The Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes 2007

Summer School 2012

The 8th Tower Poetry Summer School for young poets aged 18-23 will be held in Christ Church, Oxford from 28-31 August 2012. The tutors will be Alan Gillis (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kevin Young (Emory University, Atlanta, USA).

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Poetry Matters

Poetry Matters is an exciting on-line poetry magazine which provides a fresh, dynamic perspective on poetry issues through a mix of news, reviews and comment.

Jo Shapcott

Jo Shapcott’s first book of poetry, Electroplating the Baby, won a Commonwealth Prize, and her third, My Life Asleep, won the Forward Prize. Her selected poems, Her Book, were published in 2000. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle and the University of Arts, London, and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Magnificat Antiphons

for the Presteigne Festival

Two choirs singing at and for each other
and us. The sound is dense. We are solid with it:
it knows us like sonar. But that's later.

In the beginning, somewhere near the first, tall notes,
a small plane buzzes the church and carries off
D minor in the texture of its engine drone.

Then the church bell strikes the quarter hour and
its tintinnabulations pass into the bodies
of the singers, are absorbed, then heard again

through their mouths. A child laughs outside.
How far can a magnificat travel? It's curling round
these hills. The audience chatters in C and forgets.

We head for our cars which will hum in a variety
of keys as we head home wondering what the words are.

(This poem was written as a commission for BBC Radio 3.)

Francine Stock

(Photo: BBC)

Francine Stock is a novelist, journalist and broadcaster. She read Modern Languages at Oxford and then worked on magazines and newspapers. Her work for the BBC spans a wide range of television programmes, including Newsnight. For BBC Radio, she presented Radio 4’s weekday arts programme Front Row for six years, and currently fronts The Film Programme. Her novels include A Foreign Country (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award) and Man-made Fibre. She has judged many arts prizes, among them the Booker and National Short Story Prize. Since 2005, she has been chair of Tate Members for all four Tate museums.

Peter McDonald

Biography, poems and criticism

About Tower Poetry

Tower Poetry exists to encourage and challenge everyone who reads or writes poetry. Funded by a generous bequest to Christ Church, Oxford, by the late Christopher Tower, the aims of Tower Poetry are clear: to stimulate an enjoyment and critical appreciation of poetry, particularly among young people in education, and to challenge people to write their own poetry. Creative writing should be a central element in literary education, and learning about writing poetry can help students to think about ways of reading poetry.

Publications

The Twelve:

Poems from the 7th Tower Poetry Summer School 2010
Edited by Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott
The Twelve contains 56 poems from the 12 young poets who attended the Summer School.