"Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad" in The Forward Book of Poetry 2015

On my return from Illinois last week, I found The Forward Book of Poetry 2015 and my poem, "Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad," among the Highly Commended Poems. It seems to me that there's more range in this edition of the Forward anthology, with the likes of Andrea Brady, Lee Harwood, Marianne Morris and Denise Riley alongside such usual suspects as David Harsent, Andrew Motion and Hugo Williams. I may have to take it with me on the train to Norwich today....

Current Issues

When I returned from Oxford yesterday, I had a happily large stack of post waiting, and this book was the most exciting piece. Last year, working with co-editor Jeremy Noel-Tod, I composed six entries for this new edition of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry: Andrea Brady, Forrest Gander, Laura Kasischke, Tim Liardet, Frances Presley and Catherine Wagner. Summing up a career and describing a probably evolving poetic style (as all these authors are alive and wonderfully active) in a few hundred words proved more arduous and time-consuming than I anticipated. At the same time, I enjoyed improving my knowledge and understanding of their work. 

The experience of writing the entries also gave me one of my most rewarding exchanges with an editor. Noel-Tod provided an ideal balance of guidance and leeway (for lack of the better word escaping me), and while I expect editing such a large work with so many entries and contributors will dissuade him from any more editing for a while, I hope another, perhaps smaller opportunity to work together in this capacity will come again sometime. 

I think I've been put off from doing many of these 'Current Issues' entries by people posting news of their acceptances for publication on Facebook. I understand so well the excitement and pleasure such an acceptance brings and often feel the impulse myself to make such posts, but I feel uneasy with self-promotion that I force on people's notice. Here on the blog, I figure only those interested will come by to read what I'm up to, but even so, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. *sigh*

So I'll thank the editors of Ambit, Molly Bloom, New Walk, Poetry Wales and Shearsman for their support of my work by choosing poems of mine to appear in future issues. I'm most grateful.

I Don't Call Myself a Poet: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Living & Working in Britain

As part of her teaching at the University of Middlesex, Sophie Mayer has done a wonderful thing, creating a compendium of interviews with a wide range of UK poets, including, happily, myself. It includes Andrea Brady, Vahni Capildeo, Mimi Khalvati, John Kinsella, Ira Lightman, Chris McCabe, Daljit Nagra, Shazea Quraishi and Jane Yeh--and many more! Apparently the 68 interviews are just the beginning, with more forthcoming. It looks to become a valuable resource for readers and students alike.

The Other Room Anthology 4

The splendid poetry reading series in Manchester, The Other Room, publishes an annual anthology of its readers. I read there in April last year in the good company of Ken Edwards, Alec Finlay and by video link Derek Henderson, and with the year of readers in the anthology, the company increases to include Tim Allen, Andrea Brady, Alan Halsey, Colin Herd, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Geraldine Monk, and Philip Terry, among others. Visit this page at The Other Room's website to purchase your own copy. 


Thanks to series curators James Davies, Tom Jenks, and Scott Thurston both for the invitation to the original reading and the impressive anthology. 

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 7: Andrea Brady's "Still Hanging on Clinton's Second Visit"

Still Hanging on Clinton's Second Visit

Hope for running out on the flats, under

the overpass that chutes this abstract

into bread home delivery, buckled up

from your front porch to my front seat.

The hyphenated bridge lane where motor

boards a dream of expansive happiness,

dinosaurs trapped in oil pits, a future

to run into red and green eyes

and out till no man's land. Past the refinery

into outlaw verde, unowned hydrotropic

life unclinched by regularity, ownership,

by a loss that has never happened: one of the

kinds of possible losses. You sang this

national anthem, your life parenthesized

by flight into cinema and depiction:

the sun sets orangely, tempers cool

the boss goes nowhere and the land,

lived from, bossily patriotic. Your name

retrieved from the web, the collocation

with the smash given to know

the unknown, blood furls gradually

from the heads and is never less

parenthetical. Texts still bundled

in your pocket switch to discreet mode, rings

engage the natural world in decoration.

Above the concrete marshes, the stars

can't make their empty lines believable.

Stars to shadow by, chase out of manhattan

where that marsh is brown and the old worlds

creep around on stilts with eeling baskets.

Banality will never be obsolete, like the internal

combustion engine: even the tracks

of unbroken yellow too fleet for

the escape artist, a mimic pile-up loops

in place of persons, in a question of sovereignty.

No place unmandated, no stretch without

the service stations marked in bold on the route planner.

These four lanes a horn of plenty blow out at night

the endless hunting lament, a fictional

surplus for continents learning to recognise their bounds.

In the outlaw west the wedding party tips

their guns into starlight glasses, fill space

with pellets to celebrate the belly's axle; fire

falling down burns a noose free, ash and sand

to put fires out and secure a slipless exit. Was this

really what you wanted, to splurge on a rider

the whole real an advert break? Do go on so,

then breath undeterred in the breakbeat meter,

singing for freedom to misuse national space:

the free ride which is no freedom

when at the edge of disaster

you find yourself in the back seat of the patrol car,

the reel catapults into pitch black, and over all of us

who still live the stars

crash down from their heroic outlines

into vacancy

Andrea Brady

The anthology is out now and can be ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.