Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023/24 (96) i Oxford Poetry

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…

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…

Instead there was sunlight on split wood storm had felled, had pried apart for morning to reveal the inner grain, lit as if from within, like the false appearance of warmth reflected in a cold copper vase. Being shattered, in a field, near water, again without desire, the mind still thinks in terms of vessels, what it's possible to hold, to love, where love is always emptier, an expanding and refining of desire that makes it thinner, airier, a sphere of chrome I once saw hanging from the apse at Karlskirche, and climbed the scaffolding to study angels painted in foreshortened figuration on the flaking plaster. Even mid-air there was structure: ladders, handrails, shrouds of drop-cloth, planks of wood milled for some other function, then repurposed to support the craftsmen…

In Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Buffaloes) there are four of them. The one already falling is the first to be noticed. Suspended upside down in photographic time it would be easy to invoke Bruegel's Icarus or a newborn grabbed by its legs and lifted. Stooped on the cliff's unforgiving decline the second buffalo accelerates against its will. Its centre of mass hurls its hull past the limits of balance. Buffalo number three and four know what is bound to happen. Because buffaloes are larger than us their fear is magnified to match. Why are you sad the cliff asks the viewer. This happens all the time so why are you sad. The cliff does not understand the gravity of the situation. The photo is angry at the cliff for its ignorance and…

‘There is plenty time to be bald, plenty time hands type to bind.’ + Well, what else could we've been speaking in? It is true you are feeding off of me, also, here, at this chest of mine, so very small. There's notification, you said, of seemingly highly successful attempts at Aufklärung. Could it be you to leave such sharp, leading lines when they so particularly with you in mind were made? I do think so. For a very long time, you have had this Rucksack. + We called at Liège, we called at your boyfriend's we still wrote poems we still had small sandwiches listening, to blues. + Do you actually believe this? Even when you hear yourself, feedbackless, stretched very thin across very large bodies of water? I…

for twenty years the incandescent pill of the sun thwarting the blue-lipped horizon while I remained the warmest clock for kilometres last winter was so quiet I heard even the second stomach of an ant moaning for a litany of sugar without libido god is now an atlas of hoarfrost across a window my mind grazes on the other side of green like an animal I once saw bent over the bright cathedral of a carcass sipping from the mirror of its own thirst I remember holding out a hand with such tenderness I almost reached through myself…

I have been told by a physicist with a care for language that scientific theories aren't disproved so much as refined by new ones, so Einstein's map doesn't cancel Newton's – it focuses it, and that is all that science ever works toward: shrinking the universal so our world expands in nuance. So when a poet says of another poet, who is known to have carefully trapped house mice in a bag, then carried them several miles out of town to release them safely, this proves how gentle he was, using a verb which signals conclusive evidence, it blind-spots a human tendency for frame-of-reference bias, or, as my physicist friend would say, with corrections – this proves how gentle he was, to mice. Which is easy to miss if you haven't…

LOVERS An elf distils a very ancient moonlight drop by drop into a delicate funnel-shaped flower (the small wrought-iron lantern of a firefly hangs from his belt where a green small light mildews) then two new lovers drink it sensually greedily on a marble balcony by the sea in the double, long goblet of a kiss. AMANTI Uno gnomo distilla goccia a goccia in un diafano fiore a imbuto (gli pende alla cintura il lanternino di ferro battuto d'una lucciola in cui funghisce un verde lumicino) un antichissimo chiaro di luna, che due primi amanti su un terrazzo di marmo in riva al mare bevono voluttuosamente golosamente nel doppio e lungo calice d'un bacio.…

JOHN ARNOLD is a retired town planner who lives in Suffolk. His poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and broadcast on BBC radio. CHAUN BALLARD is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner and Terrain.org. His chapbook, Flight, was the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in various literary journals. JOE CARRICK-VARTY is a British-Irish poet, writer, and founding editor of bath magg. His debut collection, More Sky (Carcanet, 2023), is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. DEREK CHAN is an MFA candidate, lecturer, and university fellow at Cornell University. He received the 2023 Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, and his poems appear in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Meanjin, Cordite, The…

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…

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…

A lonely kid at Locke Elementary folded her letter and sent it. The only reply was a red-tailed hawk crying, and disinfectant sprayed in a hallway. Soon, a pile of plastic dolls sat on the steps of the fire department. A button was found inside a balloon. No one knew what it meant. In the hall by Principal Bishop's office children marched in an oblong ring. They demanded modular wooden blocks and working low-rise sinks. They demanded to see inside of things like peach pits, prisons, turbines, and the moon. A worm appeared. Nobody screamed. They poked with a stick at a dead raccoon because they felt like it!…

A song in a field is worth the same as a song in a church. & I've tithed in both. &, at the age of six, I Considered the lilies of the meadows the same as the meadow larks. & sunset, for me as a child, was Heaven held in a gold tooth. How I do marvel at the way life greets us in the sliver of a thing. Born Arrested is not the same as born under a restful night's sleep. I desire my country-count-of-sheep by Name & not by number. I wished to exit this earth glorious as perennials in spring: an encore in the Garden which calls me back. A little dirt hurts nothin’. Nor do the roots of the Mississippi River Envy the windows to which…

1. A ROAD NEAR A POOL the scene suicide creates is entirely fictional and carefully constructed to lead our eye around the room the sloping mountains unfold to the pointing girl who draws us to the edge of a wide pool where the person naked and shivering kneels to drink sometime soon you will smell morning and a parent will arrive with clean clothes in a duffle bag yes there will be sky but no sign of rain the land will crack but not here not now stand with me and look at your life watch it appear entirely accidental the yellow pigment which once made the leaves green disappeared over time 2. VASE WITH FLOWERS this bouquet could never have existed suicide worked on the arrangement over many months…

So what if the mountains are approaching, if your lines need to be revised. Your nose still dances through meadows of dust your pen unburies. In the ever-inflating economy of souls, the libido of your genius is both supply and demand – you have taught the sun to gyrate with the perspicacious suppleness of a Gogo dancer while you shed skin cells like dollar bills. The one who floats above your inner oculus – in a glass hearse carried on the shoulders of butterflies – is whispering, Never capitulate – do not be a mountain when you are an avalanche. You are both the mountain and what breaks it apart. You are the contradiction of force repulsed by your attraction to my repulsion to your attractiveness. What mountain enters you…

Here, yellow stars rise above other denizens Of disturbed spaces open to the sun till noon when, Like Lear's Fool, they go to bed but, unlike him, rise Next day, and next, and the beat goes on till seedtime When off they float into another year, light bursting Through them, in and out, while all around recreates itself In the cloak of seasons, and out I go again, further this time, I don't know where, it almost feels sinful having no purpose, Naturalised nowhere and everywhere as I ease through Other wordless brilliances that look like fruit, knock Against globes of fleshly flashes, brush against blooms That poke through lushness, so eloquent you want to eat them, So quiet they've made the weather quiet too, here where I pull in…

Because the rhino hasn't adopted the small muscle responsible for puppy dog eyes, the species goes bankrupt – its regional stores close down. How are we to survive this difficult climate of you being so very uninterested in me? When you turn away in bed, all I can do is baby the pitch of my voice. The body's an amazing thing. Instinctively rebranding itself to keep, if not increase, your investment, the bear became a toy bear – later a cartoon of the toy. It's key to discover a need nobody knows that they have. In the dark, I tug on your sleeve.…

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…

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…

I mistook so many things that year, every morning felt as unmade as a motel bed. A boy waving a miniature flag along a parade route turned out to be a box of blue pool noodles in the Target shopping aisle, and what I thought was the pope in his bullet-proof popemobile was merely a Snoopy snow globe. Half a year had passed since I'd started chemo and it was Christmas already. I sat in my sister's car outside the hospital looking at a baby's ankles poking out of pink socks but they were just bare branches shining in the sunset. A ceramic pitcher of orange Kool-Aid was just a toilet bowl full of rust-coloured urine, and after relieving my stained kidneys, I stood to see an old bald man…

When they tested my DNA sample for the purposes of exclusion the lab called them to say I was a quail. The family liaison officer asked me if I would like to come in to be retested and to show the forensic geneticist that I was in fact a woman. I responded that I was wintering in Africa and southern India. Well, when could I come in, she wanted to know, but even when flushed, I keep low and soon drop back to cover, so I said it was too early to tell and anyway, couldn't she tell the forensic geneticist herself that I was a woman? She replied that she had tried this but that the forensic geneticist had said his results were conclusive that the specimen he had…

Yes I distrust them but somewhere in the post-divorce half-lights, I did ask for one and later that afternoon a jay like a bottle rocket launched itself into my bedroom window and fell on the letterbox. I searched the www for what to do, learned how to leave it alone and thought I had saved it when it flew into our one tree – back to nature! I said to my daughter when I showed her after school to cheer her up. It's looking quite dead, there on the branch, she said, and during the night a drunk woman crashed into our parked car and mashed it to a pulp. In the early morning I found half a pigeon wing under the windscreen wiper. I thought this God business is…

the way i enter this poem, is the way i exit this page. black. & misunderstood. have i left my first love only to return with a ‘68 excalibur, with its mahoganyearthen-face – so my people may rest their feet without damagin’ the wood? song-seeker, here i am again, celebrating life as if a parade. we – may i say, ‘we’? – only occasion what we have survived since birth. dr. bland, save the guitar's strings. nina, i'm gon’ need you to sing along. aretha, would you please be my nurse? i'm a neighborhood away from bein’ rebo'n. all this stompin’. folks turnin’ their rustlin’ eternity into hollow graves. i can hear that. the sound of muddy waters. & may. the beat of black soil. we sowin’ somethin’ good. i…

Deep up in the winds of Northern Michigan we sat in a circle around a man with a stick of weed in his mouth, like black mamas with cigarettes hanging from their lips in night gowns standing outside room doors cursing their children for not taking the trash to the trash can. I'm black, so just assume I was alone. In the circle around him, we passed each other our poems – some would say we passed around our chitterlings – mine were the youngest. Some of them rhymed about how poplar trees and climate change are friends of rivers the Wright brothers first flew over, looking down from the plane thinking, I know of a group of people who can't swim in there or fly in here. It was…