Archive Posts

"Safety poems" a poetry collection composed by Mostafa Rahmandoost has been recently marketed for children which has been a bestseller in the past weeks. IBNA: "Safety poems" has been published in 3 volumes and Rahmandoost has composed it about the danger of some tools for children.

The book has been published by Ofogh which says that the collection has been among the bestsellers during the past weeks. In the collection Rahmandoost talks about dangerous tools as knifes, scissors, saws, needles and etc…

"The prayer poems" another poetry collection by Rahmandoost has been recently published. He told IBNA that that his opinion has changed for publishing the books as a collection and has decided to create more collections.

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There aren't many verse forms that are named after their originators; poetry doesn't seem to work much like biology in that respect.

There's the Clerihew, the Horatian Ode and Sapphics. I'm tempted to say that's that, but I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting and that I can depend on you to remind me of.

This month, the challenge is to write a poem in Sapphics – the form favoured, unsurprisingly enough, by Sappho. Rather than tying ourselves up with longwinded explanations involving trochees and dactyls, let's look at a Sapphic stanza in schematic form using "-" for long (in English, stressed) syllables, "u" for short (unstressed) syllables and "x" for an anceps (a syllable that can be either stressed or unstressed):

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It’s a testament to the pliancy of contemporary poetry and the talent of poet Malaika King Albrecht that her first book, “Lessons in Forgetting” (Main Street Rag Publishing Company. 47 pages. $7), can grapple so powerfully with an affliction that in recent years seems almost an epidemic — Alzheimer’s.

In choosing this most tragic of diseases, Albrecht traces the terrible affliction’s progression — in this case Alzheimer’s has chosen the poet’s mother — from its onset to its sad conclusion, sprinkling images and insights throughout.

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Forty five men died in a gas explosion at the Six Bells pit on 28 June 1960.Gillian Clarke said she remembered how the disaster had resonated with those living in Welsh mining communities.

"I remember this terrible thing had happened and yet great horrible accidents like that didn't happen any more," she said.She told Roy Noble of BBC Radio Wales that she thought about the human aspect, the people going about their everyday lives when the tragedy happened.

"I thought about the town ... probably a lovely day, probably with the sun shining, probably it was lovely ... and suddenly a change."How would they hear it - some sort of deep down thump before the news came to the top of the pit?"

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Bush Poet, Gary Fogarty has been selected to represent Australia at the 14th World Championships of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, California. Some may remember Gary when he was in Goondiwindi more than a decade ago.Gary is a genuine boy from the bush who tells it as it is. It’s just one of the traits he has used in a myriad of jobs over the years including working as a Drought Relief Officer in Goondiwindi in the early 1990s.

It was here that he first announced to the world his love of writing and a talent for bush verse. He’s had poems commissioned by business owners to children wanting a special present for their mum. He’s performed at major music and poetry festivals throughout Australia, on radio, on TV and at small community fund-raisers.

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Here are two Saskatchewan poets in two vastly different places in their writing careers. Glen Sorestad, well-known Saskatoon writer and first Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan, is the author of 20 books of poems, while Bernadette Wagner of Regina is a community educator and organizer with her first collection of poetry. Both of them take a trip through the past, though their angle of perception is quite different.

Sorestad, in What We Miss, wants to take a moment to do what Irving Layton once said poets do, which is to valorize the moment, to make special in a poem and for posterity what the poet sees and wishes to point out. If, as Wallace Stevens once stated, "poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush" (thanks to the Sask. Writers Guild for this timely quotation), then the poems in Sorestad's new collection want to hold onto that pheasant and show it around.

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When he met her it was as if he could see
his poems moving around below her skin
like fish in an aquarium. To attract them
he tapped the glass of the tank –
some were pretty big fish. They loomed
close, shadowing her face like a birthmark.
He saw their luminous scales, the frills
of their fins, their mouths, fat and defenceless,
without natural preditors, begging
to be caught, mounted and nailed to the wall.

George MacBeth, who died prematurely of motor neurone disease in 1992, was a prolific poet, novelist, children's writer, anthologist and ambassador for poetry. Working-class and Oxford-educated, shaped by postwar and anti-Movement influences, a stylish and often experimental formalist, he was undoubtedly a poet of his time, but also ahead of it.

His birds and beasts may not be subjected to such fierce psychic projection as those of his contemporary, Ted Hughes, but they are realised with sympathetic verbal energy, and a nice interplay of mannerism, metaphysics and muscularity. This week's poem, The God of Love, is written as an eye-witness account, almost in defiance of the quoted epigraph.

"I found them," the narrator declares authoritatively of the herd of musk-oxen, as if reporting on a field trip. After the crisp, distant precision of the initial scene-setting, the threat to the oxen is registered on the reader's skin in a little shiver as we're shown the wolves with their "ears flattened against the wind". This movement is intensified by the next stanza's dramatic "whirlpool of wolves".

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George MacBeth, who died prematurely of motor neurone disease in 1992, was a prolific poet, novelist, children's writer, anthologist and ambassador for poetry. Working-class and Oxford-educated, shaped by postwar and anti-Movement influences, a stylish and often experimental formalist, he was undoubtedly a poet of his time, but also ahead of it.

His birds and beasts may not be subjected to such fierce psychic projection as those of his contemporary, Ted Hughes, but they are realised with sympathetic verbal energy, and a nice interplay of mannerism, metaphysics and muscularity. This week's poem, The God of Love, is written as an eye-witness account, almost in defiance of the quoted epigraph.

"I found them," the narrator declares authoritatively of the herd of musk-oxen, as if reporting on a field trip. After the crisp, distant precision of the initial scene-setting, the threat to the oxen is registered on the reader's skin in a little shiver as we're shown the wolves with their "ears flattened against the wind". This movement is intensified by the next stanza's dramatic "whirlpool of wolves".

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Andrei Voznesensky, who died at 77, was part of a '60s generation of Russian artists whose inventiveness and courage reawakened in the West the possibilities of popular, politically engaged poetry.Something important does go out of the world when a great poet dies, as it did this week when Andrei Voznesensky passed away in Moscow at the age of 77. He was a virtual recluse in his last few years, suffering through strokes and an unspecified but debilitating illness.

Voznesensky was a leading figure among the shestidesyatniki, the "'60s Generation" of immensely inventive and courageous poets, writers and artists who came to prominence in the Soviet Union following the death of Josef Stalin.

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