Hear every poem from Release One of Mark Antony Owen's 'Subruria' read by the author.

subruria.com

Subruria (Release One)

TASCAM DR-40X

Hernan Cattaneo at Space Miami , August 2023 .mp3

Four poems from 'Envies the Birds', introduced and read by Angelina D'Roza: 'To the Corner Shop and Back', 'Fairytale No. 9', 'Brutal Love', 'Marginalia'. Recorded at the foot of the Cholera Monument, Sheffield, Friday 20 May 2016. Recorded and edited by Brian Lewis for Longbarrow Press.

At the Cholera Monument: Four Poems

06 Robert Pearsall - Lay A Garland

Christening

For Richard

Eleven, eight and four years old,
and you the youngest, still untouched –
still unmarked by the sign of the cross.
We tell you this while we’re alone

in the house (you open to Hell,
without our parents’ protection).
Afraid of where you’ll go when you die,
we elect to bless you ourselves;

​crowd around the washing-up bowl,
pray on the face of its water,
feel ourselves transubstantiated.
We transform into celebrants,

your sister and I: a priestess
and a priest saying ‘God’ a lot.
Fingers wetted, brushed above your brow,
we paint the key to Paradise.

Christening

Your bleeding hearts

‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified’,
sings a gloss-black, vinyl Gloria Gaynor.

Friday nights have a ritual all their own:
you pressing ABBA blue to creping eyelids.

Your perm, ringed by its aura of Harmony;
puffs of Panache to girder your confidence.

Pinching off another of your bleeding hearts,
I’m prepared to let you ‘go, walk out the door.’

Each week, watching you, readying to leave us –
tiny heart crushed by the Polos in your purse.

Your bleeding hearts

Pastoral

It begins in the rooks, in their rasping.
Before childhood is left undone.
Before bitter nights of burning things.

With a boy, a girl, a new home, a field.
With a ripe imagination.
With a woman and her world of straw.

It begins back when to run was to play.
Grows out of TV, out of games.
Grows out of a wasteland at town’s end.

Pastoral

Papier-mâché

i.m. Jeanette ‘Jan’ Jane

At some point, you must’ve given birth to them:
inflated balloons the way you once did me.

You must have taken strips of torn newspaper,
marinated them in the water and glue.

You must’ve helped me mummify tightened skin;
sculpt the death masks we would colour back to life.

And we must have waited for the hardening,
readied paint for our expressionless faces.

We must’ve done all this, I remember it –
I just forget why we made so little else.

Papier-mâché

Movie stars

It must’ve been twenty-five years since
I saw her last – longer since we spoke.
We’d cleared our plates of buffet-table
small talk when suddenly she offered,

‘Everyone on the estate thought
your mum and dad were so glamorous.’
Years reversed at her words, exposing
you both in our council house garden:

stripped for the sun, basted in tan oil;
magazines and massive sunglasses.
Smothering, sun-burned, coconut air.
Those vicious, foldaway sun loungers.

You were movie stars to our neighbours.
The arrogant couple. The ‘posh sods’.
Acting as though you believed your own
hype, till your bad press hounded us all.

Movie stars

Her too

Complicity through silence – this is what makes
her as much the abuser as if she’d touched
her daughter herself. And Mum would’ve taken
her mother’s silence with her, except dying
brings out the worst in us, surfaces poisons

corrosive to the armour of denial.
My mother’s mother, keeping mum for decades:
sweeping all the hushed things into her daughter
till she’d made of them a child she couldn’t bear.
No wonder Mum grew cold, bitter, cancerous,

cocooned by a womb spun from hurt disallowed;
trapped until her death freed both her and the truth.
Who’d have guessed she’d erupt into confession?
To ease her final hours they gave her morphine.
There was nothing they could give her for those years.

Her too

Episode one of a new podcast made by Amy Key. Features poets reading you a poem from bed. In this first episode you can hear poems from:

Richard Scott, whose first collection SOHO is out from Faber
Chloe Stopa-Hunt,whose pamphlet WHITE HILLS is published by Clinic
Mukahang Limbu, who features in the anthology ENGLAND: POEMS FROM A SCHOOL, published by Picador 
Rebecca Tamás, whose debut full-length collection WITCH will be published by PENNED IN THE MARGINS next year
Amy Key, whose book ISN’T FOREVER is out from Bloodaxe
Helen Charman, whose pamphlet SUPPORT, SUPPORT, is out now from Offord Road Books
Jane Yeh, whose third book DISCIPLINE will be published by Carcanet next year
Holly Pester, who has a 10-inch vinyl album and accompanying book of poems with Test Centre, called COMMON REST
Khairani Barokka, whose collection ROPE is published by Nine Arches Press
Rebecca Perry, whose collection BEAUTY/BEAUTY is published by Bloodaxe
Annie Freud, whose latest collection is THE REMAINS, published by Picador

Poets In Bed Episode 1

Near End of Summer

Daylight leaves green June bugs
floating in steel pots

kept near the last porch step for dipping
our sand-bitten feet. Egg yolk sun

sinking low behind the oak tree where a black
rubber tire dangles

on its rope and chains, swaying empty in the breeze.
The dog takes a long drink, licks

her cold wet nose and shakes, that old screen door
still swinging.

Her too

Mark Antony Owen

Related tracks