Wendy Saloman Chrysalis in the Desert
Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610361 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The central poem in Wendy Saloman's new collection, and from which it takes its title, is the narrative of a woman's journey through various crises in Jewish history, from biblical times to modern Israel and Palestine. The protagonist, Rachel, is 'moving through time/as fire over water/as ash on ice'. 'Rivers and Revenants', the other main poem in the book, is again concerned with roots only this time the voyage is of a more personal nature: the author draws upon her own experiences of a visit to Lithuania in order to discover her grandfather's farmstead. In both these poems, and elsewhere in her work, there is conveyed the ever present drama between otherness and unity.
Julie Sampson Tessitura
Published 2013. Paperback, 86pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612396 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tessitura, Italian 'texture', borrows a musical conceptual term, denoting the textural sweep of melodic contour—kind of safe-space—for a singer or instrumentalist. This collection is intended as an corresponding writerly-space in which I bring together various drifts of work, assemble them into poetry's visual equivalence of music's soundscape. The poems are grounded—and sometimes take flight from—the comfort-zone home of my roots in the Southwest—its continuity of personal ancestors and especially its successive memory chain of often forgotten women writers, several of whom show their presence in the central sequence Devon women; Lost W/rites.
Lesley Saunders Periplous — The Twelve Voyages of Pytheas
Published 2016. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614871 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas – whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille) – is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as archipelagic, maritime, aloof. His own account of the voyage is lost. Lesley Saunder fills in the gaps
Robert Saxton The China Shop Pictures
Published 2012. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612563 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The China Shop Pictures
ranges widely in time, space and subject matter, encompassing Jacobite wine glasses, pedagogical horses, a Japanese invention for walking on water, and a medley of viewpoints both famous and anonymous—from Virgil and Gérard de Nerval to a woman who's in love with "the monkey they left on the moon" and a man who complains (unfairly) to a sales assistant that the umbrella he's bought has a design fault.
Robert Saxton Flying School
Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616424 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Flying School is a book of beautifully crafted poems about the contrivances by which we attempt to enrich or repair our lives. One dominant image is flight and, more specifically, parachutes – reflecting an aspiration to come to terms with our hardest challenges, including the reality of death. The book ends with a series of heartbreaking elegies for the poet’s father, unflinching in their grief-stricken gaze.
In this highly various collection, plain-spoken storytelling jostles against more oblique or lyrical voices, while sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and ‘triplets’ (mixing traditional and consonantal rhyme) offer the pleasures of accomplished form. The common factor is a vividly observed aliveness, often inflected with wit. Saxton has conjured a teeming imaginative world that never fails to convince, entertain or move.
Ian Seed Anonymous Intruder
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610286 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848610286 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems and prose poems in Anonymous Intruder
navigate the vulnerabilities revealed in relationships, only to abandon these in a wandering search for new encounters and new truths. The seeking 'self' goes into exile to be shattered and reconstructed. In a hesitant movement towards the transcendental, the poems consider the possibility and impossibility of returning home. They must first find a way to recognise the stranger approaching from a distance. Although these narratives are fragmented and elliptical, the imagery is stark and clear, the language concise, the rhythms and patterns engaging.
Ian Seed Shifting Registers
Published 2011. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611597 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
With a fragmented yet rich lyricism, Shifting Registers
crosses borders between lost and rediscovered identity. The voices in the poems may be tentative and vulnerable, regretful and haunting, or playful and provocative, as they relive and re-imagine half-remembered journeys and encounters. That which has become strange through its distance in the past becomes once again familiar, while that which is near in the present begins to be unknowable. Shifting Registers
seeks to reconcile the two, and to construct a wholeness for the future, yet without resort to easy answers or false resolution. Throughout, there is delight in the navigation of different realities and new spaces through language.
Ian Seed Makers of Empty Dreams
Published 2014. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613454 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
With a sparse, haunting, often playful lyricism, the makers of empty dreams emerge like figures in the reels of an old, almost abandoned film. Their stories, often set in different countries which we may or may not know, tell of loss and estrangement, of betrayal and reconciliation, and of a search for the possibilities of renewal along the way.
Ian Seed Identity Papers
Published 2016. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614703 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The prose poems in Identity Papers
seek to construct a living bridge between the self and its shadow, between the self and other, and between present and past. They do so with a vulnerable faith, working with Heidegger’s dictum that all things must be allowed their time in darkness. Along the way, their narrators meet a series of disturbing, irresistible strangers. Identity Papers
follows on from Makers of Empty Dreams
(Shearsman, 2014). It is the second volume in a trilogy of prose poem collections.
Ian Seed New York Hotel
Published 2018. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615724 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The delight of Ian Seed’s brilliantly droll poems is that they are not entirely droll. They look and sound normal, like brief prose anecdotes told in a bar but the apparent normality is edged with disorientation, menace and anxiety. We slip over the edge in an instant and look to recover our balance but can’t quite. The world has gone, leaving behind a comical void. And that, we understand, is the nature of the world. The voice is controlled, in fact it’s perfect. It’s just that nothing else is." —George Szirtes
Ian Seed The Underground Cabaret
Published 2020. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617230 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The prose poems in The Underground Cabaret
form the final volume of a quartet, following on from New York Hotel, Identity Papers
and Makers of Empty Dreams.
"In The Underground Cabaret, Ian Seed is at his unsettling and uncanny best. In each of these tightly constructed pieces, Seed gives us people who are helpless in the face of absurdity, who miss each other or form only transient connections and who suffer alienation and loneliness in eerie and surreal encounters which emerge out of the seemingly ordinary and mundane. 'Just when I thought I’d turned everything inside out,' says one character; just when we think Seed has turned the world upside down as far as it will go, he turns it further, holds it tighter." —Andrew McMillan
John Seed New and Collected Poems
Published 2005. 156pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562634 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This major retrospective volume brings back into print the author's previous four collections of verse, and adds to them a large number of uncollected poems, written between 1990 and 2004. Published simultaneously with the extraordinary Pictures from Mayhew.
John Seed Pictures from Mayhew — London 1850
Published 2005. 171pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562627 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Every word in this book by John Seed is drawn from Henry Mayhew's writings on London, published in the Morning Chronicle
from 1849 to 1850, then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, London Labour and the London Poor
between December 1850 and February 1852, and then again in the four-volume work of the same title.
John Seed That Barrikins — Pictures from Mayhew II
Published 2007. Paperback, 160pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700523 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The second volume of John Seed's exploration of Mayhew, recasting the voices from the original text in a Reznikoffian manner, freeing them from the confines of the narrative and thus letting us hear the voices in a new context.
John Seed Some Poems 2006-2013
Published by Gratton Street Irregulars; distributed by Shearsman Books.
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613737 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
John Seed is the author of eight collections of verse, including: Divided into One (Poetical Histories, 2003), New and Collected Poems and Pictures from Mayhew (both Shearsman, 2005), That Barrikins: Pictures from Mayhew II (Shearsman, 2007), and Manchester : August 16th & 17th 1819 (Intercapillary Editions, 2013).
John Seed Smoke Rising – London 1940-41
Published 2015. Paperback, 86pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613935 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Smoke Rising
is a documentary poem. Very much in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, it utilises oral sources to capture the speech – and perhaps the experience — of those who suffered the London Blitz. However, its elective affinities are also to Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished Arcades Project: “to carry the principle of montage into history… to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components… to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.”
John Seed melancholy occurrence
Published 2018. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615816 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
melancholy occurrence is the latest in a series of texts through which John Seed investigates the appropriation and reconfiguring of historical materials. Previous volumes in the series include Pictures from Mayhew
(Shearsman, 2005) about which Allen Fisher said: ‘The substance of this work is astonishing, vivid, felt with a considerable and sensitive intelligence.’ Its successor, That Barrikins,
(Shearsman, 2007) was commended by Iain Sinclair for its ‘reverse archaeology’: ‘His close ear, and neurotic sensitivity to the way a line breaks, reveals how, in the desperate grind of the city, confession aspires to the condition of song.’ And David Caddy commented on the most recent, Brandon Pithouse
(Smokestack, 2016): ‘The singular fragments, juxtaposed and in disjunction, accumulate to produce a deeply moving montage of statistics and documentary experience. The rhythms and cadence of the vernacular emerge in both pain and humour…’ (Tears in the Fence, 2016).
Gavin Selerie Music's Duel — New & Selected Poems
Published 2009. Paperback, 328pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610033 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Music's Duel
gathers work from across the Gavin Selerie's career, combining major sequences or extracts with a range of less available material, some previously unpublished. Placed together for the first time, these texts form an extended record of self and world, their focus twisting to reflect thought and language process. From a complex weave the book yields clarity and beauty, as in the treatment of landscape, death and desire. It is possible to see a development from heady, romantic pastoral to more satirical, closely-wrought urban texts, although continuities of concern and technique are evident. Distinguished by metaphysical wit and wordplay, Selerie's poetry excites both ear and eye. Genres and devices are torqued so as to enable the lyric tradition to operate within a fragmented sound and social context.
Gavin Selerie Collected Sonnets
Published 2019. Paperback, 372pp, 9 x 6ins, £17.95 / $30
ISBN 9781848616899 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Collected Sonnets gathers nine main sequences, along with extracts and fugitive pieces, from a 50-year span. It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts. Praised by Peter Porter in The Observer for richly re-working Elizabethan elements, Selerie’s sonnets have appealed equally to readers with a modernist bent. Standard themes—love, death, time, in land- and sea-scape—are given a radical slant. These poems grapple with emotions and ideas, shaped to give the personal public force. Motifs that emerge in individual sonnets also weave through the whole.
Aidan Semmens A Stone Dog
Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611658 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Thirty-some years in journalism have left little obvious trace in Aidan Semmens's poetry — though, like the sports headlines he writes for the News of the World, his verse is grounded in word-play and natural speech rhythms. In his first full-length collection he engages death, complexity, and the Authorised Version, which provides several of his titles. Other sources for his language include news magazines, war diaries, popular science and psychology texts, overheard phrases and the 2001 Aldeburgh Festival programme. This is a poetry of ideas and allusions, where, as in music or dream, any hinted-at narrative is liable to be subverted, taken to unexpected ends.
Aidan Semmens A Stone Dog
Published 2014. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613515 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"‘A Ritual Landscape’ sets out Aidan Semmens’ stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that ‘have legs’—that continue the journey outward begun in A Stone Dog and The Book of Isaac, and elaborate the argument and project of one of our most ambitious and accomplished poets. What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined since the poetry of Roy Fisher in, ‘a place of gathering /an enclosure of power and spirit,’ in a ‘slow recovery of knowledge’. This is a book without nostalgia, but uses the findings of the past to look forward, clear-eyed—‘the future may always be terrible’. This is a book that reports on recent findings: the poems reveal themselves as envelopes containing the truth on one side and contingency to the other side of the report, whether it be the ‘morning they tested Galileo’ in the desert more than 60 years ago, or the complex, vexed revelations of Edward Snowden: ‘the document is redacted / which does not reveal but conceals / the identities of those presumed guilty’. These poems hold objects, history, aesthetics and beauty in a ring of present experience: ‘we may not believe in Greek gods / but everywhere see their powers at work’. In this centenary year of the greatest, cataclysmic event of our time, this is the book for 2014, reporting back on the long view, post-Empire, post-nuclear, post-industrial, post-Modern." —Simon Smith
Aidan Semmens Life Has Become More Cheerful
Published 2017. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615533 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848615533 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
'The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful
is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come. The first poem announces 1917, the start of the Russian Revolution, and from there follows its aftermath, interspersed with passages from the Book of Revelations. Employing first-hand accounts and factual information, we are taken on a selected tour of 20th-century Russia with a few interconnected diversions on the way.' —Geraldine Monk
‘It is not only the scope and ambition of Semmens’s work that is striking. At each step we are given a poetry which examines the exact pathology of revolution itself, conveyed in a series of highly charged monologues’ —Kelvin Corcoran
Aidan Semmens There Will Be Singing
Published 2020. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617209 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Aidan Semmens’s fifth collection of poems moves from the range of the world to the deeply personal, always placing the detail in historical context. Employing a variety of poetic techniques, he moves from the moral ambiguities of empire to the run-in to Brexit; from a reworking, forty years on, of the poem for which he was awarded the Cambridge University Chancellor’s Medal, to the breakdown of language suffered by his mother after an ultimately fatal stroke.
Aidan Semmens (ed.) By the North Sea: An Anthology of Suffolk Poetry
Published 2013. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612853
A collection of poems that will surprise the reader: Suffolk natives, incomers and visitors are all represented. From older times come Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Ann Candler, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield and Bernard Barton. From modern times we have: Andy Brown, Angela Leighton, Tamar Yoseloff, Ronald Blythe, Victor Tapner, Pauline Stainer, John Matthias, Wendy Mulford, Claire Crowther, R.F. Langley, Andrew Brewerton, Rodney Pybus, Charlotte Geater, Zoë Skoulding, Deryn Rees-Jones, Aidan Semmens, Michael Laskey, Herbert Lomas, Anne Beresford, Will Stone, Richard Caddel and Michael Hamburger (listed in their order of appearance).
David Sergeant Talk Like Galileo
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611122 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Eggs, woods, football, nations, smoke, birds (common, other), tigers, murders, curtains, rivers, chromosomes, love (varieties of), Welles (Orson), pints, bras, partings, heartings, breakings, namings, and diverse other matters, in poetry free and formal, within this book, the first from its author.
Robert Sheppard The Anti-Orpheus – a notebook
Published 2004. A5 chapbook, centre-stapled, 16pp. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562467
Robert Sheppard is well-known as a critic and a poet of a decidedly experimental bent—as exemplified by his enormous long poem Twentieth-Century Blues, many parts of which have been made available over the past decade or so. The Anti-Orpheus
is a later composition which fuses his poetic and his academic concerns with poetics into one text, the whole full of humour, and of insight.
Robert Sheppard Warrant Error
Published 2009. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610187 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Warrant Error
is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. [...] As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error
wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories—real, fantastic, or both—are only our stories so far.
Robert Sheppard Berlin Bursts and other poems
Published 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611351 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These new poems use tense couplets and other 'centrifugal' forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act: "You'll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes."
Robert Sheppard When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry — episodes in the history of the poetics of innovation
episodes in the history of the poetics of innovation
Published 2011. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611368 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. In the episodes which cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; and the cultural poetics of Iain Sinclair in the 1990s and since; the focus is upon poetic community rather than individuals.
Robert Sheppard A Translated Man
Published 2013. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612846 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Robert Sheppard has given this book over to his own invention, the fictional Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure—one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, Sheppard is extending his formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, he is exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it.
Robert Sheppard History or Sleep — Selected Poems
Published 2015. Paperback, 146pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613980 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Robert Sheppard’s selection draws on every book of his poetry since Returns (1985) through to Words Out of Time
(2015), and is designed to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and their restlessly changing forms.
Robert Sheppard (ed.) Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors
Published 2017. Paperback, 122pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615656 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. For his last project before his disappearance around 2010, Van Valckenborch supposedly asked one poet from each of the EU states to write him a poem. Of course, he wrote them himself … Each poem was then supposedly translated into Flemish (or occasionally French) via robot (online) translators and the resultant poem ‘finalised’ by Van Valckenborch before presentation on this website. The poems that follow are best thought of as collaborations between Van Valckenborch and the 25 imaginary poets and the robot translator. (As the EU expanded so did the Union: there are now 27 ‘members’.)
We have, as usual, been accused of making these translations ourselves, or even of making the poets up (many of them might take exception, a few might be rather tickled by that suggestion). Firstly our expertise does not extend to all the languages encountered. Secondly, our professional pride as translators would have prohibited the use of electronic translation devices and we have only been forced to enter into a secondary relationship with this medium by Van Valckenborch’s engagement with it, which we rather regret. —Annemie and Martin Krol-Dupuis (Brussels).
Robert Sheppard The English Strain
Published 2021. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617469 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Most of the poems [in this book] are variations or expanded translations of poems by Milton, Wyatt, Surrey, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the case of Wyatt completely and Surrey (in ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’) and Smith (in ‘Petrarch of Petworth’), I have concentrated on their versions of Petrarch’s sonnets, sometimes the same ones. I believe I have signposted, either directly in titles, or through particular quotation in titles, the source poems; editions consulted are listed in the resources. All the poems are canonical, although Charlotte Smith (my fellow Sussex poet) is less known." — Robert Sheppard
Colin Simms Otters and Martens
Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562504 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Otters and Martens was Simms' first major British collection in some years, and — at the time — his largest-ever book. The volume unites all of his poems that concern or revolve around otters and martens, poems in which his concerns as a poet fuse with those of the naturalist that he also is. For lovers of poetry and mustelidae alike.
Colin Simms The American Poems
Published 2005. Paperback 9.25 x 7.5ins, 208pp. £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9780907562931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
This volume is a second retrospective edition of the work of Colin Simms, covering his North American poems and showcasing his six long poems on Amerindian themes:
Rushmore Inhabitation, No Northwestern Passage, Parflèche, Missouri River Songs, A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course and Carcajou . While these poems still demonstrate the author's remarkable use of language they also show his engagement with open-field poetics, an aptly American format for the wide open spaces of the Great Plains and the all-encompassing narrative that he spins for the reader. To these long poems are added more than 50 shorter poems on connected themes, drawn from throughout the poet's career.
Colin Simms Gyrfalcon Poems
Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700356 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This is Colin Simms' third Shearsman collection. A noted naturalist and expert on birds of prey, he collects here his poems on the subject of gyrfalcons, magnificent raptor birds that he has studied in Britain, North America, Iceland and Siberia. The book also contains some of his field drawings of the birds.
Colin Simms Poems from Afghanistan
Published 2013. Paperback, 121pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612556 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume brings together all of Colin Simms' non-animal-specific poems that record his visits to Afghanistan, as a naturalist, during the 1980s. Approximately half of the poems previously appeared in two editions of a volume called In Afghanistan, from Writers Forum (1995 and 2001).
Colin Simms Hen Harrier Poems
Published 2015. Paperback, 216pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848614291 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hen Harrier Poems
is Colin Simms’ fifth collection with Shearsman, and his third devoted to poems on a specific species, following Otters and Martens
(2004) and Gyrfalcon Poems
(2007). Future plans include volume devoted to poems on merlins and on goshawks. Simms is a naturalist who has observed the harrier and its North American cousin, the marsh hawk, for decades; his poems fuse a rich Bunting-esque diction and sonority with a focused eye and imagination.
Colin Simms Goshawk Poems
Published 2017. Paperback, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615250 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These verses are from goshawk observations since 1955; my first experiences of the bird in the wild overseas—anecdotes of camp life, falconers, birds and probable escaped or released individually, few enough anyway, are considered largely irrelevant in this naturalist’s view. Few publications, bar the 1995 Goshawk Lives
booklet, so well and generously prepared by Harry Gilonis’ Form Books, have been used; most of this edition is new. I have used almost entirely only notes made at the time, in now well over 500 notepads, and diaries and letters; memory illumines only a narrow broken trail. (Colin Simms)
Zoë Skoulding A Revolutionary Calendar
Published 2020. Paperback, 129pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616905 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The French Republican Calendar, in use from 1793 to 1805 and revived briefly during the Paris Commune of 1871, was an effort to secularise time and return symbolic power to the rural worker. The poet Fabre d’Églantine renamed the months after seasons, while each day, instead of being dedicated to a saint, was dedicated to a plant, animal, mineral or agricultural tool. These names are the starting point for the poems of A Revolutionary Calendar, in which the interplay of etymologies, translations and sensory memory becomes a means of exploring solidarities between human, objects and other species.
Simon Smith Municipal Love Poems
Published 2022. Paperback, 126pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618220 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Municipal Love Poems
comprises two sequences, ‘General Purpose Love Poems’ and ‘Song Book: Series of Songs’. The former is a sequence of long essay-like poems and the latter, shorter song-like poems, which form new spaces, public and private, as call and response, as broken and lyric spaces to think in and with.
This book was written in the years 2015–2017, after the Paris attacks, the migration crisis, the Brexit vote, the election of Trump and installation of May, the war in Syria. One question might be: how did these events change what is meant by public and private space? How can poetry act as antidote to the hostile environments we experience every day. Perhaps some things as ‘useless’ as the song and melody of poetry could open places from where answers might start to be sounded as echoes, and where they might start to appear as ghosts.
Municipal Love Poems
is the companion volume to Last Morning, published in early 2022 by Parlor Press (USA).
Simon Smith More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry — Selected Poems 1989-2012
Edited by Barry Schwabsky
Published 2016. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615106 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road,
Mercury
and London Bridge, alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo
and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: ‘It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries’.
Simon Smith 11781 W. Sunset Boulevard
Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613225 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
'You could study an Ordnance Survey map of the route or you could make annotations concerning Dickens' association with Chatham and many other points, but Smith's skill in assimilation will always be ahead of you, partly because it assimilates ruthlessly to his own present tense, and partly because total assimilation is refused in favour of sheer presence.' —Peter Riley, The Fortnightly Review
'The Waste Land may have been smoothed to automatic for the iPad, but Simon Smith's Gravesend
makes the South-East coast of Dickens and Conrad a place worth missing connections again. All the digital landfill of one London poet's life is here, not to mention a book-stopping tribute to Cy Twombly. Line by line, Smith is one of the most exciting poets writing in England: if it weren't for the sweet Thames and the Little Chefs, he might pass for an American.' —Jeremy Noel-Tod
Tupa Snyder No Man's Land
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700608 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
No Man's Land
is Tupa Snyder's first collection. Born in Calcutta, she has studied at universities in India, the United States and England. This book demonstrates the arrival of a confident new voice that straddles cultural divides.
"Few new poets explore the ins-and-outs of identity — self, family, nation, memory, place, language — with the lyric intensity of Tupa Snyder. Snyder parleys with the Romantic quest for the idealised self as much as its present day fragmentation, to achieve works of power, formal range, and emotional depth, and to open a window onto her unique vision of an Anglo-Indian heritage."
—Andy Brown
—Andy Brown
Steve Spence A Curious Shipwreck
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610972 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Prize for best first collection
These are poems which are ostensibly about pirates yet the subtext has a satirical impulse which is fuelled by surrealism and a delight in upending the apple cart. The author revels in entertaining juxtapositions and in breathless passages of 'stream-of-consciousness' rant, which work wonderfully on the page or performed live. While there are playful references to traditional pirate mythology these poems also talk about the times we live in, from the joint catastrophes of global warming and the credit crunch to popular culture and media trivia. Wordplay is endemic. There's more than a hint of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in this book, as the shadowy figure of Alice entices the pirates into further adventures, yet the ships run aground or never manage to leave the harbour. Absurdity is the keyword, as a sense of fun runs parallel to a skewed commentary on topical events.
Steve Spence Maelstrom Origami
Published 2014. Paperback, 9x6 ins, 92pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613546. [Download a sample PDF from this volume here.]
Steve Spence’s new collection of poetry – his second from Shearsman Books – is a continuation of the mapping of contemporary cultural and political topics through the medium of montage, intervention and startling juxtaposition. While this poetry has its serious side there is plenty of scope for fun and a celebration of the strange and ‘off-key’. There are still a few odd-sounding fish, and the occasional cloud or pirate may appear when least expected, yet it’s a developing terrain where almost anything can happen and often does.
Steve Spence How the Light Changes
Published 2021. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617902 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This new collection brings together a mix of montaged and strangely juxtaposed materials composed over a period of several years between 2012 and 2017 and continues a tradition whereby images and ideas create a framework which contains some familiar and not so familiar topics and relationships. You may recognise phrases and snippets which cause a sense of déjà vu but not that you’d be certain enough to nail down. Weather becomes political and there is resonance here in abundance.
M Stasiak Enchant / Extinguish
Published 2021. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848617629 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
M. Stasiak grew up in Newfoundland, and now lives and works in London. Her work has been published in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Brittle Star, Interpreter’s House, Envoi, Urthona, Iota, Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and Shearsman . This is her first chapbook.
Will Stone Glaciation
Published 2015. Paperback, 80p, 8.5 x 5.5ins. 2nd edition, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614581. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Winner of the Glen Dimplex Poetry Award
‘Stone has a definite flair for the striking image and, taken one by one, his jarring visions of a profligate civilisation trapped in a fatally debased environment are rawly compelling.’ —Sarah Crown, The Guardian
‘Will Stone has created a collection of poems here of oblique and uncomfortable beauty, in which he has managed to successfully capture the dislocation and bewilderment felt in the modern era confronted with the ever accelerating decline of the natural world.
Sometimes you read collections that in their ambition and concerns alert the mind to the possibility of obtaining a new perspective on what else is being written all around us and this book is such a collection…’ —Paul Stubbs, The Wolf
Will Stone Drawing in Ash
Published 2015. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, 2nd Edition, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614598. [Download a PDF sample from this book here.]
‘Will Stone is the lycanthrope of contemporary poetry, a haunter of the haunted, at loose in the European necropolis. He is drawn to the darker edge of genius, attuned to the shades of Kleist and Trakl, of Rodenbach and Verhaeren, and to the landscapes they have evolved in their image. Transfixed by moments of physical and mental dissolution, he is their elegist, and a true initiate in the noble science of melancholy.’ —Stephen Romer
Will Stone The Sleepwalkers
Published 2016. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614727 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new collection from award-winning poet Will Stone, whose poems have been described as haunting, beautiful, savage, lyric and visionary, inventive, searing yet poignant, mesmerising and original.
Like its predecessor Drawing in Ash, Sleepwalkers
ranges across Britain and continental Europe, past, present and future, conjuring extraordinary visions of beauty and despair, joy and horror, revelation and nostalgia. From delicate insight to apocalyptic rage, the glory and savagery of human achievement and destruction is set against the majestic power and fragility of nature.
Will Stone The Slowing Ride
Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617162 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In The Slowing Ride Stone reclaims his role of cerebral journeyman, an inveterate trawler of history, both recent and far distant, moving back and forth between epochs and events, between personalities, cultures and landscapes, leaving behind delicate silken threads of suggestion, salvaging what remains of the humanistic in delineating the replicating tragedies and punishments endured by the fallen and the uncomprehending, those who unknowingly share a non-linear time. Like its predecessors The Slowing Ride reintroduces that rare species, an English born European poet ‘conjuring extraordinary visions of beauty and despair, joy and horror, revelation and nostalgia’.
Em Strang Bird-Woman
Published 2016. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614949 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Winner of the Saltire Award for the Best Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, 2017.
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's First Collection Prize, 2017.
"Em Strang's poems are shamanic, in that they restore to us abandoned mythologies. Nothing is stable in this very real world, where houses can become birds, where the animal lies shallowly below the surface of the human, where poems are haunted with what is unsaid. An 'old throat from the other side', full of bewilderment, concern, passion and beauty." —Jen Hadfield
Em Strang Horse-Man
Published 2019. Paperback, 72pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616776 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Second Collection Prize, 2021.
We are losing everything. In the second decade of the 21st century, loss and grief have become our daily bread, but we do not know how to chew it. Horse-Man
is an invitation to reacquaint ourselves with the lost skill of collective awakening; to re-engage with a deeper awareness of shared experience, where distinctions between self and other begin to blur: we are all in this together.
Horse-Man
inhabits at times surreal, at times mystical territory, where the human and nonhuman merge and blend. In this liminal space, loss and grief are acknowledged and sometimes embraced, allowing the human small mercies in the face of That Which Is Greater Than Us.
Part keening, part celebration, Horse-Man
immerses the reader in a powerful advocacy of sacred meaning and – fiercely, bravely – asks what it means to be whole, a fully embodied human being.
Best read by candlelight.
William Strode Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 5. Edited by Tony Frazer.
Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610057 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
William Strode, born in Plympton, Devon, in the early years of the 17th century, is a little-known writer of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, but he was a fine lyric poet and little deserves his oblivion. Hitherto the only publication of his work was by Bertram Dobell in 1907, since which time he has often been anthologised but never again granted a volume of his own. This volume redresses the balance.
Agnieszka Studzinska Branches of a House
Published 2021. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617773 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Branches of a House, Agnieszka Studzińska’s third collection, encounters the hauntings of dislocation and home. The odd, unfixed status of assumed reality of immediate and distant circumstances is acknowledged in obscured, absent houses and in the boundaries of dwelling. The poems are built from the gaps in remembering, and form a longing to find, in Gaston Bachelard’ s words, ‘our corner of the world.’ They demand yet distill in their archeology, the question of how we inhabit lived and broken spaces. Always on the threshold of loss, these poems move between the lyrical, personal, historical, and abstract, and meditate on the fractured utterance of thinking.
Janet Sutherland Burning the Heartwood
Published 2006. Paperback, 88pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562887 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Burning the Heartwood
is Janet Sutherland's debut collection, and marks the arrival of a talented new lyric voice, with a decided taste for the pastoral. Her arrival is somewhat delayed, as she first made a name as a poet in the 1980s, and was featured in the Paladin anthology, The New British Poetry, but she stopped writing in the 90s and only returned to it in the new century. Her work has been appearing regularly over the past two years in UK and US journals, both print and online. This volume covers both her earlier and her more recent work.
Janet Sutherland Hangman's Acre
Published 2009. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610743 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Born in Salisbury in 1957 and growing up on a dairy farm, Janet Sutherland studied at Cardiff and Essex Universities and has an MA in American poetry. After twenty years living and working in East London she moved to Lewes in 2001 with her partner and son.
Janet Sutherland Bone Monkey
Published 2014. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613478 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This new collection from Janet Sutherland explores the deeply mischievous, but darkly malevolent figure of Bone Monkey. A trickster who has always existed, he's one of the old gods who sprang to life fully formed. Sitting on the shoulders of men and women through the ages, he is by turns perpetrator and poet, murderer and lover, gardener and carer.
With sonnets, ballads and lyrical free verse Bone Monkey wanders through a series of shamanic creation myths into reveries on memory, love and loss. If he is brutal and amoral at times, he is also a dreamer rejoicing in those longings to eat the whole world, as Robert Bly has it, which are intrinsically human.
Janet Sutherland Home Farm
Published 2019. Paperback, 109pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616431 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In her fourth collection Janet Sutherland explores the farm where she grew up; a 90-acre dairy farm in Wiltshire, rented by her parents, where they milked 50 cows and reared heifers on the nearby water meadows. The collection examines the farm as home from early beginnings to the farm auction at the end of their working lives. It is a poetry of landscape and water, of birds, beasts and other creatures, of life lived cheek by jowl with death, of memory and forgetfulness; all of it rooted in place. There’s an engaging inventiveness of form: a disused water mill reveals poems in its old bricks, the drowner revels in his craft, the work of the farm is observed with rigour and lyricism, investigating the uses of memory and landscape as routes to understanding. The final sections zoom outwards, challenging us to look at earth itself as a home farm.
Janet Sutherland The Messenger House
Published 2023. Paperback, 266pp, 9 x 6 ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848618824 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In her fifth book Janet Sutherland explores journals written by her great-great-grandfather, George Davies, as he travelled to Serbia with his Queen’s Messenger friend, Mr Gutch, in 1846 and 1847. She writes her own journals during a trip to Hungary and Serbia in 2018 and after her cancer diagnosis and treatment during the first Covid lockdowns of 2020. Poems, journals, letters, messenger regulations and other testimony, both imaginary and actual, question, answer and echo each other in a radical collage. All the writers are grappling with uncertainties. Sutherland is intrigued by what these testimonies reveal and hide. Part history, part poetry, part travelogue – these journals, poems and other writings interweave the then and now, the observed and imagined. What do we know about these messages and their messengers? What secrets and possibilities might these words carry? What can they tell us about ourselves?
James Sutherland-Smith Mouth
Published 2014. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613539 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem (and therefore must include some hate). The poem is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human mouth." — Irving Weinman
James Sutherland-Smith The River and the Black Cat
Published 2018. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615830 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848615830 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sixty-four improvisations, whose principle motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers or the three musketeers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, among others, ghost in and out of poems ordered according to the progress of the seasons. Their moods and perspectives range from the inconsequential and paradoxical to the melancholic and erotic. Almost all the poems are in some measure love poems.
James Sutherland-Smith Small-Scale Observations
Published 2022. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / US$18.
ISBN 9781848618473 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in James Sutherland-Smith’s eighth collection move from the garden into the neighbourhood of “a down-at-heel Hapsburg town” and then range into the nearby forest, the personal and the past. Borders are crossed and seemingly insignificant creatures suddenly gain visionary dimensions. The title poem recalls a poet whose attention to the small-scale made his work seem minor, yet as Hardy wrote “he noticed such things,” a heedfulness absent in a contemporary world where both simplistic analysis and solutions constantly fail to address threats to our very existence.
Algernon Charles Swinburne Our Lady of Pain: Poems of Eros and Perversion
Edited & introduced by Mark Scroggins.
Published 2019. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Swinburne's first collection, Poems and Ballads
(1866), generated a storm of critical and public controversy, being attacked for licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and the author was forced to transfer his works to another house.
The present selection of Swinburne’s verse focuses precisely on what the first reviewers of the 1866 book found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ varieties. The anonymous review for the London Review
called the poems ‘depraved and morbid in the last degree’; Robert Buchanan in the Athenaeum
pronounced Swinburne ‘unclean for the sake of uncleanness’; and John Morley, in the most thorough and eloquent of the attacks (in the Saturday Review), called the poems ‘nameless shameless abominations’, Swinburne’s ‘a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière’, and Swinburne himself ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’.
Contemporary readers are less likely to condemn a poet for hinting at or even outrightly depicting sex, but Swinburne’s treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock.
Harriet Tarlo Poems 1990-2003
Published 2004. Paperback, 154pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562450 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume of poems spans over a decade of writing and includes all of the author's short poems and shorter sequences considered worthy of collection. It is a book in three parts, each section following a roughly chronological trajectory from 1990–2003. Read in order, the three sections overlap in time and space, while allowing the reader to follow the development of the writing. The first two parts of the book include short poems, most under a page in length, and cover two discrete areas of writing. 'Writing outside' consists of short poems engaged with language and landscape, while 'Voices' brings other perspectives into the work and is concerned with speech patterns and sounds. The third section of the book shows the poet's development of the sequence form in which shorter units of writing are strung together, allowing for longer patterns of sound and language. The latter two sections incorporate found or "heard" fragments of speech, indicated by the use of italics.
Harriet Tarlo Poems 2004-2014
Published 2015. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613591 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]
“Harriet Tarlo is at the forefront of a group of poets who take writing about topography and nature seriously; she finds new ways to express in challenging and exciting language ideas and images that could be beyond language but aren’t, in her very safe and skilful hands.” —Ian McMillan
Harriet Tarlo Field
Published 2016. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615113 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Field
is a collection of poems based on the close observation of a single field, glimpsed from a railway line near Penistone (South Yorkshire), which has been edited down to 60 short lyrical poems tracing seasonal and ecological changes as well as the relationship of people to place.
Harriet Tarlo Gathering Grounds, 2011-2018
With images by Judith Tucker
Published 2019. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £16.95 / $27.50
ISBN 9781848616691 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems were all written as part of collaborative place-based projects with the artist Judith Tucker. They emerge from what could be described as fieldwork, poetry based on walking through, and engaging with, place, with Judith, and, increasingly, with people who live in and visit the areas concerned. Some research into the areas concerned has also taken place and contributed to the work. Up until this moment, they have been pieces in flux. Shorter related poems or fragments have been exhibited with drawings and paintings and many of these longer pieces have been read at openings and poetry readings. Here they can be seen as a body of work. Although the earliest of these poems was originally written in 2011 and the latest in 2019, they have been edited and re-visited throughout the whole period, and indeed the places are also re-visited. (Harriet Tarlo)
Harriet Tarlo (ed.) The Ground Aslant — An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry
Published 2011. Paperback, 180pp, 9.25x7.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610811 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that "landscape writing" need not be confined to literary tourism, or the verbal equivalent of chocolate-box imagery, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. The Ground Aslant is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing, and presents the work of Tony Baker, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Thomas A. Clark, Ian Davidson, Mark Dickinson, Mark Goodwin, Nicholas Johnson, Peter Larkin, Helen Macdonald, Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley, Peter Riley, Colin Simms, Zoe Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts.
Andrew Taylor Radio Mast Horizon
Published 2013. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612624 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848612624 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This collection, the author's first full-length book, gathers poems written over the past decade. The poems, some gathered from previous pamphlets, are concerned with place, love, identity and mortality. Nature is never far away and neither are the watchful eyes of the cities of Liverpool and New York, their tidal rivers and connections.
Andrew Taylor March
Published 2017. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615052 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Building on his debut collection Radio Mast Horizon
(Shearsman Books, 2013) Andrew Taylor takes the reader on a journey through landscapes and places such as the Welsh hills, the West Coast Mainline and the north docks of Liverpool.
Travel is a recurring theme throughout these poems, alongside music and the seasons and the shifts they bring. From having coffee in quiet city-centre cafés to travelling around complete rail networks, Taylor invites the reader into a world that is both personal and universal.
Andrew Taylor Not There — Here
Published 2021. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617872 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Continuing the themes of travel explored in his previous Shearsman collections, Radio Mast Horizon (2013) and March (2017), Andrew Taylor takes the reader from England into pre & post-Brexit Europe, negotiating the arrival of the nightingale, European breakfasts, fast trains into Paris, and the ‘beautiful drift’ of weaving grasses. The reader is treated to the minimalist notion of moments in time alongside the traversing of travelators in Montparnasse and the intricacies of the 280-character form.
Luke Thompson Singing about melon
Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8 x 8ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617353 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: ‘Silenzio’. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through Luke Thompson’s first collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says.
Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all deployed in this exploration of sense and silence through themes of bodily identity, grief, the divine and other species.
Nathan Thompson the arboretum towards the beginning
Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610149 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Nathan Thompson mixes process and poetics with a dry wit, to produce texts that hold the reader's hand through landscapes of the tangential (with occasional diversions back to the straight and narrow). This first collection juxtaposes prose poems with more traditional verse idioms, to create a whole that can be read either as a kind of disjunct musical narrative or as a collection of free-standing associative post-lyrics.
Nathan Thompson The Visitor's Guest
Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611818 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"These poems ask about the nature of avowal and disavowal. Is a poem a love poem because it says so, or by way of an agon of interior discord? Is to merely state something ever equivalent to its understanding? Does the path of the poem take us beyond uncertainty or to its heart?" —Louis Armand
Isobel Thrilling The Language Creatures
Published 2007. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700219 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Isobel Thrilling was born in Suffolk, and brought up in a mining village in the north-east of England; she read English at Hull University and spent many years as Head of Service for Teaching English as a Second Language in a London borough. She first started writing after eye-operations that saved her sight. She is married, with a son, a daughter and two grandchildren. She has been widely published in magazines and newspapers, and her work has been included in many anthologies from publishers such as O.U.P, Longman, Hodder Headline and Macmillan. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Television, ITV; and BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has won many prizes including those at Bridport, Stroud and York. One of her poems has been set to music by the pianist and composer Philip Martin. Several have been used by a calligrapher living in California. This is her fourth collection.
Scott Thurston Hold
Published 2006. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562832 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here. ]
Hold is Scott Thurston's first book-length collection, and covers ten years of work, which have for some time now needed collecting. This is work which owes a lot to the tradition of innovative and experimental poetry in Britain and the USA, but which also sends out feelers in other directions. A radical but communicative poetry.
Scott Thurston Momentum
Published 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700325 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]
Scott Thurston's second Shearsman collection consists of three long sequences of poems, and represents a significant development from his first collection, Hold . Momentum aims to recuperate what may be had of a lyric tradition refracted through a post-Language sensibility; generating, amongst other things, responses to Proust, Shelley and the experience of dancing. Change and time are intrinsic to the book’s accumulative structure and the way in which the line-breaks argue with syntax attempts to show the process, the movement, of thinking in language in time — not a stream of consciousness, but rather more like a weir, a wave, or a rubble-filled alleyway.
Scott Thurston Internal Rhyme
Published 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610903 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Internal Rhyme
is a sequence in four parts which continues the author’s preoccupation with time and process as compositional elements. The book also explores how meaning can change when viewed from different perspectives as each poem in the book can be read vertically as well as horizontally. The subjects and themes are diverse and include poems responding to Blake, Klimt and Twombly alongside refigurings of the theoretical works of Alain Badiou.
Scott Thurston Talking Poetics
Published 2011. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611917. [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography.
Scott Thurston Turning: Selected Poems 1995–2020
Published 2023. Paperback, 154pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618770 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
“Thurston’s poems always danced, as the early writings here demonstrate, in line and spacing, long before dance as a practice became his poetic focus and his ethical metaphor for other modes of action and introspection. They always measured a world to be moved into, fine lines across fine distinctions. His texts become cues for performance, in performance, but just as important is the insistent voice of the poem as it becomes increasingly the voice of the poet: restless, relentless, carrying us with it. This is all for us: ‘in dancing your own rite you don’t/ do it for yourself.’ This is crystallized in the culminating triumph of the lockdown sonnet sequence, ‘A Hard Grief’; it reaches out from our shared resignation and hope. We’re all ‘searching/ for the shapes that shadowed the meaning/ until the flow showed up’, and Thurston is our invaluable lead.” —Robert Sheppard
Chris Torrance Selected Early Poems
Edited by Ian Brinton, and with a Preface by Phil Maillard.
Published 2023. Paperback, 130pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619098 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
One evening in 1961, in the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Surrey, 20-year-old Chris Torrance – solicitor’s clerk with novelistic ambitions – encountered a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians. For Torrance, this was “the most important day of my life”. Dazzled, he was soon joining in their activities: wild weekends in the country, his first scary public readings, and, from 1963, co-editing the poetry and jazz magazine Origins/Diversions. In literary terms, Torrance’s greatest influence from the group was Bill Wyatt, who introduced him to “useful short forms” like haiku, and to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Wyatt, later a prolific poet, translator, naturalist, and the first Zen monk ordained in Britain, remained a life-long friend and ally.
[…] In the spring of 1965 Torrance gave up his seven-year career in solicitors’ offices, and joined the local Parks Department as a labourer. As the title Green Orange Purple Red implies, he wanted a more sensual take on the world via his writing – a Keatsian ambition. About then he found a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry, and embarked on a lifelong ‘love affair’ with those writers and that energy. In particular, the enormous presence of Charles Olson, seemed to confirm that – in terms of big ambition and local detail – Torrance was on the right track with his writing.
Validation came in July 1966, with ‘The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision’. Torrance was cutting the grass outside the Laundry, when his vocation was revealed to him: ‘I’m going to be a poet’. It wasn’t a ‘vision’; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed (“I accepted it completely”). As The Voice diminished into the clatter of machinery and the chatter of the laundry girls, the path ahead lay clear. —Phil Maillard
Siriol Troup Beneath the Rime
Published 2009. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610309 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Beneath the Rime
is Siriol Troup's second collection of poems, following Drowning up the Blue End
which was published in 2004. Rooted in real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Beneath the Rime
explore memory, art and language, asking above all what it is to be human. This new collection finds her adopting voices — human and animal, colloquial and historical — in her search for a 'proper viewing distance' where life's messy fragments fuse together, enabling us to understand our position — and negotiate our survival — in a troubling world where 'our tracks once told us where we were' but which now seems, at times, no more than a 'shudder on the horizon'.
Siriol Troup No Names Have Been Changed
Published 2017. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615441 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"No Names Have Been Changed, Siriol Troup’s third collection, offers strong, strange visions. Her poems, assured and varied in technique, are equally at home in ancient cities or on today’s derelict coasts. She is a shrewd observer of times and trends: the Afghan coat, the incense-burner… In her lines, Meissen plates are set aside by violence; knives flash through Venice. But her poems are also strong in sympathy, for the old lady requesting gin and tonic on her deathbed, for the tenderness between a man and his ‘beautiful collared dog’. Troup’s long knowledge of languages leads to a final gift to her readers: the wit, freshness and variety of her translations and re-imaginings." —Alison Brackenbury
Gael Turnbull There are words… Collected Poems
Published 2006. Paperback, 496pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $32
ISBN 9780907562804 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Gael Turnbull — poet, doctor, performer and morris-dancer — was for many years a transatlantic poetic nexus in the UK, both through his own work, and through his pioneering Migrant Press, founded in 1957, an early outlet for figures such as Roy Fisher and Edward Dorn. This Collected
gathers almost all of Gael Turnbull's published poetry as well as a selection of uncollected and unpublished works.
Gael Turnbull More Words — Gael Turnbull on Poets and Poetry
Edited by Jill Turnbull & Hamish Whyte
Published 2012. Paperback, 204pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610934 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume brings together a number of hard-to-find reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a central figure in the interaction between American and British poetry in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and also publisher of the excellent small press, Migrant. Shearsman published his Collected Poems, There are words… in 2006, and this companion volume fills out the picture of an influential figure in British letters, with a number of pieces on poets such as Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher, as well as nods in the direction of Olson and Creeley from the other side of the Atlantic. The book is introduced by the poet's widow, Jill Turnbull, who has also made the final selection of pieces to be included, in consultation with Hamish Whyte, Turnbull's long-time publisher in Edinburgh.
Robert Vas Dias Still • Life
Published 2009. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611214 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
In this generous assembling of work from the past ten years, the Anglo-American poet Robert Vas Dias explores meanings and resonances inherent in art and the suggestive implications of objects which both make up the quotidian and help to define us. This is a poetry of 'domestic tranquillity' as well as chaos, of the absurd and the numinous, of the serious and comedic. Vas Dias is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, and has edited or co-edited four literary journals — two in the USA and two in the UK. His poetry and criticism have appeared in about 100 magazines and journals, as well as in a dozen anthologies. His previous collection was Leaping Down to Earth, 2008, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick. He is a tutor with The Poetry School in London and editor-publisher of Permanent Press.
Robert Vas Dias Arrivals & Departures
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613652 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here .]
Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American born and now resident in London, has published ten collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of which are London Cityscape Sijo and other poems (Perdika, 2012), and Still · Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice (Shearsman, 2010). This chapbook brings together a series of uncollected prose poems.
Robert Vas Dias & Julia Farrer Black Book
Published 2016. Paperback, 64pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £12.95
ISBN 9781848614895
Black Book: An Assemblage of the Fragmentary
is the first major collaboration between a poet and artist reacting to the worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war. In hard-hitting texts by Robert Vas Dias and vivid abstract images by Julia Farrer, Black Book takes as its point of departure the worldwide intolerance suffered by ‘the Other,’ reflecting their belief that “art is an individual commitment to the times we live in”. Robert Hampson writes: “Black Book
is an ethical response to a range of contemporary atrocities and acts of inhumanity… [confronting] us with what has become our common world since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’.” The book is experimental, exhibiting a variety of poetic and visual approaches, including texts composed by chance procedures, all illustrative of the state of fragmentation: what is left after bombardment, desecration, drownings, broken families.
Molly Vogel Florilegium
Published 2020. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617025 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Molly Vogel’s first collection of poems, Florilegium
is an exploration of life written in ‘the language of
flowers’. The poems regard flowers as both symbols and means of communication; in a broader sense,
they deem the natural world essential to our understanding of words, ourselves, and the divine. Like
Coleridge’s rook in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, the flower is a sign that connects those
disparately placed, both geographically and emotionally. Florilegium
finds its blooms in Scotland as well
as California; in free verse as well as stricter form; in books as well as dreams; on streets and at shrines
as well as in wild gardens. Fittingly, the poems are varied and vividly colourful, inviting and surprising.
They precede a long-form glossary, a meditation growing out from the poems’ words but also from the
entire history of literature and thought around flowers. Though intertwined with the poems, the
glossary is a collection in itself: in equal parts literary criticism, philosophical treatise, and prose poem.
Alan Wall Alexander Pope at Twickenham
Published 2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700998 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Accompanying Gilgamesh
is Alan Wall's new collection of shorter poems and sequence, the centrepiece of which is the London section, in which the author inhabits the clothes of a number of old masters who have lived in London or its environs — Alexander Pope, of course, but also Thomas More, Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Burton, Rosenberg, Pound and others. Then, 'Lenses' deals with Alexander Topcliffe, the early astronomer, and the unlucky Marsyas also makes an appearance — the cast of characters is extensive, and each is presented with the skill of a novelist, mixed with the precision of the poet.
Alan Wall Gilgamesh
Published 2007. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700981 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume features two long pieces — the title work — a version & partial transposition of the Gilgamesh
epic—and the mixed work in verse and prose, Jacob, originally published in the 1990s and long unavailable. In both works history, myth and the present collide. Jacob
was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize when first published.
Alan Wall Doctor Placebo
Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611337 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. As a medical practitioner he broods about his patients; as a writer he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor. One thing at least remains constant — moonlight. The end of the western intellectual tradition, like Placebo himself, is insomniac.
Alan Wall Raven
Published 2012. Chapbook, 30pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612464 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this is a single long sequence of poems. Since collected in Endtimes (see below).
Alan Wall Endtimes
Published 2013. Paperback, 86pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612754 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
All ages shape their own apocalyptic visions, a way of understanding the perils and revelations that perennially surround us. Endtimes
explores such visions over the last two thousand years, since John of Patmos first looked out of his window and saw FINIS written in vapour trails on the blue Aegean sky. From Roman tyrants to the persecuted Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, this sequence explores the dark side of our history, and the glories such darkness continues to provoke in art and literature. Between a dusty cellar in Patmos in the first century of the Common Era, and the streets of New York in 9/11, the distance can sometimes be measured in seconds rather than millennia.
Carol Watts Kelptown
Published 2020. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617339 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This is poetry at the edge of the land, but also at the edge of our horizon. Kelptown is Kemptown, so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities, lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore, knowing that the waters are rising, but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives, and shows us how we can learn to live, alongside fellow species, which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given ‘DeExtinction Poems’ and ‘Notes on a Burning World’. But is also a poetry that knows it must ‘make a home/ on friable shores, built from inundate truths’. These beautiful lines are from the book’s title sequence, where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: ‘How do I live, tenant among your long fronds’. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts’ imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade, through what can seem like the end times, these are poems that open us to new relations with the world."
—David Herd
Carol Watts When Blue Light Falls
Published 2018. Paperback, 86pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615267 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"As ‘blue comes on’ in these elegies, a unique genre emerges, a lyrical epic that speculates on a world imagined through the physics of blue light, ‘cyanometrics’, the blue waves of the spectrum, shorter and faster moving when split from the norm of white light. In this new, formative referential world of blue, perception changes. As Carol Watts thinks blue, and makes strange cognitive experience, the long-held European myth of the power of vision as a knowledge-making faculty dissolves, along with the confident centrality of the perceiving subject. There is no ‘I’ in this work, the first person is eliminated. In this new space/time of her enigmatic lyrics a spare, cryptic language evolves. Just as blue comes to us through the earth’s atmosphere, scattered by molecules, the words on the page are like particles, suspended by a minimal syntax. So we discover new relations. With its charge of blue, the four parts of the poem move from speculation to threnody and even to prophecy as the earth’s atmosphere that hosts light gradually takes on ecological terror. This terror penetrates to inner and to civic lives, to networks of finance and to myths of gender. This is a major philosophical poem of our generation." — Isobel Armstrong
John Welch The Eastern Boroughs
Published 2004. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562436 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The author's fifth major collection, following And Ada Ann, Out Walking, Blood and Dreams and Greeting Want, containing work written over the past six years. A number of the poems in The Eastern Boroughs express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing. This volume was subsequently collected in the author's Collected Poems
(see below).
John Welch Collected Poems
Published 2008. Paperback, 456pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $30
ISBN 9781905700578 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Published at the same time as the author's memoir Dreaming Arrival
this volume offers a retrospective of over 30 years' work, including as-yet-uncollected work. This Collected
— another in a series of large-scale retrospectives from Shearsman Books — demonstrates what a number of people have already recognised — that John Welch's apparently quiet art is a powerfully communicative one.
John Welch Dreaming Arrival
Published 2008. Paperback, 236pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700561 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, Dreaming Arrival
presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question Dreaming Arrival looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself.
John Welch Visiting Exile
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610767 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
In this new collection John Welch returns to his longstanding preoccupation with the inner city and its diversities, fuelled in part by his own past experience as a teacher working in multicultural education. 'Out Walking' (which was the title of his first collection back in the 1980s) the poet's trajectory across the city is informed by London's imperialist past, by the 7/7 bombings, and by a sense of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in a deeply felt involvement with the Other.
A recurring presence in the poetry is 'All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go', a sculpture by the London-based Lebanese artist Souheil Sleiman comprising hundreds of fragments of broken mirror woven together to represent a group of tower blocks, taken here to represent, among other things, the self-regard and inherent fragility of 'the City' in its recent incarnation.
John Welch Its Halting Measure
Published 2013. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612433 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"Clearly Welch, for all his minimalism, has not shied away from grand preoccupations on a local or global scale. For me, it is the quiet intelligence, provoking re-reading, that will bring me to Visiting Exile again; say, the irresistible pushing the adverb from a more to a less expected position — 'There's a god surely who sits in the air' ('Untold Wealth'). The god sits surely… Surely there's a god… Did you spot that god, surely it is one, there among the pigeons? The birds swoop through the poems. No gods are secured." —Vahni Capildeo, in Blackbox Manifold.
John Welch In Folly's Shade
Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616196 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The title sequence in John Welch’s new collection evokes early life experiences, some traumatic – material that had previously featured in his prose memoir Dreaming Arrival
(Shearsman 2008). Whether suggesting the light ancient coinage can shed on contemporary politics or moving through and reflecting on urban landscapes, there is throughout the book a recurring preoccupation with the ambiguities involved in the business of being a poet and above all the sheer oddness of us as a species inveigled into language and unable to get out of it.
Nigel Wheale Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems
Published 2004. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562757 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
A summing-up of the poetic career of scholar Nigel Wheale, covering over thirty years of his work. Hitherto, all of the author's poetry has appeared in small-press and generally hard-to-find volumes and 'Raw Skies' is the largest collection of his poetry to have been published.
Ruth Wiggins The Lost Book of Barkynge
Published 2023. Paperback, 142pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618633 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In her debut collection, Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe. Barking was one of the most significant abbeys in Britain and a centre of learning for women, it offered space to the devout, the bookish, and those who simply did not fit anywhere else. These poems introduce some remarkable characters: poets, visionaries, washerwomen and queens, and range from the sacred feminine to the protofeminist. Whether one reads
The Lost Book of Barkynge as a series of monologues or as a sequence evoking time and place, what emerges is an excavation of forgotten stories. Here the lost voices of the women of Barking are restored in poems that voice the power and poignancy of their lives –
So our words let them reach then flicker into brightness.
John Wilkinson Fugue State
Published 2023. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618985 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Fugue State is John Wilkinson's fifteenth book of poems, and the most fiery. In it, the world is thicker than ever, crowded with all sorts of things, from futures to the exhumed bodies of 80 girls. His muse is a fly, try to catch it. His sentences zigzag. His unique fashion of figuration risks cutting ties with 'verisimilitude.' Opposing everything that blocks, hardens, locks, and pursues a single, choke-hold course, he takes his stand on the edge of chaos, not instituted law. Thus would he champion the precept of refreshment, not least the natural cycle of living things. More, he curses 'he misbegetting Gods [who] fuck in beach-huts of a cement Lethe.' Data-streams, a "horizon of ones and zeros," self-driving cars, drones, crypto-currency, robots – these are for him aspects of the concretization of modern culture. Fighting its sway, he is as steely as he is mercurial. Force is good if it's on the side of 'the vital artery.' In the last decade Wilkinson has become a master of the longish poem — here, for instance, 'East Lake' and 'Xipe Totec.' Of poets now writing in English, he is the freest and most elusive-on-principle, the most capable of pulling out a language blade and using it." —Calvin Bedient
JL Williams Condition of Fire
Published 2011. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611450 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"Now I will tell my stories of bodies that change…" —Ovid, Metamorphoses
Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before he was banished from his beloved Rome and after travelling and observing many diverse and vibrant landscapes. He may well have visited and was knowledgeable of the Aeolian Isles where volcanoes cast molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the winds of the god who made his home there.
It was to these rapturous, Edenic and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write the poems in this collection; poems inspired both directly by Ovid's tales and informing the new story that emerges from the old — a post-apocalyptic vision of the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth out of the ashen wasteland that man has made of the world. Ovid expressed the truth that to change is to survive, and this message erupts out of the poems in Condition of Fire, whose language and images strive to communicate in new ways the essential elements of myth, creation and the burning breath of being.
JL Williams Locust and Marlin
Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613287 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Locust and Marlin
considers how, in lives bright and brief as a candle's burn, we tell our stories and locate the places where we live and love. Where is the origin, our point in space from which we view the world? How much control do we have over who we are and what impact we have on the territory we inhabit? In a world whose boundaries and pathways are increasingly difficult to define, how do we find our way home?
JL Williams After Economy
Published 2017. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615373 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new collection exploring the fine line between abundance and apocalypse.
"For some reason, slightly unfathomable, I am reminded of a forest we visited on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido where the annual winter ice festival is held. The forest is sprayed for days by the local fire department, but not before flowers and colored lights have been hung within the branches, so when the whole forest turns to crystalline ice, the lights burn from within, the whole crystal forest glows, and when you walk there, flowers look out from the ice, arrested in full bloom. It is all so unexpected, and so extravagantly beautiful–something essential in such crystallization, and with fire in its core. Well, this vision returned to me reading your manuscript." —Eleanor Wilner
JL Williams Origin
Published 2022. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618053 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is the story of a baby coming into the world, and of her first year in that world altered beyond recognition by a virus born into our lives at nearly the same time. It is a song of breath, and of light. It is a collection of love poems, and a cry flung into the universe echoing the cry of all babies, a cry of loss and of nearly unbearable love. It is a book not just for pregnant women, or new mums and dads, but for all people who have entered through that small crack into the light of this life, and for all who have parents and have grappled with the joys and challenges of those most intimate of relationships. It is a song of light, and of breath. It is a story of where we come from.
Sir Thomas Wyatt Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.
Published 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611023 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was born at Allington Castle in Kent. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and served King Henry VIII in various capacities both at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1535, but was imprisoned in the Tower a year later following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, but also perhaps because of suspicion that he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn — a woman he had known for many years and with whom he had been linked at one time. He was released the same year, although he was to fall afoul of authority on at least two further occasions, only to be pardoned. He is remembered today as one of the most important poets in the English language, and as the man who brought the sonnet into English, with spectacular imitations and re-creations of Petrarch. His work is broader than that, however, and he showed himself to be a fine elegist and satirist, as well as a lyric poet of the very first order.
Michael Zand Lion — the iran poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611153 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
I always seem to begin with the photographs". The photos in questions were taken in Iran and date from the 1930s to the 1960s. They chronicle the rise and fall of an Iranian patriarch, the lion of the title, and they haunt the imagination of his son, the narrator. We take a poetic and spiritual journey with the photographs, each of which yields a sequence of texts in poetry and prose. Lion
is a narrative of sorts, but it is necessarily disruptive and disjunctive — ideas and literary structures are questioned, even the fixed boundaries of language itself are challenged. Lion is a meditation on the role of kinship in the development of cultural identity and the importance of rites of passage as cultural artifacts in the modern world. Ultimately, Lion is about the impact of the loss of identity amongst the Iranian diaspora, and the creation of myths of origin. The photographs create an imagined hinterland on the edge of reality, which is every bit as vivid as any material place. It is from this created world that narrator draws his energy, the Iran of disaporic memory, the Iran of the photographs, the Iran of the Mind.
Michael Zand The Wire & other poems
Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612495 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this shows the further development in Michael Zand's work since his debut volume, Lion (2010).
Michael Zand The Messier Objects
Published 2015. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614567 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astronomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. The Messier Objects are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation.
