Latest Releases

Published March 2026. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380183

"Like Italo Calvino's invisible cities, these oneiric architectures rise up revealing a glimmering imagination. The visually compelling constructions in these poems possess a beauty that can be subtly unsettling in its materials, proportions, or the relationships or emotions hidden within. At a time when our eyes are already jaded from the remixed possibilities of AI-generated imagery, this intriguing collection is balm for the inner eye, offering an expansive poetics of space as well as an invitation to take in a sharper and more intricate view of the details around us, and savour the questions about our ways of inhabiting." —Juana Adcock

Published March 2026. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380237

Varying States of Grace (Polygon, 1989) evoked this response from James Aitchieson in The Herald:  ‘His main subjects – seas, winds, tides, shorelines and horizons – are expressed in precisely observed details of shape, colour, texture and movement that capture the spirit of a place as well as the topography in poem after poem, until voyaging becomes fact and metaphor in Stephen's work, a way of life and a way of interpreting life.’
         The way of working in response to travels, land and sea, does not seem to have changed much. But Stephen has been fortunate in being able to range from home shores in the Outer Hebrides to enter geographies as varied as those of Tasmania, the Saskatchewan prairie and those observed in 2025 during a circumnavigation of Iceland.
         This book is composed from poems in response to travels, but on what might be called home ground as well as far afield or at sea. A small number of uncollected poems from further back in time have also found their home in this grouping.
         Ian Stephen also publishes fiction and non-fiction. A reader’s report of the work which became Waypoints (Bloomsbury 2014), by Shearsman poet Tom Lowenstein, helped link poet and publisher.

Translated from Hungarian by Ágnes Lehóczky & Adam Piette. Bilingual edition
Introduction and afterwords by Ágnes Lehóczky, George Szirtes, György Tverdota, Aranka Kemény & Adam Piette

Illustrations by György Békeffi.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 386pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30

ISBN 9781837380015

These translations by Piette and Lehóczky form a five-year long project with an ambition to translate a significant selection of the poems of the modernist, socialist, working-class Hungarian poet, Attila József (1905–1937). József lived a poverty-stricken, passionate and unstable life as a wanderer, a bohemian, a poet, a thinker, a non-conformist, a vagabond and a lover till his untimely death by suicide, struck by a train, in Balatonszárszó on Lake Balaton, aged only 32. His poetry is surrealist, existentialist, Villonesque, tough-minded, quasi anarchist, deeply drenched in Hungarian folklore and the folk song, passionate, lyrical, elegiac, marked by his solitary wandering, his keen observation of the lives of the people, by his psychoanalytically inflected gaze into the unconscious, into the mind and body of lovers, his philosophical focus on dialectic and social injustice. The lyrics, free verse and formal, in an astonishing number of experimental forms, range from the metaphysical to the memoir, have filiations to French medieval, post-symbolist and surrealist poetry, fuse Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud in daring raids on the inarticulate, sing with haunting vernacular and ancient beauty and rise to extraordinary heights and flights of the imagination, yet are always grounded in the real, in the concrete particulars of the metropolis, the dark streets of the underclasses of this world.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380183

A boy scratches his name on a staircase as the decades sweep him over him. Young people run from childhood to claim a city that may destroy them, while in the aftermath of a terrible event even our own minds desert us. These are poems of disconnection, from ourselves and from a world that has come unmoored. They ask hard questions about our complicity in creating that world. But they are poems too about what may be found and honoured in that unforgiving space. The city with its 'centuries of settlement and bone' is also a place of refuge and consolation, while the physical world 'which built us and birthed us' is 'with us to the end'. Fragile young lives, caught 'between wonder and dismay', are witnessed without judgement. Face it asks us to take an unflinching but compassionate look at everything we've made and everything that has made us, as we struggle through the constraints of our own nature, continually seeking our own selves and 'something that looks like home'.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 978183730152

Drawing from, and reflecting on, the experience of teenage years stilled by illness and pain, for this, her second collection, Keri Finlayson has made poems concerned with the complementarity and tension of movement and stasis.

Many of the poems explore the meanings of textile as a weight and as a constant, as covering and as clothing. Some take comfort in the reassuring permanence of trees. Others, by contrast, represent fluidity: the flow of gossip, bird song, nursery rhymes, smoke, speech and scent; things that might move around the still island of the body or the bed. 

Here poetry is shown to be an attempt to make objects out of all that movement, and all that stillness.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380053

In Martyn Crucefix’s powerful new poems, the unearthed bones of the dispossessed gather together to march; in rural England, the whinnying of horses heralds an apocalyptic unease; amid October storms, there rises an acute sense of decline and fall as we stand, ‘in hope maladroit as the woods riot’. Elsewhere, the ancient pike remains ‘the weapon / of choice in the defence of democracy’ as Our Weird Regiment evokes a sense of menace and insecurity in the environmental, political and personal spheres.

"Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear . . . superbly intelligent . . . urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful" —Kathryn Maris

Published January 2026. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 978-1-83738-011-4

In its tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss, Forgetfulness moves from the allegorical to the abstract lyric, through to the surreal-absurd, and finally to a series of splintered memories. It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance. Throughout these pages, the end is uncertain, forever in the making, and only possibly true. 

Published January 2026. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380060

A retablo is a painting created in thanks for divine protection or a miracle. In this luminous collection, Michelle Penn transposes the art form into poems that explore aspects of the female experience. Her retablos capture moments of vulnerability, confrontations with politics and societal ideals, the struggle to construct a self, and the search for something to believe in when protection and miracles seem rare. A rich palette of images — from nuclear blast glass and an atomic Madonna to a sword-swallowing Pierrot and a muse-for-hire — creates a compelling picture of endurance, defiance, and ultimately, hope.



Translated from Spanish by Francisco Aragón
Published January 2026. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619869

Manual de espumas was published in 1924 and was one of the most important eruptions in the early phase of the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde. Heavily influenced by Vicente Huidobro and his theories of Creationism, the book is effectively the first Creationist volume by someone other than Huidobro himself, while also being the volume that carried the banner for Ultraism, Spain's first native movement of the vanguardia.

Published January 2026. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619623

Six poets each from India and China and six poems from each poet, all poems jointly translated: new voices, familiar faces in a new guise, a gallimaufry of the right words in the right order. For teachers and researchers of translation there are PhDs by the dozen here, on the how, the why, and the what of it all. 

        For poetry lovers there is more than the usual ration of delight and surprise, of the catch in the throat, the gasp of recognition, the laugh or the sob that tells you this is the real thing you’re reading. 

        This is the new world, the sound of globalisation, waiting for you. When two leading international poets like Sudeep Sen and Yang Lian join their vision and skill to produce an anthology like Himalayas, you get a cracker of a book! 

     —BRIAN HOLTON

Poets included are: Ranjit Hoskote, Jennifer Robertson, Sudeep Sen, Ravi Shankar, Arundhathi Subramaniam, C P Surendran, Zang Di 臧棣,  Yang Lian 杨炼,  Yan Rong 晏榕,  Dai Weina 戴潍娜,  Yang Xiaobin 杨小滨,  Wang Ziliang 王自亮.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619548

Culhwch and Olwen (Culhwch ac Olwen), is a prose tale, written in medieval Welsh, which survives in two manuscripts from the 14th century. The story, in its current version, probably dates from the 11th, though some parts may be much older. It is one of the eleven stories collected in The Mabinogion. When Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones translated the collection, they placed Culhwch and Olwen in a group they called ‘The Four Independent Native tales’. The ‘oldest surviving Arthurian tale’, it is unlike any of the other stories in the collection and I think it is one of the great literary performances. Whoever put the surviving version together was a genius; a wayward or accidental genius, but a genius.

By modern literary standards it is chaotic and unsure of its genre. It is episodic, inconsistent and contradicts itself. There are conversations which read as though parts have been lost or misunderstood, and episodes in which the sequence of events

seems to be scrambled. But if one accepts the story is the way it is because its audience liked it that way, then it is a reminder that ‘modern literary standards’ are not the only way of approaching a text, and any attempt to cling to them will ruin your enjoyment of what follows. It has the logic of dreams and the morality of nightmare.