Ink Sweat & Tears Press is very pleased to be able to launch the winning pamphlets from the 2014 Café Writers Commission Competition tonight at Take 5 in Norwich. During the course of the competition Jay Bernard and Jonathan Morley emerged as two fine poets whose poems and proposals complemented each other superbly. Each of them chose to look at characters forgotten from mythology and/or history and then to take that theme even further to explore the notion of identity. For more information please go to our Shop IS&T Press page.
Jay and Jon will be supported by the Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Writing Scholar (MA) for 2015/2016: Joanna Hollins.
Jay Bernard: The Red and Yellow Nothing
VII – A Dark Interlude: in which Darkness herself comes across Morien’s dreaming body and is like woah. The dark waxes wan, the dark waxes red. Light is emitted from things that are dead:
Every eye in the forest
has slipped into the gutter
of the face. The world is
changing hands: waking
and falling swap rings.
Morien’s body speaks to
the thin high black he
sleeps in. For many years
this black has sat and
spoken with badger
stripes, caves, prehistoric
cockatoos, but never a Morien.
Black hands, rhino grey
black arms and chest
downed with black hairs
sprung tight into coils.
His palms, the soles
of his feet are black and
so is the inside of his mouth,
all besides his eyes and teeth.
Morning darkness talks
with this body as whales
sing in the deep. Morien’s
tone is like a voice black
thought she heard carried
on the silent lightless
current in her head.
She can’t get enough. Bounces the sounds
of the world before the sun, and, wow,
he can actually bounce it back.
Jonathan Morley: Euclid’s Harmonics
Maiden in the Map
Here’s the place. Stand still. She is not hard to find:
Speed has spread a lacework of lanes over
the Amazon curves of my lover, who turns on waking.
Her legs are crossed at White Fryers,
her hip rests on Grayfriars Gate
and the wall at Gosford Streete runs
a hand along her ass; she slackens
Fleete Streete’s leather bond
strapping one breast to a necklace of rivers
saying St Michael’s is her navel
but a School throngs at her heart—
and reclines below me on a throw of the Chilesmore meadows
where I am dizzy as the samphire gatherer hanging
with basket to a chalk cliff, the folio not yet printed.