The launch party for Volume 2, Issue 1 of theORB, sponsored by Prospect magazine, will be taking place this week in Brasenose College at 8pm Thursday 23rd November.
“You can pick up a copy of the magazine, hear a talk by celebrity academic John Mullan, and enjoy free wine and refreshments. Click the header image above for more details.”
MSt alumna Alexandra Strnad’s H Is for Hadeda has been published by Poetry Salzburg. You can read more about it, and excerpts from it on, their webpage – and order it too.
From the Poetry Salzburg page:
““H Is for Hadeda is a luminous sequence of poems from a writer of great intelligence who combines elegance of expression with an excitingly visceral engagement with language. The polished surface, created by Strnad’s extraordinary dexterity and supple control of syntax and diction, belies deeper currents caused by the rift between older, Central European sensibilities and a newer, less urbane and sometimes less forgiving perspective. The preoccupations are spacious and wide-ranging, taking us from her Czech grand-mother’s Christmas biscuits and the ‘branches populated by pale aphids’ above the Café Meduza in Belgická to the mud-pool wadis of Thesiger’s Arabia, a photo shoot in the desert where the model is teamed with a falcon, a camel shedding ‘one bead of self-pity’ for its dead calf, the ‘aviation cocktails, silver travertine floors’ of the Burj and a young mem-sahib gasping in the heat of Hyderabad while dreaming of coldness and ‘a bed flanked by stalagmites’. It’s rare to find a writer who is at home in so many different contexts and elements and it gives the poems a constant sense of openness to different traditions of thought, of kinetically travelling forwards, of renewal and surprise; a wonderful, life-affirming debut.”
“These are poems of sensuous and edgy detail, alert to the beautiful fascination of the world’s unspoken and ancient dramas – ‘the fury is there: / a dark pip in an old fruit’ (“Prayer”) – all charged with a distinctive acuteness of observation. The collection’s canvas is wide – Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, the desert regions of the Gulf – but Strnad’s attention to the shimmer of danger and darkness is micro-precise, not least in her memorable title poem: ‘she / doesn’t mind, if his feathers are wood ash, his // dull eyes two burnt almond shells, his love call / a slasher-film scream’. A fascinating debut by a poet to watch.”
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis will be reading with Adnan al-Sayegh, Peter J. King, Jude Cowan Montague, Chinta Kallie, Ruba Abughaida and Jenyth Worsley at the Armistice Day Requiem and Poetry Reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, from 7.30-9.30pm on Saturday 11 November to remember all victims of war, spoken in several languages. The event will feature a new requiem based on Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘Futility’, composed by Janet Davies. .
“Books Saved Him, So Now He’s Building His 500th Library: Quintin Pastrana’s Library Renewal Partnership bets on libraries as a way to save Filipino communities.”
from the article:
“For Barangay 105, Tondo, it started with a small space. Around 30 square meters, which—by the standards of a Metro Manila slum that’s so densely populated that it could not be relocated to Bulacan or Laguna—is not very small at all. In 2014, neighboring slumlords began encroaching on this precious empty parcel, and were just about to claim it for themselves before Remy Cabello, a local volunteer teacher, reached out to Quintin Pastrana for help. She told him that if she could not convince the slumlords that she could build a classroom with a library there, they would take it away.
“We had two weeks before they decided to close that place down,” says Pastrana, the founder of the Library Renewal Partnership, a coalition that builds libraries for literacy and community empowerment. “So we had a text brigade going on, emails, Facebook shoutouts—it was Christmas, anyway.”
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