Shearsman Chapbooks

Chapbooks


Seren Adams  Small History

Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612457 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



One of 5 chapbooks published in 2012, this was Seren Adams' first publication and concentrates on the small Somerset town of Radstock, and its history as a mining centre.


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Seren Adams Small History

Martin Anderson  The Lower Reaches 

Published 2013. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613119 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


The Lower Reaches is framed within precise geography, the Lower Hope region of the Thames estuary where the author was born and grew up beside a river on which "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire" floated. Anderson lived for decades in the Far East. His meditation interrogates the formation of national identity and freights with poignant significance the old maxim that so much of British history happened overseas.


A few copies remain for sale. Subsequently collected in Obsequy for Lost Things (see under British Titles).




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Martin Anderson The Lower Reaches

Martin Anderson  In the Empire of Chimeras

Published 2018. Paperback, 22pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, ££7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616165 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Through these poems set within a major south east Asian city Anderson weaves, against the rotting entablatures of monumental imperial ambition, slowly degraded aspirations of native and non-native inhabitant.


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Martin Anderson The Lower Reaches

Richard Berengarten  Imagems 1

Published 2013. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, ££7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613126 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein

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Richard Berengarten Imagems 1

Richard Berengarten   Imagems 2

Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616851 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Imagems 2 contains six statements by a poet who continues to challenge modernism and post-modernism alike. This chapbook complements and elaborates Richard Berengarten’s Imagems 1 (2013). In this sequel, the borders between poetic theory and practice blur, for some of these texts are prose-poems in themselves. While their themes are rooted in the here-now, their 12-point structures call to mind early 20th century manifestos and late 20th century memoranda. Themes include the birth of poetry in sound, breath, and inner speech; the interdependence of the universal and the particular; and language, light and vision. Imagems 3 is on the way.

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Richard Berengarten - Imagems 2

Richard Berengarten  Avebury

The Shearsman Library 5

Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615892 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Avebury first appeared as a slim volume in 1972, from Anvil Press, and remains something of an outlier in the author’s work. A sequence of poems triggered by the remarkable standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire – older than Stonehenge, which is not too far away, but part of the same evidently sacred landscape. 

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Richard Berengarten  Avebury

Richard Berengarten  The Wine Cup

Published 2022. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618503 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1,000 years. But a sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time ever in English, is a suite of twenty-four of them. The delicate instrument of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao Yuanming, Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine, who lived more than 1,500 years ago.



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Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey - Into the Interior

Andy Brown  Watersong

Published 2015. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614505 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]




Watersong begins with the first of the great cholera epidemics of 19th Century England. Focussing on the poet’s home city of Exeter, the poems interlace select details from Exeter’s 1832 cholera outbreak, in which over 400 people died, with imagined narratives of the epidemic, and other related episodes in the city,factual and invented.


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Andy Brown  Watersong

Andy Brown   Casket

Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £6.50 / $9.95
ISBN 9781848616837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Franks Casket (or Auzon Casket) is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest, donated to the British Museum by a private owner from Auzon, France. Made from whalebone, the front, back, sides and lid of this small chest are decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Each rune has an equivalent letter in the Latin alphabet, allowing for Anglo-Saxon and modern English translations. Each rune also has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ (‘fisc’), f signifies ‘wealth’, i ‘ice’, s ‘sun’ and c ‘torch’, yielding a sequence of four images. To write the poems in this collection, I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word and then used these images, or variants of them, to write the poems. Using this multilevel technique of ‘translation’, the following poems are an attempt to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present, of the place where I now live: the River Teign and its surrounding area. —Andy Brown
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Andy Brown - Casket

Vahni Capildeo  Simple Complex Shapes

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614512 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Vahni Capildeo is a British Trinidadian writer of poetry and prose. Recent work also appears in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015).


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Vahni Capildeo  Simple Complex Shapes

Geraldine Clarkson  Declare

Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615069 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice — 4th Quarter 2016


Geraldine Clarkson lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, and the Magma Editors’, Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. Declare is her first chapbook.


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Geraldine Clarkson  Declare

Geraldine Clarkson  No. 25

Published 2018. Paperback, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £6.50/ $9/95
ISBN 9781848616158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“Geraldine Clarkson’s work brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s remark that “a thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility”. Clarkson is one of few poets whose work insists on, and succeeds in, finding new and more ambitious ways to integrate affective experience, emotion, thought and an imaginative expansiveness that is entirely her own. Her rare gift is to produce a poetry that sings, even as it swinges.” —Ahren Warner (editor, Poetry London )

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Geraldine Clarkson  Declare

Susan Connolly  The Sun-Artist

Published 2013. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613133 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


The Sun-Artist is a collection of "pattern poems" by a poet who has been experimenting with visual texts—often with a uniquely Irish "subject matter"—for several years. Her last Shearsman collection, Forest Music, featured a number of such works, but this chapbook is entirely visual.


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Susan Connolly The Sun-Artist

Susan Connolly  The Orchard Keeper

Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615601 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper . Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres.

     The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat , warmly recall the lives of close friends and family.

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Susan Connolly  The Orchard Keeper

Kelvin Corcoran   The Red and Yellow Book

 Published 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

 ISBN 9781848616349 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]


The Red and Yellow Book  was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis.  The Red and Yellow Book  was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. —Kelvin Corcoran

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Kelvin Corcoran - The Red and Yellow Book

Kelvin Corcoran   Below This Level

 Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

 ISBN 9781848616844 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]


Below This Level  recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.



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Kelvin Corcoran - Below This Level

Kelvin Corcoran (ed.)  According to John James

Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616301


Sadly, John James passed away in May 2018, just a month after launching his New & Selected Poems, Sarments (details under British titles on this website) in London. Here friends, admirers and colleagues take their cue from 2 quatrains in James's 'Theory of Poetry', and respond accordingly: Anthony Barnett, Kelvin Corcoran, Chris Cornwell,​ Lyndon Davies,​ Andrew Duncan,​ John Goodby,​ John Hall, ​Alan Halsey,​ Peter Hughes,​ Romana Huk​, Linda Kemp,​ Mark Leahy,​ Tony Lopez,​ Anthony Mellors,​ Ian Patterson,​ Simon Perril,​ J.H. Prynne, ​Denise Riley,  Peter Riley,​ Gavin Selerie, Simon Smith,​ John Temple,​ Nick Totton, Karlien van den Beukel,​ Robert Vas Dias,​ Geoff Ward,​ John Wilkinson, ​Cliff Yates, plus a painting by Bruce McLean on the cover.


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Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey  Into the Interior

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

ISBN 9781848618459



What are the captions using us for?


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

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



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Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey - Into the Interior

Claire Crowther  Bare George

Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614932 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


The design of a coin is an act of succinct aggrandisement. Bare George explores the coinage of power through a far more famous numismatic image: created in 1817 for King George III and his son, the Prince Regent, by celebrity gem designer Benedetto Pistrucci, it pictures a saint, young St George, lancing a dragon. He is undressed. Any Greek warrior of artistic relevance to the nineteenth century would be. The dragon is submitting, as the opposition needs to be shown to do.


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Claire Crowther  Bare George

Martyn Crucefix   The Time We Turned

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613683 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Martyn Crucefix’s new poems vividly evoke the landscapes of northern England and—in a sequence of sonnets inspired by the writing of Rosalía de Castro—the north west of Spain. But more than place, they explore the ways in which we inhabit time—how we are harmed and healed by it, how we deny, ignore, sublimate, repeat or reprise it.

 

I’d want to say it was past seven o’clock

or perhaps by then even seven-fifteen—

 

I’m sure of it now—a quarter past the hour

was the time we turned and part of what it meant

     (‘The map house’)

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Martyn Crucefix  The Turn We Take

Ian Davidson  On the Way to Work

Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615625 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


"These poems were written on the way to work, walking the two and a half miles from near Saltwell Park in Gateshead to Northumbria University in Newcastle. The journey took me through Gateshead’s residential streets, its town centre and over the Tyne, often by the High Level Bridge. I’d try to write something in my head every day before I got to work, while still free of the numbing rush of its demands. Sometimes a whole poem would appear, at other times one or two words or lines would shift and repeat through seemingly endless variations, refusing to settle." (Ian Davidson)


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Ian Davidson  On the Way to Work

Patricia Debney  Gestation

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613669 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


Patricia Debney’s first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books, 2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. A novel, Losing You (bluechrome) appeared in 2007. Her second collection of prose poems, Littoral , was published by Shearsman Books in 2013. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.

 

Exploring fragmentation, delusion and parental ageing, the long poem Gestation forms part of her next collection, Baby .

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Patricia Debney  Gestation

Shira Dentz  Leaf Weather

Published 2012. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612273 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


"Veering — often within a single poem, often within a single line — from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words." —Mark Levine


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Shira Dentz Leaf Weather

Steve Ely  Jubilate Messi

 Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616134 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]


 I’ve played, watched and loved football all my life. Along with birds and birding it is my most enduring passion. So I thought I’d write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. I started fluently, but one thing and another got in the way and the footballing Muse abandoned me after about twenty poems. The poems in this chapbook are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. Plus a sub. Messi comes last, but it is definitely not him.


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Carrie Etter  Scar

Carrie Etter  Scar

Published 2016. Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614871 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


In Scar , Carrie Etter compellingly explores the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois. The language shifts and evolves painfully as the land and its inhabitants find themselves wracked by climatic and political forces beyond their control.

 

You can hear the author talking about Scar on a podcast from the Scottish Poetry Library here , interviewed by fellow Shearsman author, JL Williams.


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Carrie Etter  Scar

Amy Evans  The Sea Quells

Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613140 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


The poems in this chapbook form an individual sequence. At the same time, they present a new and longer section of an ongoing series. The Sea Quells responds to and continues Collecting Shells , which was published in 2011 with Oystercatcher Press and is included, in excerpt form, in the anthologies Sea Pie (Shearsman) and Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe).


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Amy Evans The Sea Quells

Amy Evans  CONT.

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 978184861454-3 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]


A sequel to 2013's The   Sea Quells, CONT . continues Amy Evans' explorations of language and the infinite whiteness of the page. 


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Amy Evans   CONT.

Amy Evans Bauer   PASS PORT

Published 2018. Chapbook, 42pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

 ISBN 9781848616226 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]


 PASS PORT is a travel document—a transcript of the first half of the at-sea installation SOUNDING((ING))S, which ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea across the English Channel, and underneath the seabed through the Channel Tunnel. Bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny refugees movement across the English-French border. The installation offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts, and the asylum-seeking body within the EU.


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Steve Ely  Jubilate Messi

Gerrie Fellows  Shadow Box

Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618480 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Shadow Box originated with a single piece, ‘The Curiosities of Dr Hunter’, a poem which gathered together many objects from Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum in an investigation into the nature of 18th-century collecting; but the museum holds so many objects to catch the eye and imagination – cultural artefacts from across the world, scientific instruments, medical specimens, objects of the natural world – from which so many kinds of poem might be written. Here then are poems caught between the perfection of a single thing and a necessary enquiry into how the object came to be here, what its meanings might be, and who comes to be an observer here.


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Gerrie Fellows - Shadow Box

Kit Fryatt  Rain Down Can

Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612471 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

 


One of 5 chapbooks published in 2012, this was Kit Fryatt's first publication. 



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Kit Fryatt  Rain Down Can

Nancy Gaffield  Tokaido Road — A Journey with Hiroshige

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613782.

 

This is the libretto for Nicola LeFanu’s chamber opera Tokaido Road , which had its premiere in July 2014, and is based on Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poems (CB editions, 2011).

 

In 1832 the young Hiroshige sets out on Japan’s great Eastern Sea Road, the Tokaido, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The paintings he creates along the way reveal the secrets of a hidden country. 


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Nancy Gaffield  Tokaido Road — A Journey with Hiroshige

Mark Goodwin  Layers of Un

Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612488 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

 


One of 5 chapbooks published in 2012, this volume digs further into Mark Goodwin's explorations of landscape and language.


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Mark Goodwin  Layers of Un

Mark Goodwin  All Space Away and In

 Published 2017. Paperback, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95

 ISBN 9781848615632 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]



All Space Away and In  … is on mist-smudged snow just to our north or in a bulbous evolving sky or in a rhyolite bowl of wobbling Welsh syllables … Here Mark Goodwin becomes involved with animals & ground, as well as people … Poems as clunk-&-puff-of-dirt … creaturely elongation of speed … a fog-hollow of corrie … chalk-hooves flint-ringing … Attempts to free amazement and pin-point sharp where we are…


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Mark Goodwin  All Space Away and In

Harry Guest  Elegies

The Shearsman Library 10

Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615960 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Harry Guest’s remarkable sequence of Elegies were first published as a chapbook in 1980 by Pig Press in Durham, and were later collected in Lost and Found a large collection of the author’s work in 1983. here we take the chance to return the poems to their original chapbook environment, convinced that the world still needs work like this. Still available in the author’s Anvil collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest , they benefit from being able to breathe more easily in their original form…


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Harry Guest  Elegies

Harry Guest   Short Attention Span

Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616875 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Throughout his career, Harry Guest has written occasional poems, haiku, squibs and jests, and this little collection brings together a range of them that will delight his readers.



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Harry Guest - Short Attention Span

Peter Jaeger  Family Time

Published 2015. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614529 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet now living in the UK. He is the author of several books and is Professor of Poetics at Roehampton University in London. 


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Peter Jaeger  Family Time

David Hackbridge Johnson   Après Rops

Published August 2023. Chapbook, 28pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618398 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]


Félicien Rops (1833–1898) was a Belgian artist, primarily a print-maker.  He was a friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Péladan.  His work – symbolist and decadent in tone – retains its shock value over a century later. In a sequence of poems inspired by Rops’ etchings and peppered with ill-translated fragments plundered from old exhibition catalogues, Hackbridge Johnson wrenches the daring reprobate into the 21
st century where he is surely needed to puncture the hypocrisies of a discredited age.   

 


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David Hackbridge Johnson - Après Rops

juli Jana  ra-t

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

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



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


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juli Jana  ra-t

Alice Kavounas  Thin Ice

Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins,£7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613157 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Thin Ice takes the reader on an odyssey of the imagination, with poems whose sources range from a childhood in Maine, to New York City of the Vietnam era, to our paranoid post-9/11 world. There is a measure of relief in the quotidian pleasures of our beleaguered natural environment, whether from a terrace on a Greek island, or the poet's garden in Cornwall. Thin Ice follows Alice Kavounas' earlier collections, Ornament of Asia , and The Invited.


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Alice Kavounas Thin Ice

David Miller  Spiritual Letters (Series 6)

Published 2015. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614550 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



“The word ‘spiritual’ is, in this volume, ripped away from the New Age and returned to its sources in Kabbalah and early Christian (gnostic) writings. But it carries with it the world as we have it now. A heap of horrors, remnants, a sense of the feminine under assault, and the drive to love. Therefore the dimensions are multiple and unstable. To be human is to be a spiritual entity more aligned with nature than with culture, and therefore to rebel. I am happy to have and to hold this book.” —Fanny Howe, on Series 1-5 of Spiritual Letters 


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David Miller  Spiritual Letters (Series 6)

Paschalis Nikolaou (ed.)  12 Greek Poems after Cavafy

Translated from Greek by Richard Berengarten & Paschalis Nikolaou. Bilingual.

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95 ISBN 9781848614499

[Download 'A Note on Translating 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy' here and 'Εκ του Ελληνικού' / 'From the Greek' here .]


Throughout his adult life, C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) rarely journeyed outside his native Alexandria, though he spent some of his childhood years in Liverpool and London. In the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the reach of his poetry has been immense. It has been witnessed and addressed through a global wealth of versions, imitations and rewritings: those poems written ‘in the manner of Cavafy’, variously channelling his themes and style. Here, for the first time in English, is a selection of such work by poets writing in Cavafy’s own language, Greek. Together they embed the intimacy of shared culture, skilfully mirroring passions and preoccupations. This bilingual presentation includes voices familiar to English readers, such as those of George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos, alongside lesser known names – all of them, engaged in layered dialogues with Cavafy. The result is a lasting image of literary influence and reception, and ultimately, of poetry translated by poetry.

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Paschalis Nikolaou (ed.) 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy

Sonia Overall  The Art of Walking

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614482 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Sonia Overall is a novelist, poet and lecturer based in Kent. The Art of Walking is a collection of responses to movement and place, reflecting the writer’s interest in the relationship between walking and creativity, self and setting.


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Sonia Overall  The Art of Walking

Richard Owens  Song of the Constant Sea

 Published 2021. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848617919 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]



Song of the Constant Sea  is a poem of moderate length which attends to the deeply entangled network of interrelations and genealogies that come together and variously cohere within a single consciousness of being. Starting from home or not home, the poem winds through a catalog of experiences and memories to suggest that home, more than a geographical location, is an imagined and essential space that is both constituted by and participant in building a poetic imaginary committed to liberatory balance, equity, and social justice.


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Richard Owens - Song of the Constant Sea

Simon Perril  In the final year of my 40s

Published 2018. Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616141 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In the final year of my 40s

I shall abdicate responsibility

for all my poems say, do, or be

so they might get a life

away from me.

 

Join Simon Perril as he writes an ecstatically elastic 50th birthday poem bidding adieu to his 40s. Written on the skin of the moment, the membrane of occasion, these poems nod, wink, cajole, caress, proclaim and defame their way across 80 plus freewheeling stanzas.


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Sonia Overall  The Art of Walking

J.H. Prynne  Or Scissel

Published 2018. Chapbook, 38pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616219



This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passagebetween J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation,subsequent eventually to Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).



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J.H.  Prynne  Or Scissel

J.H. Prynne  Whitman and Truth

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

ISBN 9781848617926



Whitman and Truth is a set of reading notes intended to introduce third-year university students to Whitman’s reading of war, with enlightening comparisons offered from the work Susan Sontag, Sir Philip Sidney, Mo Yan, Edmund Blunden, and others.



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J.H. Prynne - Whitman and Truth

Peter Riley  "Proof..."

Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618855 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



        ‘How do you get mortal harmony

out of a stone box into the moving air?

With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.’


Proof asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can.  It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren’s song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet’s task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. Proof brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision. 


   ‘And it is through

this hole in the night that the wren sings.’


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Peter Riley - Proof

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 Saunders fills in the gaps.


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Lesley Saunders  Periplous — The Twelve Voyages of Pytheas

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).


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John Seed  Some Poems 2006-2013

Michael Smith   Maldon — A Version

Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island.


"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.” 

—Dr. Alex Davis,  U.C. Cork


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Michael Smith -  Maldon - A Version

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.



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M Stasiak -  Enchant / Extinguish

Tin Ujevic  Twelve Poems

Translated from Croatian by Richard Berengarten and Dasa Maric. English only.

Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613164 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (Translations only).]


Tin Ujevic (1891-1955) is regarded in his native Croatia with the same kind of popular affection and respect as Robert Burns in Scotland. His poems appeal to people of all ages and conditions. Under their deceptively simple surfaces lie deep linguistic sonorities and emotional resonances. Born in Dalmatia, Tin lived in Belgrade, Mostar, Sarejevo, Split, Zagreb and Paris. A natural Bohemian, he was always poor. Tin's writings have hardly been translated into English. These versions not only render the meanings of the originals, but also respect their musicality and form. For the first time, they make one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century available in English.


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Tin Ujevic  Twelve Poems

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.


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Robert Vas Dias  Arrivals & Departures

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 2012, this is a single long sequence of poems. Since collected in Endtimes (see under British Titles).


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Alan Wall  Raven

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 2012, this shows the further development in Michael Zand's work since his debut volume, Lion (2010).


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Michael Zand  The Wire & other poems

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