British Poetry Titles: Authors H to J

Published 2014. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613560 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In Rampant Inertia Alan Halsey, identified by Tony Lopez as a 'normally secret and invisible language spy', is found going about his familiar business, dismantling the rhetoric of Austerity while tracking scientific and other uncertainties, rereading Burton in the light of the Arab Spring, miming Our Mutual Friend , transcribing a racehorse's gossip, mapping the bricked-up public toilets of Sheffield, tapping Lewis and Clark's conversation in the Lost Trail Pass or fitfully failing to translate Aretino's erotica. Is 'Baa baa black sheep' a political poem? He thinks so. Rampant Inertia completes a trilogy of books, following Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada 2009) and Even if only out of (Veer 2011) although it may be the third in a tetralogy. Selections from Halsey's earlier work appeared in Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989), Wittgenstein's Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006).

Published 2017. Paperback, 260pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848615397 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Selected Poems 1988-2016 focuses on Alan Halsey’s longer poems from the period and brings together the previously scattered sequences Ars Poetica, Tracks & Tracts of the Lizopard, A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts and Latin for Today : The Sequel . It includes some revised and expanded texts such as the John Dee libretto Loagaeth alongside poems written since Rampant Inertia , published by Shearsman in 2014.

Published 2022. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618459

What are the captions using us for?

Halsey's series of diagrams and quatrains for Into the Interior is suggestive of a journey through the rebus-like territory of thought itself. Corcoran doubles the quatrains in answering him back, as if such a dialogue might be how to talk to a friend exploring the enigmatic signs of the journey remembered from long ago and made present again.

Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us Your Thinking Tracts or Nation s (West House 2001), A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).

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 2016. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / £23

ISBN 9781848614604 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]

CLASP is an exercise in collective remembering – with, as Lawrence Upton’s essay suggests, a consciousness of memory work as also a process of selecting, forgetting and inventing. The original plan had been to focus on the 1970s, the decade during which [Ken Edwards and I] had co-edited Alembic with Peter Barry. Some of those we approached felt they could not usefully remember enough of their poetry activities in this period; some were reluctant to return to the past. Also, as the project developed, it became clear that the original plan wouldn’t work: the history did not fit neatly into the limits of the decade. We would have to start earlier to understand the roots of 1970s London poetry, and we would have to stray into the 1980s to see how some of the debates and actions of the 1970s played out. —Robert Hampson, from the Introduction

Published 2023 . Paperback, 724pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.50 / US$45. 

ISBN 9781848618558 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]

Lee Harwood’s work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice, speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from complex cut ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.

        From his earliest pamphlet title illegible (1965) to his last collection The Orchid Boat (2014), New Collected Poems assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in pamphlet or book form in broadly chronological order, fashioned upon the ordering of Harwood’s own 2004 Collected Poems . Some excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected material from the end of his career completes this rich body of work.

Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 521pp. £19.95 / $30. OUT OF PRINT.

ISBN 9780907562405

A major event, this volume was the first career-spanning collection of Lee Harwood's work, and its publication was timed to coincide with the author's 65th birthday in 2004. Most of Lee Harwood's work is currently out of print, including the large-scale Selected Poems ( crossing the frozen river ) published by Paladin in the late 1980s, and this Collected makes all of it available once again, including some hard-to-find material and some recent uncollected work.

Published 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, Price £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610019 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



To accompany Lee Harwood's new Selected Poems , we offer also this book-length collection of interviews with Harwood by his long-time friend and admirer, Kelvin Corcoran — himself also a Shearsman author. An invaluable opportunity to "hear" Harwood talking about poetry and about his own work.

Published 2020. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616974 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Ickerbrow Trig , the book, is simply a collection of poems written since A Cure for Woodness . As for the book's title, it’s simply the remnant of a bonnet-bee and an exhausted pun. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map, though Ickerbrow is better known to followers of the Ordnance Survey as High Brown Knoll.  (Michael Haslam)

“In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England” —David Wheatley, The Literary Review , on Scaplings (included in this volume).

Published 2009. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610217 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Ralph Hawkins' poems always give the impression of turning up late and being drunk when they do arrive. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules and values." —Andrew Duncan

Published 2015. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614208. [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“Ralph Hawkins’ poems minimise the gap of ‘constructive effort’ between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the “mediated” pleasure of the poem. […] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of “direct experiences” from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins’ method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. […] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps.” —Andrew Duncan

Published 2007. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. OUT OF PRINT.

ISBN 9781905700295

This volume combines a revised text of the first part of The Memory of the Drift (written 1993-1999, and originally published in 2001) with the three interlocking, previously uncollected, books in which its argument is extended: In the Common Era, Dog Mercury and Vicinal . 

Published 2014. Paperback, 292pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848613041 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Openings is a sequel to Jeremy Hooker's earlier Welsh Journal and Upstate : A North American Journal , permitting us a peak over the shoulder of a fine English poet at work, and on the move.

Published 2016. Paperback, 190pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615090 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Diary of a Stroke is a poet’s journal with a difference. After suffering a stroke in July 1999, Jeremy Hooker kept a diary of his experience in hospital and of the subsequent period of recuperation at home, which ended with his return to work shortly after January 1, 2000. As in his other published journals, he observed the life around him, with notations of the living moment giving rise to reflection. Closeness to death gave his thinking about questions of ultimate meaning a special urgency. As time passed, he found the diary becoming a memoir of his early years. The past was coming back to him in ‘scenes’, which were ‘quick with sensation and laden with memory’. As a consequence, he was able to write about people dear to him – especially his parents and brothers – who had played a formative part in his life. At the same time as he was learning to walk again, and describing his immediate Somerset environment, he was remembering and vividly describing growing up in rural southern England during and after the Second World War.

Published 2019. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616721 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Word and Stone is questioning poetry which explores the ground between language that seeks meaning, and the obduracy of matter, and between life and what seems dead. Its concern is with a sense of the sacred, and the possibility of renewing words such as ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ in a materialist culture. But it celebrates the material world too, drawing upon nature and history in Hooker’s native Hampshire and his adoptive South Wales. It contains a number of elegies, paying tribute to friends, and to poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, and Christopher Middleton, and the Americans James Schuyler and Charles Reznikoff. Word and Stone is concerned overall with ‘quickness’: how words may animate stone, and intimate the life of the dead.

Published 2020. Paperback, 278pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848617070 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This volume draws on over 50 years of poetry written by a poet who stands a little askew to the dominant modes in Britain: an Englishman in Wales, and an English poet with a decided admiration for the work of both George Oppen and David Jones, two very different Modernist exemplars, whose work often seems to be admired rather than engaged with in this archipelago. Jeremy Hooker is a literary explorer, and a poet with a powerful sense of place, whose joy in landscape and his surroundings shines through his body of work.

"I am a lyric poet who seeks to free himself from the limitations of a narrow subjectivity." — Jeremy Hooker 

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

Published 2018. Paperback, 184pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615786 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“James is decidedly un-English in his love of French and German poetry, in his unembarrassed (and unembarrassing) celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and in his Marxist and republican politics – which seem to legitimate a taste for the finer things on the grounds of international solidarity against a British suppression of the capacity for joy … John James is one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry.” —John Wilkinson

Published 2014. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613676 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The figure of ra-t slithers through these pages like the Zelig of London Town—an ocular witness at every juncture of its history. His split name makes him a fractured and contradictory creature. Always recognizable he is also hesitant and obscure, not unlike this text which at every turn employs discontinuity and slippage as formal strategies whilst being as familiar as nursery rhyme. Ra-t is a survivor, but you won’t find him—he is today and gone! —Jeff Hilson

Published August 2023. Chapbook, 28pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £7.50 / $10.95
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.