News

One of the editors is just back from the Hay Jamboree, featuring (in no particular order, but all were excellent)

Geraldine Monk
Alan Halsey
Elisabeth Bletsoe
Caroline Bergvall
Scott Thurston
Phil Maillard
Zoë Skoulding
Anthony Mellors
Richard Gwyn
John Goodby
Claudia Azzola
Jean Portante

And lots more! Was an amazing few days, though couldn't get to everything, but will be writing up responses shortly.

Meanwhile...

- The Bath Spa Reading Series continues this week with David Morley, 8pm at the BRLSI.

- Penned in the Margins announce a new 'box format' limited edition of Simon Barraclough's Bonjour Tetris.

- The 2010 Voiceworks Concert is now online, in case you missed the live stream.

- The University of Greenwich is running the Cross-Genre Festival from Wednesday 14th-Friday 16th July 2010. Line-up looks astonishingly good!

- Probably there's lots more to say, but as a round off, to save the other editor the embarrassment of committing the 8th Deadly Sin, his new book, Difficult Second Album, is out from Nine Arches Press, as is Milorad Krystanovich's Improvising Memory. Two beautifully designed, bolshy publications.

- Oh wait, just remembered, at risk of committing aforementioned sin myself, Polarity Magazine UK, eggspawn of the New Surrealism, will be launching in London at 6pm, Sunday 27th June, at The Slaughtered Lamb.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (9)

Twite

[song]



Fat trills, buzz-notes, electric twitters.
The hedgerow shred from inside by scissors.
This one moving eye to watch us while we
scaled the five stiles from the Wye to Hoarwithy.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (8)

Great Tits

[song]



high wire acrobats
of our bird feeder’s
three ring circus

clingers   climbers
ringers    rhymers

they call for teachers
for teachers

& have nothing
to learn

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (7)

Willow Tit

[song]



black cap
                  & black bib
world’s eye
                  on the wold
skids sideways
                  skywards
brightest ear
                  of the wood
listening
                  in zigzags
sounding
                  the twigs’
precision
                  xylophones

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (6)

Greenfinches
‘greenness a thousand times more green’
      —Dorothy Wordsworth

[song]



Now they are precision
      instruments
      for opening seed hearts.

Now they are jade lanterns
      on a bough -
      sweet-hearts and pair-bonds.

Now they are emerald
      lamps lit
      over the bird feeder.

Now they lime-light the branches,
      bright
      pears or goosegogs.

No green more greener
      nor no finch
      more finchier.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (5)

Dunnock

[song]



Trust the plainest of birds
with the sweetest calls

to carry them under cover
lest they fall into the claws

of a hoopoe or golden plover.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (4)

Chaffinch

[song]



whose call
(according to Bill Oddie)
is as a cricketer bustling up to bowl
who hurtles to the crease
then releases

                                    the
                                    ball

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (3)

Wren

[song]



        that
                ratt-

                                ling

                                        hedge
                                has   a heart
        the coppery heart—
                                        beat of bushes from
which
                                                it  bursts  the
smallest

                        god-

                send

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (2)

Long-Tailed Tit

[song]



          A nursery ball
        with a bell inside
    blown through branches
      —a bauble with a tail
         peals in its nest-
          bell of lichen.

David Morley - Painted in Nest Boxes: Bird Poems (1)

Earshot

Were it not for the slight upended
twite suspended below that lancing spray
of elder blossom then the light that slid
through my eye last night, that told
the twite’s call within an ear of my eye
might well, might not, might never, be remembered.

==========

David Morley directs the Warwick Writing Programme. He has published more books and won more prizes than we could possibly list here, but his poetry collections include Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings (both with Carcanet), whilst in 2007 he wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Gists and Piths will be serialising more of his bird-poems over the next few days as part of our Midlands poetry season.