All posts filed under: Small Books

A celebration of women’s poetry for International Women’s Day 2017

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Featured image from “The Infinite Body Of Sensation” by Salma Caller   Salma Ahmad Caller is an artist and a hybrid of cultures and faiths. She is drawn to hybrid and ornamental forms, and to how the body expresses itself in the mind to create an embodied ‘image’. UK based, she was born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. With a background in art history and theory, medicine and pharmacology, and several years teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing via non-Western artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, she now works as an independent artist and teacher. salma caller artists statement [PDF] “In the Glass Coffin” by Kim Myeong-sun Today, I withstood agony again, Because my life is still lingering, Trapped in scarcely visible sorrow. If my body is trapped Like the life of a dinky, dinky thing, What is with all this sorrow, this pain? Like the bygone prince, Who had loved the forbidden woman, I believed I would live if I danced in the …

“The Infinite Body of Sensation”; Visual poetry by Salma Caller

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Sound is a shell Sound is a shell An ear Curves of sound Vibrating and condensing air Echoes in a curved space An ocean in the shell of sound Pearls Things that stand in for other things The Witches Pouches Bags of velvet black Nets entangling objects Bones of birds The insides of shells Spells Pearls Things that stand in for other things Nets entangling objects Bones of birds The insides of shells Black Lace Turn this talk into a tale A small dark textured cloth Shadows with shades of velvet Borders and edges tactile Spaces glittering and ornate An elaborate intertwining language Of touching A complex dance of bodies Claustrophobic close Obscure ornate organs Lying in a dark net of black stuffs Needles like obsidian beaks Braiding sound into A florid calligraphy of sensations Rose Point Point de Neige Gros Point Punto in aria Lying in a dark net of black stuffs Needles like obsidian beaks Braiding sound into A florid calligraphy of sensations Rose Rose coloured lips swirling around a dark spot Tasting …

Dowsing/ RABDOMANTICA – by Daniela Raimondi

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Dowsing/ RABDOMANTICA & other poems is © Daniela Raimondi, the english translations are © Anamaría Crowe Serrano DOWSING   Mother pregnant with rain. Mother of virgin sounds, with music in your marrow and the chirping of a bird in your mouth. Mother sewing and unsewing the waters and the tides holding between your teeth the source of all rivers, the alphabet that gushes on the tongues of poets and leaves damp traces, the imprint of a lamb wet from birth. Mother of the dark-dark Mother of the black-black night. Moved by a primitive thirst, the same need to flee from light that pushes the hare deep into the scrub. Touch me with your clear fingers oil my lips with your blind love. Like a heavenly valley where only light falls. Your blue within another blue, the intense azure breath of your sky.   RABDOMANTICA   Madre pregna di pioggia. Madre di suoni vergini, con un midollo di musica e sulla bocca il gorgheggio di un uccello. Madre che cuci e scuci le acque e le …

“Iago’s Curse” and other poems by Liza McAlister Williams

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September Tenth, 2001   Outside the store, at the sidewalk sale, the breeze lifts each dress again as the shop girl tries to smoothen them: musses the chic brown challis pleats, ruffles the flamestitch voile whose turquoise and chartreuse V’s seem borrowed from another day. Sun, when it shines on this scene, is playful, peeping between steely clouds whose sky business does not admit playfulness. The baking, lazy summer’s over – the long summer when the towers that are about to fall amidst us in ruins have so far felt and withstood only the earliest tremors of their collapse.   Serenade (after Kevin Young) Rain popping on the air conditioner like hail on a tin roof like a handful of pebbles against a window like the pinging of a car engine cooling off – you can make a story to explain being alone again on a drenching night: a hobo curled in the hay of another anonymous barn a virgin with cold feet ignoring the signal to elope a travelling salesman out of gas in …

‘The Last Fire’ and other Poems by Helen Harrison

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CROSSROADS   Nineteen forty-five was like that Free-wheeling to the crossroads; Fifteen miles later; her own birth-place; Travelling was the best part, the wind at her back, A greeting ahead. News from home….   Roaming the familiar lanes, sisters Continuous chatter; away from the Clatter of feeding hungry hens, pigs and Cows. She could roam without children, For a day: To pause for some rest.   A small slip of time away from the chores That shaped her life. No sooner had the Ceili begun, it was time for the door: among Promises to write, feeling satisfied to have rested Those tired limbs. She’d set off, her frame;   Feeling heavier, cycling up hills, the thrill Of the annual visit finished; her spirit slightly Diminished, yet younger. She’d relay through letters, How when she got back to the crossroads….the First thing she’d hear; to spoil her wonder   Were her pigs squealing with the hunger..   PASSING SUNSETS   Evening, and there is nothing To tempt me indoors.   Warmed from a day spent in …