Summer School 2010

The 7th Tower Poetry Summer School (24-27 August) for young poets aged 18-23 will be held in Christ Church Oxford.

 

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Competition 2010

The Christopher Tower Poetry Competition, the UK's most valuable prize for young poets, is once again open for entries, and this year students between 16-18 years of age are challenged to write a poem on the theme of 'Promises'

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Tower Poetry,
Christ Church,
Oxford, OX1 1DP
Tel: 01865 286591
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Poems from the Tower Summer School 2005 - Amulet

Hamid Khanbhai

AMULET

Give me my scallop shell of quiet
Sir Walter Raleigh, His Pilgrimage

And who would have blamed us,
playing here as children
when the shells tinkled like saucers
and the sea grinned in the wind’s fable.

Years later I saw the bone in the cups;
and now, cracked out of boyhood,
this fluted lineaments, smashed
to a mineral grasp.

I stand on splayed hands;
hear a clattering underworld

underfoot, while the sea lifts her skirts
for the siren’s spirited fingers.

They were carried to Santiago
as fellow pilgrims once.
I too would wear one as an amulet;
I would plug my ears with all of them
against this wind.
But I will listen.
And that sea will hurl me to the tumulus,
my skull to the scallop knife.

Alice Wood

YOU, READING

You, reading, framed in your window-side chair;
as Woolf rests in a portrait by Bell,
with a blank, anonymous face.

Our usual cracks, past blazered years,
all lost in my copy of Keats:
how strange; that stumbling on you

poised as your name, it’s now
I know you least. ‘Grace?-‘

Meirion Jordan

CARVING THE HORSE

Evening defines the land, collects the shadows
in the soft hallows of the slope. Up here
the road seems to wind across the sky,
valleys flocked with rushes grow gold.

Neck straight, the mare crosses the road
and I stop the car and stare: muscles
hunching underneath the mane, light blushing
on white skin, a limestone dressed to pavane.

Then the head bends and crops grass again,
the herd stirs and stamps to the next tuft,
jaws grinding. But now I can tell why,
in the swart dark of those brute woods,

my ancestors invented wonder and carved the horse
made out of clouds into the windless chalk.

Rebecka Mustajarvi

3 CHALCOT SQUARE

all day searching

across the hallway
of your hospital heart,

dogmatizing recipes,
watching manuscripts stutter
into blank sheets.

it’s a long day flicking
the morning into a crisis,

to hear the holy communion of infidels
stabbing at your heart,
ticking the last box

where the howling idea remains
at large;
the beast too fabulous to sleep
bolts off into the evening

when the blinds yawn
and close, the world hits it head
and turns comatose.

you, awake,

tapping the pipes of frozen water

battling the fact

of being a daughter.

 

Amulet: Poems from the Tower Summer School 2005

ISBN 0-9549932-1-7
£4.99 Download an order form (PDF) | Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Publication date: 22 December 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this month’s Poetry Matters, the poems have been selected from Amulet, the newly-published anthology of poems written during the 2005 Tower Poetry Summer School

 

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.

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Publications

ChangePromises:
The Christopher Tower Poetry Prize Winners 2010 (Digital Edition)

The winning poems from the 2010 prize are brought together in this exclusive digital-only edition.