Ian Davidson At a Stretch
Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 109pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562443
The author's second full-scale collection, following a series of fine chapbooks, and his largest collection so far. Ian Davidson is one of the most exciting and innovative English-language poets currently writing in Wales, and his radical engagement with landscape in these poems offers new ways of using and approaching landscape within the context of a poem.
Ian Davidson As if Only
Published 2007. Paperback, 9x6ins, 84pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700080 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The author's second Shearsman collection, following his successful first large collection, At a Stretch
(2004). The author says of this book: "These poems were written in Bangor, in north Wales, in Barcelona, in London, on the Baltic coast and in Fez and Marrakech. Despite the distances involved they are the result of a period of introspection and self-possession. Travel doesn't necessarily broaden the mind. In some cases only the long lines would do, and the language had to be chewed over, while in others, when the town was quiet and the blood had stopped pounding in my head, I could clip the tone and measure out the words a few at a time."
Ian Davidson Partly in Riga and Other Poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611306 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Partly in Riga and other poems
is a book in five sections, covering themes of birth (the arrival of a new son), travel in Latvia, in Greece and in Wales, contemporary politics, and the endless of vagaries and mysteries of people. "I like people, though they disturb me sometimes." (Ian Davidson, from the Foreword)
Ian Davidson On the Way to Work
Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £6.50 / $9.95
These poems were written on the way to work, walking the two and a half miles from near Saltwell Park in Gateshead to Northumbria University in Newcastle. The journey took me through Gateshead’s residential streets, its town centre and over the Tyne, often by the High Level Bridge. I’d try to write something in my head every day before I got to work, while still free of the numbing rush of its demands. Sometimes a whole poem would appear, at other times one or two words or lines would shift and repeat through seemingly endless variations, refusing to settle.
Ian Davidson New and Selected Poems
Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618268 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in this selection range from recent poetry written in Ian Davidson’s new home in Ireland (in ‘Coming and Going’) to work gathered from his collections with Shearsman and Spectacular Diseases, written when he lived in north Wales. This volume also makes available long out-of-print sequences from West House, Oystercatcher and Wild Honey, work that was published to some critical acclaim and was described at the time of its publication as ‘some of the most exciting and innovative poetry currently being written in Wales’. Combining human and non-human concerns, the social and the environmental, the poems chart a growing interest in the ways the landscape and the moving body interact. They focus on events such as an archaeological dig off the west coast of Ynys Môn, on a walk around the Llŷn peninsula and exploring the coast at Aberystwyth, but never lose sight of the gritty politics of language in those communities or the ways the frictions of mobility are part of the writing process.
Lynn Davidson Islander
Published 2019. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18. Not for sale in Australia/New Zealand.
ISBN 9781848616325 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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
Patricia Debney Littoral
Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612938 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A year after her young son's diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, Patricia Debney spent six weeks writing in a beach hut on the North Kent coast. From the often bleak, always shifting winds and seas, prose poems of loss and love emerged.
"Memorable and moving without excess or strain, Debney's prose poems are brilliant in themselves and important contributions to the genre. The prose is unfussy, confident while subtle; the command of rhythm and use of imagery, expertly crafted. A refreshing and original collection." — Jane Monson
Patricia Debney Gestation
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613669 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Patricia Debney’s first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books, 2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. A novel, Losing You (bluechrome) appeared in 2007. Her second collection of prose poems, Littoral , was published by Shearsman Books in 2013. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Exploring fragmentation, delusion and parental ageing, the long poem Gestation forms part of her next collection, Baby.
Peter Dent Handmade Equations
Published 2005. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 100pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562658 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A collection of over eighty poems written since the beginning of the new century, this book showcases Peter Dent's remarkable investigations into the possibilities of the modern lyric and the possibilities of language.
Peter Dent Tripping Daylight
Published 2012. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612341 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One might be looking at a game of consequences with serially switched pronouns … or a stranger-than-life biography where missed moves and alternatives compete with the actualité for attention. Nothing here, however, is blessed by what is commonly understood as 'finality', realised or imagined. Tripping Daylight, Peter Dent's latest collection, finds its unlikely protagonist connecting (or attempting to connect) the experiences of a 'life lived' with a welter of convenient 'truths'—known or suspected—and which may be seen as arguable every step of the way. Shared words and wisdom, occasioned by this singular work, allow both for the making of an expansive public field and the leaving of private tracks.
Peter Dent A Wind-Up Collider
Published 2019. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616660 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Like any self-respecting cloud the words of this, Dent’s latest volume, have occasion to slip into and out of focus as well as flit between meanings. To recognise such moments is to ensure we are party to an intrigue more about delight and imagination than dissecting (or, heaven help us, directing) a life. An eye for the weather (physical/mental) is a cannier companion here than any Baedeker or mind that frets. To be fully present within the action of the text is to see that what we’d first interpreted as ‘the finishing line’ was, shockingly, ‘birds migrating’. The mind is vulnerable, matter is contrary, life is in a state of flux. ‘Skip all that tosh about modelling clouds: for every big storm / or soul in torment, I’ve a shedful of u/s machinery.’ This resourceful and energetic new collection acknowledges not just the world we (think we) know but the many and various others. Being here, being reactive to ‘all that is’, is key.
Mark Dickinson Tender Geometries
Published 2015. Paperback, 130pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
"Indignation at environmental injury and economic corrosion gives us indicative texts capable of sensing what is being damaged and waylaying us at that point to be continuously co-invented – but this can only be reached through an intricate lyric inoffensiveness once again testing the scope of poetry itself. Ambivalent, self-contaminating vitalities are combed through for their appraisals of renewal but which are not thread-bare so much as thread-aware, tangle-replete enough to take part in reprisals of praise." (Peter Larkin)
Mark Dickinson Networks
Published November 2022. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617650 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“In this brilliant collection, Mark Dickinson ranges – with a passionate, weary restlessness – over bird, plant, monetary, sexual, and internet networks, but mocks any easy connection between these. His tone varies from lovingly intimate to bitingly witty, picking up language from taxonomic systems, social media, travel and nature writing, but all the while retaining a lyric intensity and sense of dynamic, layered, threatened living spaces. We feel, powerfully, the search for values we might live by, but the work demonstrates again and again that this is hard to come by: ‘Gathering a sense of love from a hole of black earth is dark dark, & everything is leaving’.” —Harriet Tarlo
Tom Docherty If the Mute Timber
Published 2022. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618091 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Tom Docherty’s first collection,
If the Mute Timber , begins ‘not with a book / nor even an attentive ear’, but with the elusive fragment of its title. The poems situate themselves
in medias res : among birds or gravestones, between lines of prayer, in the flux of appearances. Places without words become focal points: the poems seek articulation in life before birth and after death; in animal and imagined lives; in works of music, painting, and architecture; and in the varied silences of human and divine relationships. In one sense, the poems are variations on the
vanitas – but the transience of life and its artefacts is transposed to an offering, a potential key in which to register the work. When followed to their natural end, fragments become sentences, notes are sung.
John Donne Poems (1633)
Shearsman Classics series, No. 21.
Published 2015. Paperback, 332pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613874 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume—presented in the original spelling, with all its inconsistencies—reproduces the text of Poems by J.D. With Elegies on the Authors Death, published in 1633, two years after Donne’s death. Very little of Donne’s poetry had been published during his lifetime but it was much prized and many manuscript copies survive from the period, although only one is in the author’s hand. This first edition of Poems by J.D. remains a monument and—unusually for posthumous publications of this kind—very little of the contents was not Donne’s work, only two poems having been incorrectly attributed.
Nikolai Duffy Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop
Published 2013. Paperback, 190pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612778 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"A sequence of fragments seems the most appropriate form for a work of this kind, introductory, surveying, essentially personal, marked, as with all things, by my own reading and preoccupations. 'Maybe,' Waldrop writes, 'the essence of the fragment is that it cuts out explanation, an essential act of poetry.' It constitutes, Waldrop continues, a 'lessening of distinctness, of "identity."' I do not claim to be comprehensive. Nor do I mean to speak for Waldrop or her work but simply to speak about some of its aspects, its various senses of poetics, the shifting relationships between theory and practice, to draw out a number of examples and to trace certain lines of thinking, ways of thinking." —Nikolai Duffy
Andrew Duncan Switching and Main Exchange
Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 62pp, £7.50
ISBN 9780907562276
This collection consists of the second half of the author's Threads of Iron manuscript, subject of much discussion since its partial appearance in magazines in the early 1980s. The first half of Threads was collected in 1990 as Cut Memories and False Commands (Reality Studios, London).
See below for the complete Threads of Iron —now available as one complete volume from Shearsman Books.
Andrew Duncan: Pauper Estate
Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 52pp, £7.50
ISBN 9780907562283
A collection of the author's poems dating from the late 1990s.
Andrew Duncan Savage Survivals amid modern suavity
Published 2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 116pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700035 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Here are arcane mysteries, here are forgotten histories; here are assorted arcana and incunabula; and here there is a transposition of a Chinese classic to contemporary Glasgow, filtered through the mesh of a Chinese martial-arts movie. And what connects aerial photography, growing up in the Turkic lands, and sound-poetry (the difficulties of)?—Andrew Duncan's imagination, which ranges far and wide, but always brings back news of interesting climes, and landhaps even the poets' heads do grow beneath their shoulders.
Andrew Duncan Threads of Iron
Published 2013. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612891 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Threads of Iron
is Duncan's lost debut volume: not because it was never published, but because it never appeared as intended. Instead, the original was split into two and was published in two parts by Reality Street (in 1991) and by Shearsman Books (in 2000). A further part of the manuscript was cut and became Sound Surface
(see In Five Eyes, below).
"Threads of Iron
may have been the great unpublished book of the 80s, the recipient of more agonized and extensive debate than many published collections of poetry. [...] these poems invoke the most massive tragedies of the 20th century not merely to deconstruct the rhetorics of power, but to rouse what Wyndham Lewis called the 'the noble pessimism of the speculative mind' into a new political practice and a reformed subjectivity. Duncan's is a poetry of laudable ambition and sometimes extraordinary achievement." —Geoffrey Ward, PN Review
Andrew Duncan In Five Eyes
Published 2013. Paperback, 124pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612723 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Five Eyes
recovers two almost-lost collections of poems — Sound Surface
and Surveillance and Compliance
— published some 20 and 10 years ago, respectively, but which were written in the 1980s and early 1990s. Published originally in fugitive editions, these two collections fill out the picture of Duncan's earlier work.
Andrew Duncan On the Margins of Great Empires — Selected Poems
Published 2018. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615984 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
At this point in time Andrew Duncan is better known as a critic of contemporary poetry — and an entertaining, waspish, and unusual critic at that. His own poetic work has been under-recognised and his previous collections — barring those from Shearsman — are out of print. This Selected
edition gives the poetry-reading pubic a valuable chance to re-engage with a very original voice. Certainly no experimentalist, but also not a mainstream writer by any stretch of the imagination, he engages with narrative and history in a way that has become unusual in contemporary British poetry.
Andrew Duncan With Feathers on Glass
Published August 2023. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6 ins, £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)
Andrew Duncan The Council of Heresy —A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain
Published 2009. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $27
ISBN 9781848610071 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling aperçus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.
Andrew Duncan The Long 1950s
Published 2012. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848611375 [Download a PDF containing the introduction to this book here.]
"The story of poetry since 1960 is largely of people rebelling against what was there in the 1950s. But another story is about poets who didn't revolt against that, but went on with it—developing it organically. The present work deals with a complex of issues, but started with the double twist, that two 50s poets, Logue and Hill, have dominated the artistic scene over the last ten years (or, say, 1996 to 2006) and that the death of the main '50s style has liberated the official English poetry, with the decease of certain inhibitions which were glued together and brewed up to weapons grade quality back in the 1950s." —Andrew Duncan
Andrew Duncan A Poetry Boom 1990-2010
Published 2015. Paperback, 324pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848614239 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
The third of Andrew Duncan’s surveys of 20th-century British poetry from Shearsman Books—there are also volumes from Salt and from Liverpool University Press, two of which are republished here in revsied form in 2016 (see below)—and as idiosyncratic and as fascinating as the previous volumes. This volumes covers the most recent period in our poetry, and pays special attention to recent anthologies as maps of the terrain, recent critical surveys of the secne, and to the work of a range of poets, from Claire Pollard to Emily Critchley, and from Pauline Stainer to B. Catling.
Andrew Duncan The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2nd, Revised Edition)
Published 2016. Paperback, 364pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848614987 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Failure
starts from the key misrepresentation of orthodox poetry criticism, that the conservative is also the new, and sets out to define the whole British complex of refusing to innovate. In the attempt to set up publicly accountable criteria for what counts as new, the book goes through the whole period from the 1950s to the mid-1990s, identifying what the stylistic innovations were at each point.
Andrew Duncan Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry (2nd, Revised Edition)
Published 2016. Paperback, 318pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848614994 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Does what is true depend on where you are? Or, can we speak of a British culture which varies gradually over the 600 miles from one end of the island to the other, with currents gradually mutating and turning into their opposites as they cross such a distance? The unbalanced local energies which gave birth to the central horror of possessive individualism, the Empire, and the State as war-machine, do not sound their triumphalist self-praises without conjuring up a reaction in favour of collective values, pacifism, equity, and the languages of the periphery. Poetry has to offer more than the illusion of being in the few rooms where a metropolitan elite solemnly engages in the circularity of authentication. A polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England exposes the possibility that the finest poets of the last 50 years have lived in the outlands, not networking and neglecting to acquire linguistic signs of status. We contemplate the sublime through the works of Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam. But a second look at poetry in the South jettisons the shallow tricks favoured by High Street cultural managers to reveal a hidden stratum of intellectually sophisticated poets, even in Babylon.
Andrew Duncan Fulfilling the Silent Rules — Inside & Outside in Modern British Poetry 1960-1997
Published 2018. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $30
ISBN 9781848616097 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is the missing volume in Andrew Duncan’s compendious survey of British poetry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An overview of trends during a period of more than 30 years, and a consideration of some individual poets whom Duncan feels deserve greater attention.
Andrew Duncan Nothing is being suppressed
Published 2022. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617490 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"There are several reasons for writing about the Seventies at this point. One is a reading of a recent collection of memories of the decade by participants. My impression was that they couldn’t remember the period – too much time had gone by. They had lost all sense of differentiation and were writing about 1975 as if it was 2015. It is also possible that any attitudes of the previous time which didn’t chime with current positions were being written out, consciously or unconsciously. The extent of the mismatch is of great importance, I think. This suggested that there was a real problem with memory, justifying an account based on contemporary documents. The other problem with memory is that we are living in a splinter dictatorship, a cultural phase where the forces of convergence have stacked arms and opinions are split up into small groups. How can there be a collective memory when there is no single point on which all factions agree? so how can I record collective memory? in what sense is any statement about poetry true? But this argues even more for putting facts down and increasing the area free from malicious invention. We need to think about the divergence as a phenomenon in itself, a kind of cultural gravity that guides all the watercourses. The splintering allows local freedom at most locations – what it does not allow is unifying literary opinion." — Andrew Duncan
Ken Edwards Collected Poems 1975–2020
Published 2021. Paperback, 520pp, 9x 6ins, £19.95 / $30
ISBN 9781848617605 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"A Collected Poems is a tombstone – there’s no getting away from that. So it was with decidedly mixed feelings that I approached this project. But it has to be said this is a good moment to pause and take stock; it’s been a while now since verse composition was central to my practice, and the work of some forty years can be looked back on with some degree of objectivity, now that I am no longer fabricating lines, but rather sentences (though there are a lot of those here too).
[As with my previous (now superseded) Selected
volume], the poems are presented in the form of their original, separately published books. I tend to compose in books … and most of those books are now either out of print, or in a few cases were never actually published as I had intended. I hope they have a decent after-life in these pages." —Ken Edwards
Ken Edwards a book with no name
Published 2016. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615007. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
It is not a book of poems.
It is not a long poem.
It is not a novel.
Nor a volume of short stories.
It is not a work of philosophy.
It is not an object – like a stone.
Yet it drops into the well of nothingness
and is never heard of again.
a book with no name fuses the optimism of Beckett with the hyperrealism of Stein.
Ken Edwards Songbook
Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610675 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This book, spanning two decades of work, contains songs that have never been and never will be sung; anti-lyric and narrative poems for which a musical equivalent has been constructed; and text written specifically for musical purposes. The volume is completed with scores composed by Elaine Edwards of settings of three poems from Ken Edwards' earlier book eight + six.
Ken Edwards No Public Language — Selected Poems 1975-1995
Published 2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 184pp. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9781905700011
The author says of this Selected: "This volume contains what I think of as the essential matter in my verse composition over two decades. I tend to compose in books, and didn’t want to disturb the integrity of my favourites: therefore Drumming & Poems, Intensive Care
and 3600 Weekends
are included in their entirety, as are the shorter sequences 'A4 Portrait' and 'A4 Landscape'. Erik Satie loved children, an early pamphlet, is also included, as I still think it’s quite sweet, and besides it was the first showing of what later evolved into my preferred procedures: cutting and splicing, juxtaposition, language play, composition by rhythm."
Steve Ely Jubilate Messi
Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616134 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
I’ve played, watched and loved football all my life. Along with birds and birding it is my most enduring passion. So I thought I’d write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. I started fluently, but one thing and another got in the way and the footballing Muse abandoned me after about twenty poems. The poems in this chapbook are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. Plus a sub. Messi comes last, but it is definitely not him.
Steve Ely Lectio Violant
Published 2021. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617544 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The poems in this book are improvisations arising from contemplative readings of four chapters of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible—Matthew VI, Mark V, Luke XV and Luke X. Lectio Violant—‘profane reading’—is the name I’ve coined to describe this process, alluding to Lectio Divina—‘divine reading’—the long-established Catholic practice of devotional reading, the purpose of which is to draw the reader closer to God by enabling a fuller experience of scripture. I’m not sure this book’s doing the same thing, although you never know." —Steve Ely
Carrie Etter (ed.) Infinite Difference : Other Poetries by UK Women Poets
Published 2010. Paperback, 210pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610996 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
An anthology of radical new women's poetry from the UK, featuring work by: Sascha Akhtar, Isobel Armstrong, Caroline Bergvall, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Anne Blonstein, Andrea Brady, Emily Critchley, Claire Crowther, Carrie Etter, Catherine Hales, Frances Kruk, Rachel Lehrman, Sophie Mayer, Marianne Morris, Wendy Mulford, Redell Olsen, Frances Presley, Anna Reckin, Carlyle Reedy, Denise Riley, Sophie Robinson, Lucy Sheerman, Zoë Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Carol Watts.
Carrie Etter Divining for Starters
Published 2011. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611504 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Carrie Etter catches the drift and pushes it lightly into her courses. Lilting now, her courses swerve between the reaches of the American mid-West and the claggy ruts of England, and their erotics are those of skin and fold, of elegant runs and breaks. Carrie Etter's poems give the feel of pleasure; they take unpredictable turns. When all about would be stipulated, Divining for Starters
points heedfully to the possible." (John Wilkinson)
Carrie Etter Scar
Published 2016. Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614871 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In Scar , Carrie Etter compellingly explores the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois. The language shifts and evolves painfully as the land and its inhabitants find themselves wracked by climatic and political forces beyond their control.
You can hear the author talking about Scar on a podcast from the Scottish Poetry Library here , interviewed by fellow Shearsman author, JL Williams.
Amy Evans The Sea Quells
Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613140 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The poems in this chapbook form an individual sequence. At the same time, they present a new and longer section of an ongoing series. The Sea Quells responds to and continues Collecting Shells, which was published in 2011 with Oystercatcher Press and is included, in excerpt form, in the anthologies Sea Pie (Shearsman) and Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe).
Amy Evans CONT.
Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 978184861454-3 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A sequel to 2013's Sea Quells, CONT . continues Amy Evan's explorations of language and the infinte whiteness of the page.
Amy Evans Bauer PASS PORT
Published 2018. Chapbook, 42pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
PASS PORT is a travel document—a transcript of the first half of the at-sea installation SOUNDING((ING))S, which ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea across the English Channel, and underneath the seabed through the Channel Tunnel. Bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny refugees movement across the English-French border. The installation offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts, and the asylum-seeking body within the EU.
Amy Evans The Report of the Iraq Enquiry — Poetic Summary
Published by ff
Press and distributed by Shearsman Books, 2017.
Paperback, A4 format, £14.95 / $23.
ISBN 9781848614437.
This Poetic Summary
of 145 pages is an abridged edition of a twelve-volume creative translation of The Report of the Iraq Inquiry. The text was published by ff
Press in London in a limited edition of a quantity greater than 4 pints or 2.27 litres.
Paul Evans The Door of Taldir — Selected Poems
Edited by Robert Sheppard.
Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610255 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Paul Evans (1945–1991) was a significant member of the group of new radical poets that appeared in England in the late 1960s, but his work remains scattered through a number of small-press publications from 1970–1987 and is now entirely out of print. This Selected Poems
redresses the situation and makes available a broad selection of Evans' work from throughout his career—a career that was cut tragically short by a climbing accident.
Patricia Farrell The Zechstein Sea
Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612631 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Via encounters with the troubadour poet Guillaume of Poitiers, Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith Jivan Astfalck, Farrell offers 'new solutions / new songs,' whilst 'provoking new lines of thought.' This challenging work might make us feel 'hardly more than poets and not who we really are' but who cares when 'tongue play makes sense like this'?" —Scott Thurston
Gerrie Fellows The Body in Space
Published 2014. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613430 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is a poetry of layers and echoes. Poems which bring together people and places—family relationships enacted through webs of intimacy or distance, the dead remembered in interleaved images of art and medicine.
These are poems concerned with the living presence of place—and with what is written over it by maps and history, whether in the crash-site of a military aircraft in Argyll, in the personal histories of an elegy or in the eroded landscapes of the Scottish hills. Here the living move through time and weather, making and remaking their own language in the music and silences of the poems.
Gerrie Fellows Uncommon Place
Published 2019. Paperback, 70pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616356 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Uncommon Place
is a book rooted in Scotland's mountains and open spaces, its fenced enclosures and mined ground. It develops from earlier books what Tom Leonard has called "the most intelligent debate between technology and nature in poetry that I know."
Through rivers, weather and wild creatures, as well as through industrial landscapes and urban spaces, the poems explore a core preoccupation, that of how we experience being in place, the relationship of the walker with the shifting nature of the place through which she walks.
"Rooted in the local, the poems in this book deliver a profound understanding of emotions engendered by the geologies and natural histories of landscape and what it means to fully inhabit this country: true dwelling; compelling, unique, enduring poetry." —Gerry Loose
Peter Finch The Welsh Poems
Published 2006. 9x6ins, 148pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562917 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Welsh Poems
might also be called 'Selected Experimental Poems' and highlights Finch's more unusual excursions into verbal and visual trickery. The book covers work written over a period of two decades and was the first such large-scale selection of his work.
Alec Finlay Be My Reader
Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611078 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Be My Reader
is a trove of texts made and found by Finlay over the past two decades, touching on philosophy, landscape, dance, football, travel and technology. Affectionate, celebratory and vulnerable by turns, it includes such key texts as his popular homage to Robert Creeley 'I Know A Poem', the long poem-mapping of the Wittgenstein Hut in Norway, and poems which emerged from art projects for civic spaces and landscapes, all interspersed with pitch-perfect renderings of off-key phrases overheard and chanced upon. Formally adventurous and restlessly curious, Be My Reader
is a unique confluence of contemporary experimental and generative forms together with the lyric voice.
Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn the road north
Published 2014. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613584 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
the road north
is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Osu-no-Hosomichi
(Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken and Alec left Edo (Edinburgh) on May 16, 2010 — the very same date that basho and his companion Sora departed in 1689 — and on their return, on May 16, 2011, they published 53 collaborative audio & visual poems describing the landscapes they had seen and the people they had met.
Keri Finlayson Rooms
Published 2009.Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610347 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Keri Finlayson's first collection Rooms
finds its centre in the etymology of the words camera, a chamber and stanza, a resting place. Both are forms of enclosure, of inclusion and exclusion that forge definition and force choices over the stories we want to be told and the stories we want to see. Rooms
develops two intertwining narratives. In the first, the poet remembers and reimagines her grandmother as a young woman, and the family stories that surrounded her. Exploring the notions of editing and stitching, patterns and limits, it describes her seduction during the making of a silent film in Cornwall in 1919. The second concerns the history of film from the depiction of multiple movement in early cave painting, through the invention of the camera obscura, to The Jazz Singer; the first "talkie". What is a history of technology and a story of seduction and violence, is also a collection of stanza about camera, rooms about rooms.
Allen Fisher Marvels of Lambeth
Edited by Andrew Duncan
Published 2013. Paperback, 214pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612730 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Andrew Duncan says of this book:
"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded. Drawing on the creative input of Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, and Victoria Sheppard (among others) made the book more robust and embracing."
Roy Fisher Interviews through Time (2nd Edition)
Edited by Tony Frazer
Published 2013. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612983 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Excerpts from several interviews conducted throughout the author's career and spliced together to form a coherent narrative of his development and his aesthetic. The book closes with two full-length interviews, conducted by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan.
Roy Fisher An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013
Edited by Peter Robinson
Published 2014. Paperback, 198pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613003 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013
brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, ‘owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends’.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson Collected Poems
Edited by Anthony Barnett, and co-published with Allardyce Book.
Published 2008. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700806.
A revised Collected, bringing back into print an important body of work. This volume excludes the translations that were printed in the first posthumous gathering of the poet's work, but includes some extra poems and numerous revisions that have been discovered since that publication.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson Poetic Artifice
Edited & introduced by Gareth Farmer
Published 2016. Paperback, 232pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95.
[Not for sale outside the U.K. and Republic of Ireland]
ISBN 9781848614451 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
First published posthumously in 1978 by Manchester University Press, this volume turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defence of “all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different from prose.” According to the author, such devices are responsible for poetry’s most significant effect—not pleasure or ornament or some kind of special expressivity, but the production of “alternative imaginary orders.”
SJ Fowler The Guide to Being Bear Aware
Published 2017. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615380 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Through incisive, intricate, explorative poems, SJ Fowler offers an ambiguous but often starkly humorous viewpoint into the pre-occupations of contemporary being. From incisions into the political and moral factionalism which so often dominates our online existence, to the more sincere negotiations of our private lives, our bodies and our minds, in love and in death. Fundamentally a statement about the Anthropocene, The Guide to Being Bear Aware is doing the work poetry is meant to do, offering more questions than answers.
Tony Frazer (ed.) Poets of Devon & Cornwall, from Barclay to Coleridge
Shearsman Classics No. 1.
Published 2007, 8.5x5.5ins, 148pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700509 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Alexander Barclay, George Peele, John Ford, Humfrey Gifford, Richard Carew, Anne Dowriche, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Arthur Gorges, Joseph Hall, Robert Herrick, Sidney Godolphin, William Strode, William Browne, Thomas Spratt, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Thomas D'Urfey, John Gay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
All of these are poets born in the two westernmost counties of England, or—like Hall and Herrick—poets who were active there. In time we stretch from the very beginning of the 16th century until the early 19th century. We begin with Barclay, a priest working in Ottery St. Mary, and we close with Coleridge, the son of a priest in Ottery St. Mary, his birthplace.
Hazel Frew Seahorses
Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700615 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Scottish poet Hazel Frew's first collection of poems offers tales of families, of growing up, and of the world around us, seen with uncommonly fresh eyes.
Kit Fryatt Rain Down Can
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612471 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this was Kit Fryatt's first publication. Kit Fryatt divides time between Ireland and Scotland and runs the Wurm im Apfel reading series in Dublin.
Kit Fryatt Bodyservant
Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615779 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Fryatt is playful, with word-games, variations in line and length and dynamic outbreaks of rhyme giving the poems a kind of performance feel—but they also have a very strong page presence, their complexity in fact demanding movement through them at the pace and with the instant rewind of the eye. The reader is never allowed to get too settled, too comfortable—some fresh piece of invention, some unforeseen swerve, takes us into uneasy places.” —Rupert Loydell, Stride
Tamara Fulcher The Recreation of Night
Published 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700585 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781905700585 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection by Edinburgh-based Tamara Fulcher, winner of the 2006 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.
Damian Furniss Chocolate Che
Published 2010. Paperback, 101pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611061 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Chocolate Che
were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks.
Damian Furniss works images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving. Using forms as varied as their subjects, with characteristic verbal intensity and a probing wit, he returns to the fixations of his youth in wry but reflective maturity. Along the way, he encounters the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; visits the houses of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, only to find no one's at home; and collects the stubs of cigars that might once have been smoked by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but probably weren't.
Damian Furniss The Best of All Possible Worlds
Published 2015. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614444 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here.]
101 poems about power and its consequences, one for each year from the beginning of the Great War to the present day, together making a history of the past century.
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Nancy Gaffield Continental Drift
Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613294 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Continental Drift
is a book about place, about the attachments and appropriations that shape our relationship with the land. Transcending the border of country and continent, these poems search out ways that language balances the demands of location. This is a poetry of shifting localities and the forces that make them. Continental Drift
is Nancy Gaffield’s second collection. Tokaido Road, published in 2011, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
Nancy Gaffield Tokaido Road — A Journey with Hiroshige
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613782
This is the libretto for Nicola LeFanu’s chamber opera Tokaido Road , which had its premiere in July 2014, and is based on Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poems (CB editions, 2011).
In 1832 the young Hiroshige sets out on Japan’s great Eastern Sea Road, the Tokaido, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The paintings he creates along the way reveal the secrets of a hidden country.
John Goodby Illennium
Published 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610941 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Set in 'South-Wets Wales', Illennium
is a cut-up sonnet sequence which draws on recent theories about the social role of shame as it traces the trajectory of a single attachment within a tangled set of friendships. Mixing disease and end-of-era career discontents, its plotlines cohere and decompose around the blown down sign of the No Sign bar, a local watering-hole. There they intermingle with texts that range from Enid Blyton to Keats, Rimbaud to Dafydd ap Gwilym. But the more shameless the embarrassment of riches, the more the lyric itself comes to seem 'a form of shame management', its anticipated plenitudes thwarted by 'silences stubbed out' on an 'I for an I / in the very temples of delight'. Even so, for all its anxieties concerning the 'dork inability' of the poet, or of poetry itself, to resist the abjection that follows, Illennium's brazenness is golden too; again and again, it reveals the peach-succulent heart of a recklessly playful work which spares no blushes in celebrating the 'brilliantly pointless' energies of language.
Giles Goodland What the Things Sang
Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610545 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
If Johnson believed that objects held primacy over language, why did he compose his dictionary following the arbitrary rule of alphabetical order? If (to contradict Wiitgenstein) poems are engaged in the language-game of giving information, how should that information be arranged? If Blake had, when he heard ringing in the trees, picked up the phone, what information would the things have sung to him? If Heraclitus had not been struck with his own lightning, would he be less fragmented to us now? This sequence of poems presents a number of possible and less possible answers to these questions. But more questions arise on the way.
Giles Goodland The Masses
Published 2018. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615618 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
If Johnson believed that objects held primacy over language, why did he compose his dictionary following the arbitrary rule of alphabetical order? If (to contradict Wiitgenstein) poems are engaged in the language-game of giving information, how should that information be arranged? If Blake had, when he heard ringing in the trees, picked up the phone, what information would the things have sung to him? If Heraclitus had not been struck with his own lightning, would he be less fragmented to us now? This sequence of poems presents a number of possible and less possible answers to these questions. But more questions arise on the way.
Mark Goodwin Else
Published 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700974 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection for Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1998.
"It’s thrilling to welcome a new poet into the company of our seriously exciting younger nature writers such as Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane . . . Mark Goodwin is a poet whose surround-senses are as alert as an animal’s, and whose writing is exceptionally grounded in so many of the complexities of being fully human." —Catherine Byron
Mark Goodwin Back of A Vast
Published 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611191 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"These poems disclose a poet's rich relationship to the natural world by stripping away, by letting a raw objectivist lyric scrape off any rhetorical surface to discover the details beneath. This happens in almost every line, every phrase—so much so that finally his individual words seem to do it by themselves. The result is that /nature/ here ticks and clicks as though it were trying to find a halfway-house language between itself and the writer. Illusion of course, the trick of poetry, and Mark Goodwin is the magician." —Tim Allen
Mark Goodwin Layers of Un
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612488 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this volume digs further into Mark Goodwin's explorations of landscape and language.
Mark Goodwin House At out
Published 2015. Paperback, 9x6ins, 118pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614185 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here.]
“InHouse At Out, Mark Goodwin steps beyond the physical landscapes of Back of A Vast, into a new topography: a world that is a “wild’s inf i nite b its” approached through the gaps and hollows in the word. The holes are apertures as we zoom into language, crack open word hordes and find worlds of association, “hole keys” with which we open kinetic lands as nimble as “music thinking of water”. Here are poems that “house and home // and hone a mind of sky-leaf sheets.” Step out with this book and relish the trip elsewhere.” —Simon Perril
"'House At Out
is an echo in a cave you've just discovered, a canopy that lets the light through, a fast river, ready to be waded. The language is full of pores, breathing spaces, places where you can catch your own thoughts or find the gaps where 'tiny homes within a home' exist and 'a shiny poem coils'." —Helen Mort
Mark Goodwin All Space Away and In
Published 2017. Paperback, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615632 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
All Space Away and In … is on mist-smudged snow just to our north or in a bulbous evolving sky or in a rhyolite bowl of wobbling Welsh syllables … Here Mark Goodwin becomes involved with animals & ground, as well as people … Poems as clunk-&-puff-of-dirt … creaturely elongation of speed … a fog-hollow of corrie … chalk-hooves flint-ringing … Attempts to free amazement and pin-point sharp where we are …
Thomas Gray The English Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 19.
Published 2014. Paperback, 152pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613577 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Thomas Gray was the author of some of the most admired poems of the 18th century, the famous 'Elegy' among them, but his reputation continues to rest on a handful of masterpieces, while the rest of his work has faded from view. This book offers all of his poems in English — he wrote also in Latin and Greek — and his translations into English from Italian and Latin, together with a brief introduction and notes.
Paul A Green The Gestaltbunker: Selected Poems 1965-2010
Published 2012. Paperback, 174pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Gestaltbunker
encapsulates the diversity of Paul A. Green's output during his long subterranean career. His engagement with nuclear apocalypse, global melt-down and the excesses of media landscaping is modulated through surreal inscapes and an intensifying torsion of language. He moves from mid-life grubbings in the basement of a psyche to marital praise-songs and celebrations. Yet the riddles of time and consciousness continue to pre-occupy him, whether encountered through magick, music or the mysteries of the city.
David Greenslade Lyrical Diagrams
Published 2012. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612198 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Diagrams are meant to be clear and precise, serious and informative. David Greenslade shows them to be none of those. In his eyes they become murky and ambiguous, playful and misleading, harbouring deep, discomforting mysteries. Read at your peril: you will never be able to view a diagram in the same way again." — Donald Norman, Prof. Emeritus, Cognitive Studies, University of California, San Diego
David H W Grubb The Man Who Spoke to Owls
Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610477 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This new collection brings together three elements central to the poetry and prose of David Grubb. There is the world of surreal identities, of wonders, disturbances, angels, fire sermons and celebrations where animals and people speak with both words and silences. There is the unfinished business of growing up in a strict religious household and seeking meanings beyond rituals and texts. In the third section of the book Albania, Bosnia and other locations create a world where nothing is certain, the past provides constant challenges and distant voices call. The darkness is broken by stars.
David H W Grubb Notes Relating to an Idea of Blue
Published 2011. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611825 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In David Grubb's new collection collisions, wonders, ballyhoo and sudden light signal the way we walk a tightrope between the real and the imagined. Our human world encompasses clowns, angels, the dead, ghosts and saints, parrots and horses, the upsidedown and secret dancing, kazoo music and heart songs.
Harry Guest Comparisons & Conversions
Published 2009. Paperback 8.5 x 5.5ins, 88pp. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610194. Download a PDF sampler from this book here.
Comparisons
considers the disparities between memory and expectation as well as the alteration in events separated by the gap of years — since, sometimes when we journey, we are "hoping by space to leave / the faults of time behind".
Conversions
contains poetry translated since Versions
appeared from Odyssey in 1999. Harry Guest regards the effort of translation as a vital complement to creative writing, providing not only a technical challenge but also the strange effect of inhabiting another's consciousness for a while.
Harry Guest Elegies
The Shearsman Library 10
Published 2018. Chapbook, 8.5 x 5.5ins, 32pp. £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848610194. Download a PDF sampler from this book here .
Harry Guest’s remarkable sequence of Elegies were first published as a chapbook in 1980 by Pig Press in Durham, and were later collected in Lost and Found a large collection of the author’s work in 1983. here we take the chance to return the poems to their original chapbook environment, convinced that the world still needs work like this. Still available in the author’s Anvil collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest , they benefit from being able to breathe more easily in their original form…
Harry Guest Short Attention Span
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616875 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Throughout his career, Harry Guest has written occasional poems, haiku, squibs and jests, and this little collection brings together a range of them that will delight his readers.
Harry Guest Last Harvest
Published 2020. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617261 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Last Harvest
brings together poems of place, poems on religion, poems on family and friendships, and poems that rebel against the passing of the years.
[…] enough however here for mysteries,
times to get lost on, found again,
a different beauty, wilder, spread, bare and
always the past put there in stone to stay
Christopher Gutkind Inside to Outside
Published 2006. Paperback 9x6ins, 116pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Through a variety of approaches Chris Gutkind shows a self exploring and working itself out across a range of preoccupations. It is a journey from inside to outside, from the more hermetic to the more expansive and from him to you, perhaps into you.
Born in the Netherlands and raised mostly in Canada, Chris Gutkind has lived in London for many years, where he is a librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies. This is his first collection of poetry.
