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ORB Poetry Night

By Oxford Review of Books

Fitzhugh Auditorium, Oxford

With David Constantine, Erica McAlpine,

Jamie McKendrick and Lucy Ingrams

Having left the late afternoon bustle of Beaumont Street and Walton Street, the elegant glass doors of Exeter College’s contemporary Cohen Quod, is quite an astonishing looking glass of a kind – once on the inside, you stand in front of a stunning corridor, where light weaves and plays through modern wooden arches,  and at the end on your right, you enter the auditorium.  As if the architect knew that after a hectic day, we would need a slip road of unexpected beauty and calm, to prepare us, to shift away from the demands of the day, open to new thoughts and ideas.

The transition was successful  – as soon as David Constantine began speaking, you knew you were in good hands – Constantine spoke arrestingly  about A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from the Greek Anthology (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), explaining amongst others the connection to Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer.  Bloodaxe has a recording of Constantine reading from the collection, and so does the excellent Poetry Podcast Magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing, (episode 33); moreover, there is an erudite review by Merryn Williams in the online poetry journal, The High Window (2. January 2025).

Constantine then treated us to half a dozen wonderful poems from his collection, Belongings ( Bloodaxe Books , 2020) – all emanating his deep compassion and social conscience. The poems provide a vivid map of his preoccupations, imbued with the kindness that won’t stand for injustice, his inner compass being a deeply moral one. A personal favourite of mine is the poem written in memory of a dear Quaker friend of his, Gillian Farmer, I will hold you in the light. The poem recalls Constantine’s relationship to Gillian Farmer as a boy but also projects forward into the future, a future that needs us to remember those who gave us light, who gently showed the need do the ‘right’ things in life, and generously held us in the light.

Professor Bernard O’Donoghue began by reading the title poem of his latest collection, The Anchorage ( Faber& Faber,2025), its subject matter being a devastating fire during the summer of ’59 and the response of a community – ‘The next Sunday a long cortège of horse floats//Made their slow way along a dusty road// to Ardnageeha to repair the loss’ . But all the work to repair and rebuild cannot erase the poet’s inner eye that imagines the ‘invisible // Last leaping of the dog.’  This childhood memory is typical of O’Donoghue’s unsentimental ‘story telling’ – the poems are often events described with emotional honesty but in that very low-key, contained way that invariably creates a deep, often unforgettable, impression. The afterlife and the poet’s memory of friends who have passed away, as in ‘While the sun shines’ and ‘Winding up’  contemplate grief through the gentle lens of appreciation of the lives lived, while also imagining the scenario where life and work do not stop at death – ( ‘We can’t stop now,’ they say. ‘There’s too much still to do’ )

O’Donoghue came to England as a 16-year-old boy and has written about Ireland from the position of being abroad. In Here Nor There (1999) the poem Westering Home expresses the longing for Ireland exquisitely – ‘Though you’d be pressed to say exactly where // It first sets in, driving west through Wales // Things start to feel like Ireland [….] More, though, than all of this, // It’s the architecture of the spirit; // The old thin ache you thought that you ‘d forgotten –‘.  Of course, the poet’s focus on the experience of living abroad, while ‘abroad’ also, over time, becomes a ‘home’, is close to my own heart, having left Denmark at 19.  O’Donoghue gave a very rich reading from The Anchorage; it seems shallow to try to summarise or pin down ‘what it was about’ – rather  it felt as if we were invited into the poet’s mind, his questions and part-answers; his poems made me question my own ‘anchorage’ – geographically but especially emotionally and spiritually… because at some point in life it might be a relief to cast anchor, to ‘settle’ somewhere, or at least somewhat.

While I am fairly familiar with the other poets, Professor Erica McAlpine was a new – and very rewarding – poet to hear. McAlpine read mostly from her new collection, Small Pointed Things (Carcanet, 2025); the collection has many poems about her marriage and she deliberately chose rhyme as a tool to indicate the yoke of two people. Humour mixed with poignancy and McAlpine’s charm made it a pleasure to listen.  Not all poems were about marriage, The Scorpion, she announced as her Trump poem – ‘One glimpse of his carapace will shock us….’ I have put her new collection on my birthday wish list – her reading made me curious to know her work better.

The penultimate reading was given by Jamie McKendrick. His poems were wide-ranging from – the eve of the last Gulf war, to insects ( a book of poems that apparently McKendrick cannot get a publisher interested in, he told us with a typical twinkle in his eye), to a poem about Liverpool, where he was born – ‘The last stop before the Pier Head’ , finishing with several poems from a sequence – The Importance of… (Wilde inspired) ; ‘The Importance of Pitch’; ‘The importance of me’ ( again delivered disarmingly: ‘this is not universally agreed’ );  and finally, ‘The importance of Time’ (where ghosts wear watches ironically).

It was an entertaining and thought-provoking, thoughtful selection of poems, but I had hoped McKendrick might have spoken about his work on Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh (Faber & Faber, 2025); maybe we will be lucky enough to have him back to talk on this very special collection which was awarded the PEN Heaney Prize, as well as shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize last year.

Lucy Ingrams ended this fine evening with some wonderful poems – delicate and pulsing with life. Ingrams won the Birkbeck Michael Donaghy Poetry Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize ( 2015), was selected as one of  Poetry School and Nine Arches Press’ Primers in 2015 and won the Magma Poetry Competition (2016); she holds a MPhil in Creative Writing from University of South Wales.  Ingrams’ collection, ‘Signs’(2023) won the International Poetry Book Award, 2024.

Tonight, Ingrams’ poems were – beautiful! Not a word often used nowadays about poems, as if it only offers slight praise, but in Ingrams’ case her writing is full of beauty, it feels natural, at times quite ethereal yet there is always precision and craft. Listening to her reading tonight, I was swept away by the lyricism, the at times almost meditative quality of her work.  This was very evident and exquisitely executed in her last and longer poem (unfortunately, I did not catch the title) which in five sections describes – or rather embodies the experiences – of the same ‘scene’ from the point of view respectively of ‘the Hay Field’; ‘Mole’; ‘Ghost’ (Possibly : ‘Ghost Elius’ apologies again, as sadly it was difficult to hear, but a wonderful line has stayed with me – ‘haunting, like living, is natural’); ‘Mother’; and finally ‘Daughter’.  It was a mesmerising delivery; I think the closest I have come for a very long time to feel ‘the poem as an event’.  Her collection, Signs, has gone on my wish list, too.

I fear this write up has not begun to do justice to the brilliant poets reading – it can be hard to absorb everything when the offerings are so very rich, varied and  touch both heart and mind, so that by the end, all I knew was how very lucky we were to have heard these five poets read and speak, how very special such events are.