Second Place Rosette

Poems about Britain

Emma Dai'an Wright, Richard O'Brien

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781912915033
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Second Place Rosette is a calendar of the customs, rituals and practices that make up life in modern Britain. The poems take in maypole dancing, mehndi painting, and medical prescriptions. Some events, like the Jewish Sabbath, happen every week; some, like the putting away of Christmas decorations, thankfully come only once a year. The subjects range from the universal to the personal: every family might have its own ritual, and each culture its own important figures to remember and commemorate. In the introduction, co-editor Emma Wright notes how, as the daughter of a refugee, she felt 'deeply disturbed by current discourse about Britishness and how it seems impossible to separate talk of national identity and pride from talk of exclusion and isolation.' Against that divisive rhetoric, Wright and co-editor Richard O'Brien have assembled a refreshingly inclusive take on national identity. Poets from different cultural backgrounds speak to their sense of what Britain means through their own daily lived experience, through what they care about on a grass-roots level. The nation which emerges from the poems is a patchwork quilt of betting tips and TV dinners, nights out on Bold Street and strolls in the park. While the years pass, the seasons cycle, and the people who make up the country change, these poets reveal how much stays the same. In Britain, there will always be a man running late who really should have been allowed to get the bus, and a warm spot by the fire in a pub in December. Much of the book displays an ambivalence towards the land and its rituals, but there is also love, affection and pride. Mixed feelings: what could be more British than that?

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Emma Dai’an Wright is a British-Chinese-Vietnamese publisher, designer and illustrator based in Birmingham, UK. She studied Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, and worked in ebook production at Orion Publishing Group before leaving in 2012 to set up the Emma Press with the support of the Prince’s Trust.

Richard O’Brien is a poet, translator and academic based in Birmingham, UK. He has a PhD on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama. Richard’s pamphlets include The Emmores (Emma Press, 2014) and A Bloody Mess (Valley Press, 2015). His work has featured in Oxford Poetry, Poetry London and The Salt Book of Younger Poets. In 2017, he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for his poetry.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Claire Askew’s poetry collection This changes things (Bloodaxe, 2016) was shortlisted for an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, the 2016 Saltire First Book Award, and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre and Michael Murphy Memorial prizes. @onenightstanzas.

Dean Atta’s debut poetry collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. His poems deal with themes of race, gender, identity and growing up, and have appeared on BBC One’s The One Show and several times on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service and Channel 4.

Casey Bailey is a secondary school senior leader, poet, spoken word performer, author and rapper from Birmingham. His first short collection, Waiting at Bloomsbury Park, was published in 2017 by Big White Shed. His first full poetry collection, Adjusted, was published in 2018 by Verve Poetry Press.

Sarah Barr lives in Dorset and writes poetry and fiction. Her poems have appeared in The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, South, the Bridport Prize Anthologies 2010 and 2016 and The Templar Anthology 2016. She teaches creative writing in Dorset and for the Open University.

Clare Best’s Excisions, her first full collection, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELL, Springlines. Her latest book is a prose memoir, The Missing List (Linen Press, 2018). clarebest.co.uk

Julia Bird grew up in Gloucestershire and now lives in London where she works as a literature promoter. She has published two collections with Salt Publishing (Hannah and the Monk, 2008, and Twenty-four Seven Blossom, 2013) and an illustrated pamphlet – Now You Can Look – with the Emma Press in 2017.

Jerrold Bowam: a British/Canadian writer who aspires to find others who are as amused as his muse, have a predilection for repetition and a penchant for recurrence.

Jo Brandon was born in 1986 and currently lives in West Yorkshire. Jo has a pamphlet, Phobia (2012), and a full-length collection, The Learned Goose (2015), both with Valley Press. Jo’s work has featured in various publications including The Poetry Review, The North, Butcher’s Dog and Magma. www.jobrandon.com

Carole Bromley lives in York where she is the stanza rep and runs poetry surgeries for the Poetry Society. Winner of a number of first prizes, Carole has three collections with smith|doorstop: A Guided Tour of the Ice House, The Stonegate Devil and Blast Off!, a children's collection.

Alan Buckley is from Merseyside, and now lives in Oxford. He has two poetry pamphlets: Shiver (tall-lighthouse, 2009), and The Long Haul (HappenStance, 2016). He was highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes. He is a poetry editor at ignitionpress, and a school writer-in-residence with the charity First Story.

Shruti Chauhan is a poet and performer from Leicester. In 2018, she won the National Poetry Library’s Instapoetry competition and was voted Best Spoken Word Performer at the Saboteur Awards. Shruti’s debut pamphlet, That Which Can Be Heard, is forthcoming with Burning Eye Books in November 2018.

Claire Collison’s publishing credits include Butcher’s Dog, The Compass, Island Review, Bare Fiction, Elbow Room, and Templar Anthology. Artist-in-residence at the Women’s Art Library, Claire is currently touring her single-breasted life modelling monologue, ‘Truth is Beauty’. writingbloomsbury.wordpress.com

Oliver Comins lives in West London and writes poems about people, sport, landscape and growing up. He grew up in Warwickshire, the county where Edge Hill is located. Templar Poetry has published three of his pamphlets since 2014 and a full length collection, Oak Fish Island, in 2018.

Aviva Dautch has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths and a PhD in poetry from Royal Holloway. Her poems are published in magazines including Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation and The Poetry Review. In 2017 she won the Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primers Prize for emerging voices.

Tracy Davidson lives in Warwickshire and writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies, including: Mslexia, Modern Haiku, Shooter, Journey to Crone, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts and In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights.

Ian Dudley’s most recent publications have been in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Rialto and Zoomorphic. He has won the Oxonian Review (2015) and Aesthetica (2017) poetry competitions, and featured in Eyewear’s The Best New British And Irish Poets 2016.

Clementine Ewokolo-Burnley is a migrant writer, mother and community worker. She has been a finalist in the Bristol Short Story Prize Competition 2017, the Miles Morland Scholarship Award and received an Honourable Mention in the Berlin Writing Prize Competition. @decolonialheart

Steve Harrison born in Yorkshire and now lives in Shropshire. His work has appeared in Emergency Poet collections, Wenlock Festival, The Physic Garden, Pop Shot, Mid-Winter Solstice, The Curlew and Poets’ Republic. He regularly performs across the Midlands and won the Ledbury Poetry Festival Slam in 2014.

Ramona Herdman’s pamphlet Bottle is published by HappenStance Press. It was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2018 and one of the Poetry School’s Books of the Year 2017. She won the Poetry Society Hamish Canham prize 2017. @ramonaherdman

Maryam H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Titles from the Emma Press
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• JANUARY
• FEBRUARY
• MARCH
• APRIL
• MAY
• JUNE
• JULY
• AUGUST
• SEPTEMBER
• OCTOBER
• NOVEMBER
• DECEMBER
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors
• About the Emma Press
• Also from the Emma Press