2023 Titles — in alphabetical order

Published August 2023. Paperback, 178pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848618978 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

These pieces are selected from a steady series of essays and reviews I found myself publishing in the late aughts of the still early century. It was a period in which I was translating poetry, not so much as a specific translation “project,” but as an extension of writing poetry. And as an interactive means of reading poetry. 

My impetus for writing prose on translated poetry was explorative, not didactic. During that period, I eventually published three translation collections from three very different cultural periods. In 2012, the 91 extant poems of Luxorius, a sixth century C.E. Latin epigramist, writing in Vandal-occupied North Africa at the dawn of the Dark Ages. This segued into a multi-year delve into Martial, and culminated in a good-sized, 2018 selection. And, concurrently, beginning with a chapbook in the late ’70s, I’d been translating Rilke, finally publishing an extensive selection in 2020.

One can happily and productively write poetry without too much theorizing. In fact, at least in our era’s thinking, the best poems spring from need not theory. Even successful formalists utilize form as vehicle, not inspiration. But when you find yourself wanting to translate poetry into poetry, you can also find yourself in an anarchic unmapped landscape, navigating a cliff’s edge in the fog between languages. When translating established classics, “do no harm” isn’t a concern. But “don’t do anything stupid” is a prime directive. All other rules spring from that. The “translation police” exist, but they’re not so much to be feared as one’s internal gestapo. So, many of these pieces served as negotiations with myself for permission. Some make repeat visits to the poets above for multiple looks. But from somewhere over the years, Catullus also kept showing up. I welcomed and re-welcomed those visits. (Art Beck)

Published July 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618718 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Interiors and Other Poems takes the reader down divergent pathways, along the river Stour through the Blackmore Vale weaving threads of identities, history, and the natural world. The poems dive deep into psychic and neurological divergent selves beneath an accrued social, cultural, and environmental history of the area. The personae are both grounded and estranged, living, and breathing as fictive constructs, and drawing upon the earth and its deep ecology. Living things evoke living things. 

Published by Three Highgate Editions, and distributed by Shearsman Books.
Edited by Irina Johnstone, with an introduction by Alistair Hicks.
Published October 2023. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781739544904 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In 1928, George Claessen’s future as a writer and poet was already showing great promise. Aged nineteen, he had just won a prestigious poetry prize in a national Sri Lankan newspaper. That led to writing stories and articles for various publications. It seemed as though his desired vocation was assured until the birthday gift of a paintbox changed the course of his life. During a temporary job as a night watchman stationed at the edge of a jungle, he began painting to pass the time. By the end of his stint he was irrevocably hooked. 

      In the early 40s, George was one of the founding members of a Sri Lankan art group, which was based in Colombo and was spearheaded by Lionel Wendt. Known as The ’43 Group, this movement would become renowned as the first modernist art collective in South Asia. By the end of the decade, his path as an artist eventually drew him to London. His painting became increasingly abstract. By the 1950s he was exhibiting internationally, notably at the Venice Biennale in 1956, and in 1959 he won first prize at the São Paulo Biennale. 

     In later life, while living in London, he returned to poetry, often interrogating the same metaphysical themes he explored in his abstracts. Describing his desire to use poetry as a creative alternative to his visual artistic work, he memorably said that it was, ‘…the outcome of an urge for expression in another form – a phenomenon not uncommon in painters, just as the same would and does apply in reverse to essential poets’.

Published May 2023. Paperback, 766pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.95 / $45.

ISBN 9781848618923 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A major event, this volume covers some 40 years of work.

"Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song… Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." —David Wevill

Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley

Published February 2023. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. Bilingual edition.

ISBN 9781848618862 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Selected as Best Poetry Book of 2022 in Spain by El Cultural.

Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments fluctuatingbetween dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the bleakness of ageing,and accompanying the loved one through a long and debilitating illness. The continuity of mood and imagery gradually melds the fragments intoa single poem. The poet stumbles confusedly as through a labyrinth offeeling and sensation. Who or what is the mysterious master of distancesof the title? Time? Language? Oneself? The answer is a radical experimentin poetry and a new departure for this fine lyric poet.

Published August 2023. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848619012 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The original idea of “paintings on glass” was to get close to folk art. After a long period attempting to learn Gaelic and Welsh, this new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the peddlers who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.

      This is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance. (Andrew Duncan)

Translated from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne

Published October 2023. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. English only.

ISBN 9781848619005 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"These miraculous poems of everyday matter magnified by forty reveal our world in all its pristine glory – reminiscent of Pablo Neruda’s household odes, but stranger. Her sketches of waterfalls are extraordinary, as if we are witnessing the birth of water and every inch hallucinatory. Her magnifying eye probes the roots of matter and spirit, where they intertwine and dance with light. Tsvetanka Elenkova has a mystic’s eye, an inventive vision honed with surgical precision." —Pascale Petit

"In Magnification Forty, Tsvetanka Elenkova turns her piercing poetic intelligence upon the small things of the world. She lifts them up to us in all their revelatory and spiritual power. Elenkova is a visionary, who makes quietness speak and who reminds us that the miracle of embodiment is realised not only in the exceptional but in what’s humble and quotidian. This deeply mindful book is a call for us to pay attention to what we experience. It’s also a masterclass in the lucid and economical poetics that have made Elenkova into a leading European poet. " —Fiona Sampson

Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618480 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Shadow Box originated with a single piece, ‘The Curiosities of Dr Hunter’, a poem which gathered together many objects from Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum in an investigation into the nature of 18th-century collecting; but the museum holds so many objects to catch the eye and imagination – cultural artefacts from across the world, scientific instruments, medical specimens, objects of the natural world – from which so many kinds of poem might be written. Here then are poems caught between the perfection of a single thing and a necessary enquiry into how the object came to be here, what its meanings might be, and who comes to be an observer here.

Published April 2023. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848618695.

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2023 features poetry by Martin Anderson, Nóra Blascsók, Melissa Buckheit, Stuart Cooke, Carrie Etter, Amy Evans Bauer, Alec Finlay, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Daniel Hinds, Emily Tristan Jones, Norman Jope, Kenny Knight, Mary Leader, Rob Mackenzie, James McLaughlin, Eliza O'Toole, Michelle Penn, Sophia Nugent-Siegal, Peter Robinson, Jaime Robles, Maurice Scully, Aidan Semmens, Nathan Shepherdson, Maria Stasiak, Cole Swensen, G.C. Waldrep, Carl Walsh and Petra White, plus translations of Anna Akhmatova (by Stephen Capus) and of Mercè Rodoreda (by Rebecca Simpson).

Published October 2023. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619104

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2023 features poetry by Serena Alagappan, Wendy Allen, Mark Byers, Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell, Peter Dukes, David Dumouriez,  Marie-Louise Eyres, Dominic Fisher, Mark Goodwin, Amlanjyoti Goswami, John Greening, Finn Haunch, Neal Hoskins, Fiona Larkin, Peter Larkin, Rupert M Loydell, Valeria Melchioretto, Eliza O’Toole, John Phillips, Amber Rollinson, D’or Seifer, Natalie Shaw, Robert Sheppard and Judi Sutherland; plus translations of Kjell Espmark (by Robin Fulton Macpherson), Attila József (by Ágnes Lehóczky & Adam Piette), Lutz Seiler (by Stefan Tobler) and Roelof Ten Napel (by Judith Wilkinson).

Published January 2023. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848618602 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Man of Heart , the second part of A Presentment of Englishry , is the story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain. It is also a story about story-telling. It continues to follow the narrative trajectory of Laȝamon’s late 12th century version of The Legendary History, the foundation myth of Britain. By the 12th century this had very little in common with ‘History’ as we understand it in the 21st. Attempts to resolve the discrepancies or reconcile Laȝamon’s version with what we currently know about the period are futile. Nor is it possible to rationalize the chronology. There are anachronisms, contradictions and inconsistencies in my text. It is not a modern novel.

Published October 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618879 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it’s related to images – the ekphrastic relationship – I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there’s a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton’s Viewer / Viewed, the answer is a resounding Yes. 

      First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems.  “The tug of juxtaposition”: the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process – for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process – results in the poems’ extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding.”  —Robert Vas Dias

Published July 2023. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618787 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Comments on previous work by Peter Hughes:

‘a poet who stands at the very forefront of twenty-first-century lyricism’  —Ian Brinton, P.N. Review 

‘Peter Hughes personalises and modernises the Romantic lyric mode of address, blending it into the stratum of practical everyday living with its hassles and clutter, and the conversational speaking voice. He plays with the inheritance of the European love poem as a renewal of it, sometimes seeming to undermine it and then folding it back into his purpose. This is a poet working very much in his own way, and breaking the rules of just about all current schools.’ —Peter Riley

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer

Published November 2023. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23.

ISBN 9781848617681 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Ver y palpar is one of two books from 1941 which between them include some of Huidobro’s finest work, something that most commentators have tended to ignore, preferring usually to engage with Altazor or with the earlier books such as Poemas árticos, and their attendant Creationist theory. On the other hand, the rupture between the poetic text and empirical reality, exemplified by Creationist theory (but not always adhered to by the author) may well have become embedded in the subtext of these later poems, with their disrupted syntax, and their clearly surrealistic tendencies. Almost certainly under the influence of surrealism, in many of the poems Huidobro moves towards something far looser than his original theoretical position. There is a deliberate instability in many of the poems, arising from unusual, even awkward syntax, and the suppression of syntactic linkages within the poems, something that was also evident in later cantos of Altazor.

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer. Bilingual edition.

Published September 2023. Paperback, 212pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848618541 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Adverse Winds is a collection of essays, aphorisms, maxims and observations, some quasi-autobiographical, published by Huidobro in Santiago in 1926, after his return from many years in Europe.

          At this distance in time it is perhaps difficult to grasp that this noisy, wealthy and entitled poet, who had cut something of a swathe through literary Paris – was almost unknown back home in Santiago. He had published nothing there apart from self-financed volumes of juvenilia before his departure for Paris in 1916, and his new avant-garde work from the Paris period was strange territory for provincial, behind-the-times Santiago. 

          Needing to attract some attention upon his return, Huidobro assembled this collection as an introduction to the serious new self that he wished to present to those who might have heard a few rumours of his successes abroad. The break-up of his marriage shortly afterwards, and the surrounding scandal, were to ruin his attempts in this direction, and cause his rapid return to Europe, this time sans famille and pursued by death-threats from irate relatives of his new young paramour. Looked at objectively, the book is a grab-bag, including some fascinating and oft-quoted statements (the poet is a little god; I will be the premier poet of my time, etc.), alongside sideswipes at writers he wished to denigrate, and even dismissals of some he had once regarded as friends. His excursions – daring for their time – into matters of love, sex and infidelity in the maxims and aphorisms must have struck many after the scandal as being, at the very least, misguided. The book should be seen as a pendant to the previous year’s collection of Manifestos (also available in this series).

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer

Published October 2023. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. English only.

ISBN 9781848619111 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Satyr is Huidobro’s last novel, published in Santiago in 1939, at a time when little of his work was in print in his native land. While that situation would be rectified two years later, with the release of two major poetry collections, this volume is his final work in prose, and one that has mostly escaped attention since. Closer examination of the text reveals however that it contains a number of the author’s literary, social, political and philosophical preoccupations, with many themes from his poems, essays, and manifestos re-occurring in the book, the protagonist of which, Bernardo Saguen, may be regarded on one level as a failed artist. This would-be writer is one that goes to the bad, and whose mental collapse – he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia – and moral disintegration seem to parallel the kind of disintegration seen in some of the author’s later poems. Written at a time when Huidobro was unsure of his literary position in Chile, the book is much concerned with the idea of poetic creation, while also worrying at the concept of reality, whether artistic creations are part of reality itself, and whether the artist is part of reality. As the novel proceeds, Saguen finds himself increasingly untethered from that reality as he has a nervous breakdown, only for his return to a measure of sanity and composure to coincide with horror, and then total mental collapse. The reader’s sympathies lie with him at the outset, but we have only his word for the events that transpire; his unreliability as a narrator becomes ever more obvious, and clues begin to mount. Have we, as readers been deceived by a monstrous and amoral egoist, or have we really observed a total mental breakdown, as it was happening? Nothing is clear at the end, apart from the horror.

The cover image replicates that of the first edition, albeit in black rather than blue.

Published June 2023. Paperback, 298pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848618565 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

David Jaffin's first collection for 2023. The world's busiest poet strikes again.....

Published December 2023. Paperback, 184pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848618794 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

David Jaffin's second collection for 2023. The world's busiest poet strikes yet again.....

Published August 2023. Chapbook, 28pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £7.50 / $10
ISBN 9781848618398 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Félicien Rops (1833–1898) was a Belgian artist, primarily a print-maker.  He was a friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Péladan.  His work – symbolist and decadent in tone – retains its shock value over a century later.  In a sequence of poems inspired by Rops’ etchings and peppered with ill-translated fragments plundered from old exhibition catalogues, Hackbridge Johnson wrenches the daring reprobate into the 21^st century where he is surely needed to puncture the hypocrisies of a discredited age. 

Published October 2023. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618947 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog’s ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of an African finch, or in finding herself a holidaying bystander in 1968, witnessing tanks en route to the invasion of former Czechoslovakia. This acutely-assembled collection is rich in such telling intersections, and her narrative energy is flawless. She follows threads of thought and memory and imagination with exact insight and compassion. She reminds us that unless we give honour and attention to the past, we are lost. Her poems are rich in those qualities that we require of poems, so that we may better comprehend and celebrate our human lives.” —Penelope Shuttle 

Published June 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618909 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The earliest poem in this book (‘The Sleeper’s Blue Shirt’) is from 1972. The most recent poems are from 2022. Ken Bolton edited this selection, drawing from five books and one chapbook.

“John Levy has a magical deftness that makes world upon world appear out of nowhere. He marvels at the most ordinary circumstances and things (waiting for a bus, wrong numbers, accordion straps, a hammer, the letter K) and when he does so, there is nothing else in the universe. The work is meticulous, precise yet always unlabored. The poems come from Paris, Kyoto, Greece, Tucson, Edinburgh (among other places), and the poet has worked as a public defender. Reading Levy’s wondrous poems, I say to myself again and again, “so this is how it’s done!” His book is like no other.”—John Martone

Published May 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618893 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In this new book of poems Rupert Loydell writes about the world he now finds himself living in, questioning the damage caused by time, memory, lockdown, aging, politics, lies, neglect and disinformation. Whether grappling with social history, corrupt data, road-building, Grenfell Tower, urban graffiti, faith and fine art, or ‘the fickleness of language’, these damaged prayers and disbelieving explor-ations are ‘configured for maximum twitch’. And despite the resigned conclusion that ‘we are only ever likely to have a clear backwards view’, and even though ‘it is totally absurd to expect answers that might help explain our world’, Loydell clings to the way that ‘memory is all about being able to change the past’ and notes that ‘the future is here right now’.

Published October 2023. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848619081 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation, That Nostalgia records Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial, or, as he coins it, “Empire, that Nostalgia”. As the first European power to lose its global empire, Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa, and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa, Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive, not only to language itself, but also to its internalized practices, cultural and spiritual. That Nostalgia's invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity, their own unknowing, to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast, often chaotic, contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016 and does not include work from the author's other Shearsman books.

"On the one hand, a palpable, bodily hunger for foreign sights and sounds, for the touch of a foreign hand; on the other, an uneasy sense that he is null, empty, a vehicle being used by a poet-being from another realm (strongest candidate: Fernando Pessoa). This underlying tension does nothing to vitiate the strikingly vivid quality of John Mateer’s visits to destinations high and low across the globe, on journeys which are at the same time explorations of the deeper self." —JM Coetzee

Published July 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618930 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"The intersection of theology and poetry is a charged zone of encounter and, if I may say it, discipline. Yet there’s a generosity and a lightness to Milbank’s verse: a concinnity both with, and within the now, the lyric moment of generous apprehension, which aligns these taut lyrics with the sensibility of Traherne. 'Ripeness rustles,' but it is brightness that reigns here, among 'alien and yet familiar creatures,' a jackdaw, an escaped jaguar in a wood, a white cat in autumn, 'beech-mulch' that 'sings silently.' These radiant poems overflow with creation and gratitude." —G.C. Waldrep

Published September 2023. Paperback, 214pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848619029 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Rob Goddard knew he shouldn’t be travelling during a national lockdown, but it was Xmas and he headed West to see his family anyway. At Waterloo, the train seemed completely empty; perhaps it was, but an exploratory walk revealed at least four other passengers. All dead. They were ghosts. People he’d known; people who had died far too young.

     At first a convivial reunion, the journey’s mood changed when four more travellers embarked, mutating further when two of them hatched into enormous dragonflies, meganeura, extinct for hundreds of millions of years. Rob, a poet, was reminded of the dragonflies that ‘draw flame’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous sonnet. But these angelic giants possessed many different powers. Also, ominously, it had begun to snow heavily.

     Snow Bees is an apocalyptic novel with a difference, a roller coaster to the end of the night, a story in which hilarity rubs shoulders with death, and poetry rescues memory: a world apparently charging headlong towards oblivion in the plot of heaven.   

Published July 2023. Paperback, 370pp, 9x6ins, £22.95 / $35

ISBN 9781848618497 [Download a PDF of the Introduction to this book here.]

In this book, eighteen authors from a dozen countries interpret Richard Berengarten’s Changing (2016), a large-scale poetic mosaic written in honour of the I Ching , the first of the Confucian classics of ancient China.

Published February 2023. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618855 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

        ‘How do you get mortal harmony

out of a stone box into the moving air?

With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.’

Proof asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren’s song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet’s task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. Proof brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision. 

   ‘And it is through

this hole in the night that the wren sings.’

Published April 2023. Paperback, 74pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618763 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Livestream is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. Livestream 's poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is Livestream ’s constant ecology. The photographs are resonators, and witnesses.

Published September 2023. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618817 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Sleep guardians, unstep yourselves. Turn towards the outside. Recall his speaking look, the only sound in a city of whisperers where hurt is cradled in the palm of a hand. Cuts traced along ink lines, words like milk and pleasure and pain turned inside out and shaken from these pages. Rest your head upon that bosom. You are marooned on a pale island, lapped by gentle voices, careful footsteps, confidences. 

Pine Island is an experimental memoir written in the form of a series of letters to an unknown recipient. The book chronicles a year in the life of the author as she navigates family illness, bereavement and motherhood while honouring and cultivating the poetic life she has created. Pine Island documents a life unfolding and accounted for, with all its little victories and failures laid bare. Weaving family interactions and personal reflections with observations of the natural world and accounts of the weather, the book creates an intimate space in which the reader becomes a participant in an evolving present.

Shearsman Library Vol. 19
Published August 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618961 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest of the poems collected in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems (itself now out of print), which is itself difficult, and expensive, to obtain for readers outside the USA.

“Gustaf Sobin’s poems are not, in any superficial sense, ‘painterly’, but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin’s attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin’s world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious.” —Charles Tomlinson

Published September 2023. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618831[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in The Orphic Voice, describes as ‘…a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward.’ That could serve as worthy blurb for And And And. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a prima poieia, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn’t define, doesn’t categorize, doesn’t lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other…”  —Dan Beachy-Quick

Shearsman Library Vol. 17
Published June 2023. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619036 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought then to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is now revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

Shearsman Library Vol. 17
Published July 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619043 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published by Random House, New York, in 1971, and by Cape in London in 1972, with the material collected in it dating back to 1969. A major staging post in the author’s career, it pre-dates Lyrics for the Bride of God and The House of Leaves, Tarn’s other two major publications from the 1970s, and (apart from Bride of God) was the last major UK publication of his work. The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and ‘Choices’ were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the ‘October’ sequence, which ends with the moving and tragic “in memoriam” poem ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’.

Published October 2023. Paperback, 152pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618770 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Thurston’s poems always danced, as the early writings here demonstrate, in line and spacing, long before dance as a practice became his poetic focus and his ethical metaphor for other modes of action and introspection. They always measured a world to be moved into, fine lines across fine distinctions. His texts become cues for performance, in performance, but just as important is the insistent voice of the poem as it becomes increasingly the voice of the poet: restless, relentless, carrying us with it. This is all for us: ‘in dancing your own rite you don’t/ do it for yourself.’ This is crystallized in the culminating triumph of the lockdown sonnet sequence, ‘A Hard Grief’; it reaches out from our shared resignation and hope. We’re all ‘searching/ for the shapes that shadowed the meaning/ until the flow showed up’, and Thurston is our invaluable lead.” —Robert Sheppard

Edited by Ian Brinton, and with a Preface by Phil Maillard.
Published September 2023. Paperback, 130pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619098 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

One evening in 1961, in the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Surrey, 20-year-old Chris Torrance – solicitor’s clerk with novelistic ambitions – encountered a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians. For Torrance, this was “the most important day of my life”. Dazzled, he was soon joining in their activities: wild weekends in the country, his first scary public readings, and, from 1963, co-editing the poetry and jazz magazine Origins/Diversions. In literary terms, Torrance’s greatest influence from the group was Bill Wyatt, who introduced him to “useful short forms” like haiku, and to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Wyatt, later a prolific poet, translator, naturalist, and the first Zen monk ordained in Britain, remained a life-long friend and ally.

 […] In the spring of 1965 Torrance gave up his seven-year career in solicitors’ offices, and joined the local Parks Department as a labourer. As the title Green Orange Purple Red implies, he wanted a more sensual take on the world via his writing – a Keatsian ambition. About then he found a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry, and embarked on a lifelong ‘love affair’ with those writers and that energy. In particular, the enormous presence of Charles Olson, seemed to confirm that – in terms of big ambition and local detail – Torrance was on the right track with his writing.

Validation came in July 1966, with ‘The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision’. Torrance was cutting the grass outside the Laundry, when his vocation was revealed to him: ‘I’m going to be a poet’. It wasn’t a ‘vision’; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed (“I accepted it completely”). As The Voice diminished into the clatter of machinery and the chatter of the laundry girls, the path ahead lay clear. —Phil Maillard

Published June 2023. Paperback, 420pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32.50

ISBN 9781848618992 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

We issued the first half of David Hadbawnik's remarkable modern version of the Aeneid in 2015, and followed that with the second half in 2021. Both of those editions were fully illustrated. We now offer a more affordable package, with the entire text between one set of covers, but without the illustrations.

“…Hadbawnik’s ironic wit brings Virgil’s text to life for a contemporary readership even more impatient than its historic counterpart with the potential longueurs of traditional epic. [… his] version is fresh, irreverent, and radical.
      […] In sum, this is a startling and stimulating version of Virgil’s great epic for a twenty-first century readership which will engage student attention and has some interest for Translation Studies. Its lively irreverence reflects the way in which classical reception now (at last) feels able to tackle one of the central texts of Latin and European literature with up-to-date brio and gusto. Its in-your-face tactics will surely bring new readers and enthusiasts to the Aeneid, and has something to say to old ones too.” —Stephen Harrison, Translation and Literature

So our words      let them reach      then flicker into brightness.

Published September 2023. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618985 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Fugue State is John Wilkinson's fifteenth book of poems, and the most fiery. In it, the world is thicker than ever, crowded with all sorts of things, from futures to the exhumed bodies of 80 girls. His muse is a fly, try to catch it. His sentences zigzag. His unique fashion of figuration risks cutting ties with 'verisimilitude.' Opposing everything that blocks, hardens, locks, and pursues a single, choke-hold course, he takes his stand on the edge of chaos, not instituted law. Thus would he champion the precept of refreshment, not least the natural cycle of living things. More, he curses 'he misbegetting Gods [who] fuck in beach-huts of a cement Lethe.' Data-streams, a "horizon of ones and zeros," self-driving cars, drones, crypto-currency, robots – these are for him aspects of the concretization of modern culture. Fighting its sway, he is as steely as he is mercurial. Force is good if it's on the side of 'the vital artery.' In the last decade Wilkinson has become a master of the longish poem — here, for instance, 'East Lake' and 'Xipe Totec.' Of poets now writing in English, he is the freest and most elusive-on-principle, the most capable of pulling out a language blade and using it." —Calvin Bedient

"Contrapuntal, polyphonic, recursive and baroque, John Wilkinson’s Fugue State sounds the dissociative disorder of our time—and of history itself. 'May my transmission glorify each wandering, singular flight,' writes this poet; from the business traveller’s 'fugue in a transport café' to a fossilized 'insect on a rock discovered in its rock face itself rock,' Wilkinson charts fugitive flight paths through arrest and duration, myth and modernity, art and violence, interiority and collective life. Fugue State exposes us, like the flayed singer Marsyas, to our own 'wild skin unfolding.' From this vital material, we might fashion a flag for lifeworlds to come." —Srikanth Reddy