Shearsman Books | Australian and New Zealand Authors
Published 2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700110 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Another remarkable collection from this prize-winning Australian author. Her previous Shearsman collection, the totally original <More or Less Than> 1-100 won two of Australia's major literary awards; this new volume is as path-breaking as the last and proves that she is one of the most talented poets of her generation.
Published 2014. Paperback, 114pp, 8 x 5.25ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613829 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness, almost a minimalism, that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem, it thinks our world without telling openly. As in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet , everything hangs together and speaks the whole though one can’t exactly say how. Like Celan and Rilke before her, Cronin is a risk-taker: she can say 'love', 'loss', 'death', 'the heart', without tying the words to recognizable stories or hiding behind the game of avoiding meaning. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions. Compared to so much that is written in the English-speaking world, Cronin’s poetry IS so different and so itself." — Peter Boyle
The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610163 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Subtitled The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli — a neglected 20th century poet influenced by Celan and Vallejo—this collection represents the merging of two contemporary Antipodean poets into the consciousness of a mysterious third.
Published 2005. Paperback 9x6ins, 224pp. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9780907562610. A few copies of this book remain with the publisher.
This book is Duggan's first collection to be published in Britain and the USA, and is a career overview which serves to introduce a vibrant and colourful new voice which will sound familiar at first — with its obvious influences from the New York School — but will then sound stranger, as a distinctive Australian element emerges, an element moreover that communicates well across borders. Withdrawn after the publication of the author's Selected Poems 1971–2017.
Published 2012. Paperback, 94pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611993 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Pursuit of Happiness collects shorter poems written during and after the composition of Crab & Winkle , and concludes with 'The Nathan Papers', an earlier and longer work written in Australia. The poems address the state of the art and the state of the nation, investigating the spaces left for pleasure in this new dark age. As anthropological investigations, they shift from Robert Creeley, burgers and South African wine on Charing Cross Road to images of Santa Claus in Anglo-Greek Paphos and Japanese tourist signs in the Brontë country.
Published 2014. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613553 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"The small poems . . . slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines." — Fiona Wright
"Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." —Peter Riley
Published 2017. Paperback, 102p, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615212 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“We’ve all seen how, after a night of drones, an experimental poet comes out to read, wielding the vernacular, and the room lights up. There’s laughter, joy, play, confusion, armation, all the things that make poetry what it is. This is why poets in the generation including Duggan, Pam Brown and Ken Bolton are so accessible to readers and listeners, because of their interest in the page-as-field (perhaps an ‘Olsonesque’ sense), and the everyday vernacular. The only reason Conventional Verse Culture still claims to own the (ever-elusive) ‘average reader’ is because of the structures and frameworks in place that tell people they do. This is not because people on the street speak like CVC.” —A J Carruthers
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610804 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]
Views of the Hudson , written during a visit to New York in 2008, explores ideas of belonging and displacement. In a flood of images from this overcrowded information-rich city it weaves a narrative that suggests both the intoxication and dangers of believing in Promised Lands. Views of the Hudson shows the life of a city that is complicated and enriched for being at once both sacred and profane.
Published 2014. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613713 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish losses from gains. The world we live in constantly changes and so how to make sense of it all? What is the relationship between mind and body when the mind’s world is built from the body’s sensations? What will we be when we return from war, from love? Who will we be in the post-human machine world? How will genetic manipulation change us and our representation of ourselves? The Told World contemplates some themes of ‘The Pastoral’ in a contemporary world and explores the stories that can be told from that chiaroscuro.
Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616622 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Are you English?’ is never a neutral question. In the 11th century a ‘Presentment of Englishry’ was the offering of proof that a dead man was English and therefore unimportant. In the 12th century Laȝamon, a priest living in the small settlement of Areley Regis by the River Severn, set out to ‘tell the noble deeds of the English, who they were, and where they came from.’ No one knows why he choose to write his 16,000-plus lines in English.
Taking his life and poem as their starting point, the stories in this collection of poems move outward from the legendary arrival of the Trojans in Britain, finding echoes and similarities in stories from Angevin England and Ireland, the prehistoric tin trade and the arrival of the first English as raiders and migrants in a fading Roman Britain.
Published 2008. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610088 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Not for sale in Australia/New Zealand. Available there from UWA Publishing.
Subtle and sharply lyrical, these poems shimmer on the eye while being deeply held at the back of the mind. Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.
Published 2016. Paperback, 126pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614758 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In the ancient tradition of poet-as-traveler-and-seer, Barry Hill’s Grass Hut Work is, like Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior , both a travelogue of Japan and a journey inward, into what we’ll call the Soul—for lack of a better word. He sees with fresh eyes the merger of history and presence, and presents us vital insight at every turn. “In the grass hut,” he says, “I strive to be nobody,” and thereby becomes an everyman, an exemplar, a master and unsui, a beginner. Beautiful and quietly powerful, this is work to return to again and again. —Sam Hamill
Published 2019. Paperback, 194pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848616080 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Barry Hill’s tenth book of poetry selects from his Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud , which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, 2013, and described by John Kinsella as a ‘masterpiece’; Grass Hut Work (2016), his excursion into Hiroshima and Japanese poetry, which Sam Hamill said was ‘beautiful and quietly powerful’; Lines for Birds (2009) his collaboration with the painter John Wolseley, was acclaimed by Nathaniel Tarn as ‘a miraculous gift of a book’; The Inland Sea (2001), which David Malouf described as ‘a mixture of intense contemplation and powerful eroticism’; Ghosting William Buckley (1993), deemed by Barrett Reid a ‘major work’ of ‘stories, thought and music’ from the encounter of a ‘wild white man’ and the indigenous people of the Australian frontier. This Selected also includes recent poetry—lyrical, political and in memoriam.
Published 2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 80pp. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562924 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Not for sale in Australia/New Zealand. Available there from Giramondo Publishing.
First published in Australia by Giramondo Publishing of Sydney, this collection won two prestigious awards – the 2003 C.J. Dennis Award (the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry) and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award (the Queensland Premier's Prize for Poetry). The author's second collection, Anything the Landlord Touches is a tour-de-force full of extraordinary visions.
Published November 2023. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23.
Not for sale in Australia / New Zealand.
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 2014. Paperback, 318pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613317 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller’s poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters project and his visual poems.
Published 2015. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614550 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“The word ‘spiritual’ is, in this volume, ripped away from the New Age and returned to its sources in Kabbalah and early Christian (gnostic) writings. But it carries with it the world as we have it now. A heap of horrors, remnants, a sense of the feminine under assault, and the drive to love. Therefore the dimensions are multiple and unstable. To be human is to be a spiritual entity more aligned with nature than with culture, and therefore to rebel. I am happy to have and to hold this book.” —Fanny Howe, on Series 1-5 of Spiritual Letters
Published 2005. Paperback, 113pp, 8.5x 5.5ins. £12.95. Not for sale in North America.
ISBN 9780907562665
The Waters of Marah brings together the best of David Miller's non-poetic output. The prose here however does include work that would be classified as prose-poetry in most quarters, as well as the longer work Tesserae which could be better described as experimental fiction. These pieces tend also to have verse interludes, which further confuses the definition of what category they actually belong to. In the end however, categories are irrelevant, and the work can be read on its own terms, be it prose, be it prose-poetry, be it fiction, be it poetry. This is musical work that explores the para-meters of the sayable in a manner that does not repel the reader but rather draws him/her in as a participant in a remarkable enterprise.
Published 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619142 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Petra White is a singular voice in Australian poetry. She is known for a style that doesn’t fit neatly into any of its categories, a free-verse of startling energy and surprise.
That Galloping Horse
is her sixth collection, and the first to introduce her to UK readers. Written at first in Melbourne and then while resident in London, Berlin and Belfast between 2017 and 2023, these poems are haunted by places, but they also reach into the spiritual and the imaginary. Thirteen elegies take personal grief as their starting point and travel widely, mediating anguish through delight in language and the physical world. Rich in their variety and tones, these elegies are inhabited by the Ukraine War, the nature of modern work, domestic life in the reality of planetary demise, marriage and familial love. Alongside them, short mysterious lyrics build layers of irony and raw narratives traverse the Nullarbor Highway and the atomic cloud of Maralinga.
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