes you hold a stone so bruisable the evening lake cannot believe its own blue. I'm thinking of the times we sat on the deck staring at masses of goldenrod, the way colour stands inside colour, all of it dying, all of it opening. It's enough for desire to wear the lone mask of a cloud waiting for a darkness thick enough to burn. Imagine never tasting a story about the boiling ocean. All the fish of the late world singing like angels. For wings which begin and end as water. I mourn you now despite not knowing who I am. I mourn this moment despite standing in the future where there is already too much light to ignore. All my shadows cementing…