Shearsman Books | Australian and New Zealand Authors

Australian & New Zealand Poetry Catalogue


Ken Bolton  Selected Poems 1975–2010

Published 2012. Paperback, 212pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612099 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smudged, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Bolton, a poet & art critic—a 'Sydney' poet living in Adelaide, & working there at The Experimental Art Foundation—is editor of Little Esther books and at one time edited the magazines Magic Sam & Otis Rush. Major publications include Untimely Meditations and At The Flash & At The Baci—and, more recently, The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose.
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Ken Bolton Selected Poems 1975–2010

Ken Bolton  Species of Spaces

Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615762 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"…beautiful and sharp, critical and concise observations… gestures towards a neglected conversation between poetry and cultural studies in Australia." —Tim Wright, Cordite

"…from the erudite to the everyday, … the inconsequential, the tentative, are presented as more interesting than static profundities the author parodies in canonical poets … Yet his work is also a meditation on poetry" —Gig Ryan, Australian Book Review
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Ken Bolton Species of Spaces

Pam Brown  Home by Dark

Published 2013. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612884 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Pam Brown's work is fearless, acutely observant, witty and wry. She delights in the curiosities of the everyday, in notational sprezzatura, in the penetrating encapsulation of layers of time, chance and meaning with her twists of lexicon, diction and line break. This is a work of quotidian consternation, breaking through from irony to sheer fondness and painful shadows. She sees askew—and Home by Dark has its own poignant look at decades, bodies, and changes. Pam Brown is a wonderful writer, one of the scintillating wizards of Oz poetry." —Rachel Blau DuPlessis
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Pam Brown Home by Dark

M.T.C. Cronin  <More or Less Than> 1-100

Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 140pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562474 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Winner of the C J Dennis Prize in the Victoria State Premier's Awards. 
Winner of the Innovation Award in the Government of South Australia's 2006 Festival Awards. 
Shortlisted for both the NSW Premier's Award (Kenneth Slessor Prize) and 'The Age' Book of the Year Award.

The second British collection by this extraordinarily talented Australian poet, who is creating a stir in several parts of the world. Poems 1–13 and 88–100 from this one-hundred poem sequence appeared in Shearsman magazine, issue 54, but the full scope of the piece only becomes clear with publication of the complete book: one hundred poems, where poem 1 has 1 line, poem 2 has 2 lines, all the way to poem 50 with fifty lines, 51 with 49 lines and back down to 100 which is a one-liner again. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms. Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse.
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M.T.C. Cronin: <More or Less Than> 1-100

M.T.C. Cronin  Notebook of Signs

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.


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M.T.C. Cronin: Notebook of Signs

M.T.C. Cronin  in possession of loss

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



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M.T.C. Cronin  in possession of loss

MTC Cronin   A Ticket to Trilce

Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617506 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


"Cronin's remaking, re-envisaging, re-creation of César Vallejo's astonishing masterpiece Trilce enables a re-imagining of many of Vallejo's lifelong obsessions: childhood, the family unit, poverty, injustice and the anarchic joy of language. Just as in Vallejo there is an intimate self-exposure taking place alongside and within the disruption of language. The social structures that marginalise people and their experiences are seen as embodied in the language structures and conventions rigidified in traditional poetic and prosaic structures. Cronin, just like Vallejo, seeks to break both open. All the levels of life—the banal, the most elevated, the erotic, the pragmatic— collapse into each other. A joyous sense of multiple voices liberates the poetic from tired patterns: "All these things we use for walls/ when the walls fall down!" (XVIII). Much of Cronin's play with Vallejo's 1922 experimental sequence originates in the gender difference between herself and Vallejo and the humour to be found in male-centred assumptions. A Ticket to Trilce provides admission to a private female stocktake of an early 20th Century classic in a contemporary Australian setting. A lover of Vallejo herself, Cronin provides us with a passport to another version of his great vision." —Peter Boyle

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MTC Cronin - A Ticket to Trilce

M.T.C. Cronin & Peter Boyle  How does a man who is dead reinvent his body? 
  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.



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M.T.C. Cronin & Peter Boyle: How does a man who is dead reinvent his body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli

Lynn Davidson  Islander

Published 2019. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616325 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Not for sale in Australia / New Zealand. Available there from Victoria University Press.

The quivering luminosity of Islander is the rippling movement of the sea in sunlight, reflecting at once here, at once there, and then dissolving the distinctions. From Scotland to the Antipodes and back again, Davidson maps the prosaic alongside the sacred, inviting us into a gentle dissolution of place-based story, towards a more non-dual perspective of being in the world. This is the work of a cartographer of ‘ancient light’.  —Em Strang

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Lynn Davidson - Islander

Laurie Duggan  Compared to What — Selected Poems 1971-2003

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.




Laurie Duggan: Compared to What – Selected Poems 1971-2003

Laurie Duggan  The Ash Range

Published 2005. Paperback 9x6ins, 248pp, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9780907562696 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The Ash Range is a long documentary poem that mixes prose, poetry, reportage and illustrations — somewhat in the manner of William Carlos Williams' Paterson — to narrate a history of the settlers' engagement with Gippsland, a southerly region of Victoria State. Like Paterson, which concerns itself with small-town New Jersey, The Ash Range is not constrained by its locality, but instead finds the universal in its extended examination of the local. While the work is enormously ambitious in its mix of materials, the whole is welded into a solid structure that facilitates communication of the theme, even to an audience that is unaware of the territory it describes.
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Laurie Duggan: The Ash Range

Laurie Duggan  Crab & Winkle

Published 2009. Paperback, 164pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610491 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


Crab & Winkle is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.

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Laurie Duggan: Crab & Winkle

Laurie Duggan  The Pursuit of Happiness

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.



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Laurie Duggan The Pursuit of Happiness

Laurie Duggan  Allotments

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



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Laurie Duggan Allotments

Laurie Duggan  No particular place to go

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


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Laurie Duggan  No particular place to go

Laurie Duggan  Selected Poems 1971–2017

Published 2018. Paperback, 290pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615731 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“I think of how Pound defined the image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’; and, still being thoroughly sane back in 1913, he went on to say: ‘the natural object is always the adequate symbol’. Such an imagist doctrine has always been at the heart of Laurie Duggan’s sharp-eyed work, ever since the days when he was at the core of a group who got together at Monash, back in the 1960s.” —Chris Wallace-Crabbe
 
“Duggan’s is a poetry that determines to surprise: almost daring a reader to exclaim: you wrote like this about that?” —Alan Wearne, Sydney Morning Herald
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Laurie Duggan Selected Poems 1971-2017

Clive Faust  Past Futures — Collected Poems

Published 2017. Paperback, 304pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848615403 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: ‘In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones—even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them—and it is not nothing—is an economy of means. 
     Ultimately the variety—of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them, deceptive—because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible, because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.’
       I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit—adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the
way to being mechanically replicated by it.
       Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply 'the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act', in the words of Cid Corman." —Clive Faust
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Clive Faust   Past Futures — Collected Poems

Clive Faust   Maxims, Minims, Thoughts, Essayettes and Mini-Descriptions

Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Few men know death: we do not usually undergo it deliberately, but unthinkingly and out of habit and most men die because men cannot help dying” —François de La Rochefoucauld

“And we open our eyes and feel our way in the dark.” —William Bronk 

“The changes that have occurred in places you return to, the demise of attitudes that once seemed ‘inevitable’, show not so much how things change with time, but how transitory they always were. The fundamental truth is not that things change, but that they have hardly ever existed.”

“All my friends, dead for so many years – even their ghosts are dying.”

“The moon at last quarter sliding out of black cloud, giving body to darkness.” —Clive Faust
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Clive Faust Maxims

Angela Gardner  Views of the Hudson

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. 



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Angela Gardner: Views of the Hudson

Angela Gardner  The Told World

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. 



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Angela Gardner  The Told World

Angela Gardner  The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette

Published 2021. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617391 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2021.


The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette
tells the tale of the author's great-grandmother's cousin, Richard Parker, a cabin-boy on a yacht being sailed from Southampton to Sydney in 1884 for Jack Want a prominent New South Wales barrister and politician. The Mignonette foundered in the South Atlantic far from land, and after nineteen days with no sight of any other vessel to rescue them, and with all four in a terrible state, the captain and mate decided to murder and eat poor Richard. Days later the remaining sailors were rescued and returned to Falmouth to face justice. The original trial at Exeter Assize was moved to The Old Bailey due to huge public interest and the need to clarify the Empire’s maritime legal framework regarding what had been common practice.
        The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette takes place in the West Country, at sea and in Australia. It explores power relationships, individual motives, survivor guilt and self-justification, and justice and divine retribution. Poetry heightens the tension and drives the narrative telling the personal and human story of one of the most important legal judgements in English Law—that necessity is not a defence for murder—and is still taught at universities the world over.

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Angela Gardner - The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette

Liam Guilar   Presentment of Englishry

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.


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Liam Guilar  A Presentment of Englishry

Liam Guilar  A Man of Heart

Published 2023. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848618602 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Precisely between their God and the Devil, heaven and hell, white and black, the man of heart walks through.

In the fifth century, Britain has been abandoned by the Roman empire. Threatened by raiders along its coasts, an army massing in the north, increasing numbers of migrants, self-interest and civil war, Britannia is disintegrating. Vortigern is given the task of saving the province. A Man of Heart is the second part of A Presentment of Englishry; it continues to follow the narrative trajectory of Laȝamon’s Brut, a late 12th century version of The Legendary History, the foundation myth of Britain.”

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Liam Guilar - A Man of Heart

Martin Harrison  Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems

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.

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Martin Harrison Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems

Martin Harrison   The Kangaroo Farm

Shearsman Library 15
Published 2020. Paperback, 82pp, 9x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617018 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949–2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer: "calm, intelligent, long-lined verse letters that engagingly bring us to a world where the ‘sea-dusks are sea-dusks flowing far inland’", as Nigel Wheale pout it when reviewing the first edition for the London Review of Books.

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Martin Harrison - The Kangaroo Farm

Barry Hill  Naked Clay

Published 2012. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611870 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Naked Clay is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud — "the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art"' as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences. Barry Hill has created a unique space for the senses and the intellect to be prompted, explored and disturbed.
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Barry Hill Naked Clay

Barry Hill  Grass Hut Work

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

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Barry Hill  Grass Hut Work

Barry Hill  Eagerly We Burn — Selected Poems 1980–2018

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.

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Barry Hill  Eagerly We Burn – Selected Poems 1980-2018

Emma Lew  Anything the Landlord Touches

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.



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Emma Lew: Anything the Landlord Touches

John Mateer  Unbelievers, or 'The Moor'

Published 2013. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20. Not for sale in Australia/New Zealand.
ISBN 9781848612815 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

World Literature Today has described John Mateer as "the most recent reincarnation of of the international poet". Born in South Africa, John Mateer has for the past two decades been documenting the world seen from the Indian Ocean edge of Australia, travelling frequently to Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Unbelievers or 'The Moor', like his previous surveys of the visages of the Portuguese Empire in Southern Barbarians and of his memories of South Africa in Ex-White—described by novelist J.M. Coetzee as "rolling back the tide of forgetting"—recovers aspects of the hidden past that haunt our present. In Unbelievers, Mateer seeks out evidence of the importance of the Islamic and Arabic history in places as diverse as Dubai, Seville, Cairo and the Portuguese village of Monsanto. He is not only interested in the past but in the deep present, its poetics.
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John Mateer Unbelievers, or 'The Moor'

John Mateer   João  (sonnets)

Published 2019. Paperback, 70pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616493 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Not for sale in Australia/New Zealand. Available there from Giramondo Publishing.

João is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is João of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for “John” and his epithet – “Place of Gold” – is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu. The linked poems reveal João not only as a cosmopolitan traveller, but also as someone sensative to others preconceptions to how they are also haunted by history. The book's concluding poems evoke a geneology for João's restlessness: Cape Town-born parents, Cape Malay friends, a Brazilian uncle, and the great-grandmother from an island, Tristan da Cunha, in the middle of the Atlantic. In this book of richly dense sonnets John Mateer presents us with the experiences of someone who travels the world, like so many of us, to understand himself and his place in a shared, global history.
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John Mateer  Joao (sonnets)

John Mateer   That Nostalgia

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

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John Mateer - That Nostalgia

Alice Miller  The Limits

Published 2014. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613324 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] 

Not for sale in Australia or New Zealand. Available in those territories from Auckland University Press.
 
The poems in this extraordinary full-length collection by Alice Miller ask you to force yourself beyond your own boundaries. They are curious, restless, bold; they marry lyrical music and intricate metaphor as they search for other human voices beyond the rumblings of the apocalypse and the stubbornness of myth.
 From bare battlefields to crisp Antarctica to the gates of Troy, from re-written history to love story, these poems ask for something more from the world than just riding till the spoke breaks. A poet for whom one way's easy but an easy way's / worse, Miller in this collection traces a path that leads beyond our limits — to where we set the sky on silent, where we're braver than science, and where we try to un-glimpse what we've lost.
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Alice Miller The Limits

David Miller  Afterword

Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618046 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]


Afterword is a long poem in fragments, with some long lines of poetry folded over, as it were, onto the next line(s) of the page, as in Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsberg.

It is a long poem in fragments, but it might also be seen as a poem sequence: of memories and meditations, dreams and (for want of a better word) visions. It’s increasingly invaded by images of destruction and desolation: of nature, of animals, of humankind; with those images prefigured by the opening passages. 

At the end of the text, the negative emphasis is “turned” upon and against itself into the language of transition. It’s a poem that’s concerned with limits and the possible surpassing or exceeding of limits. 

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David Miller - Afterword

David Miller  Reassembling Still — Collected Poems

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.


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David Miller  Reassembling Still - Collected Poems

David Miller  Spiritual Letters (Series 6)

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

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David Miller  Spiritual Letters (Series 6)

David Miller  The Waters of Marah

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.

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David Miller  The Waters of Marah

Gig Ryan  Manners of an Astronaut

The Shearsman Library 4
Published 2018. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615885  [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Manners of an Astronaut was Gig Ryan’s second collection, from 1984, and confirmed the striking impression she had made with her first book. It has been unavailable for some time although parts have reappeared in her Selected Poems (Bloodaxe in the UK, Giramondo in Australia, as New & Selected). As Martin Johnston said in a blurb for the first edition: “it marks … something new in Australian poetry: a deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative’ in verse of hallucinatory vividness and continual wry wit, lacerating without self-pity, demanding without pretentiousness or condescension. No one will find it comfortable reading. Ryan’s craftsmanship is impeccable, her vision bullshit-proof: both qualities to be greeted with loud hosannas.”
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Gig Ryan  Manners of an Astronaut

Sam Sampson  Everything Talks

Published 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18. Not for sale in Australia or New Zealand.
ISBN 9781905700486 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A first book by a young New Zealand poet, whose work—experimental in form—owes much to music and to developments in American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. While consciously stretching the limits of the poem, Sampson's work remains very communicative, powerful for both ear and eye. Simultaneously published in New Zealand by Auckland University Press.

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Sam Sampson: Everything Talks

Nathan Shepherdson  how to spear sleep

Published 2021. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617414 [Download a PDF sample from this book here.]


A late-life, late 1960s Celan straddles the perception and the hallucination that akin to Abraham he must choose between Poetry and his own son. The test is in the asking rather than what is being asked. It is not his belief but the readiness within that belief where the conflict exists. To adhere to the story, to countenance a different ending, to inject the necessary steps into his feet to ascend the idea and the mountain. In how to spear sleep Nathan Shepherdson has improvised a sequence of poems from a footnote in Celan scholarship. In sparse, anecdotal language, each poem seems extracted via a Beuysian mode of thought-sculpture. Collectively they drift like spores from a different hemisphere across the enormity of their subject.

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Nathan Shepherdson - how to spear sleep

Alan Wearne  The Lovemakers

Published 2008. Paperback, 688p, 9x6ins, £24.95 / $40
ISBN 9781905700967 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Centered on Australian suburbia in the 60s, 70s and 80s The Lovemakers explores the inner and outer tensions of families, friendships and society whilst charting the sleaze, mayhem and humanity that go to make a nation's life. A remarkable verse novel, this edition brings together the two prize-winning volumes published in Australia – now out of print – for a first single-volume edition.

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Alan Wearne: The Lovemakers

Petra White   That Galloping Horse

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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Petra White - That Galloping Horse

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