Shearsman Books Latest Releases
Published March 2024. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619166 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘Sarah Cave’s collection is, by turns, sinuous, troubling and sensuous. Its central conceit – that Jesus’s sister Yona is cursed to live until his return at the Apocalypse – is certainly ambitious, but is handled with real tenderness and humanity. Indeed, Cave interrogates the registers of queer desire, of faith and of bodies without ever losing sight of what Donne calls “Love’s mysteries”.’ —Rachel Mann
‘Witty and sensual, The Book of Yona invites us into intimacies of the feminine, queer and sacred with a holy jouissance. With verbal elasticity and playful fusions of time and geography, Sarah Cave traces a via negativa through secret truths that were there all along in the half-light of cedar branches, the archives, the anchorage… read and be drawn into companionship, divine encounter, love.’ —Phoebe Power
Published March 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619210 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one’s ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what’s happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers – the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence,
The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." —Martha Ronk
Published March 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619432 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Colours Nailed to the Mast
is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may be obvious. More so than some of what I seem to recall here, sharing the dream quality that has most intrigued me – a conviction my dreams have been annexed by another consciousness with a history and range of knowledge I cannot claim. (John Wilkinson)
Translated from Spanish & French by Eliot Weinberger
Published March 2024. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618190 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume presents the 4 chapbooks published by Huidobro in 1917–18 and offers, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have
El espejo de agua, written in Spanish in 1914–16, ostensibly first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not available until 1918;
Ecuatorial (written in Spanish, although the author also made a French version,
Équatoriale, which is believed to be later),
Hallali and
Tour Eiffel, the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period,
Hallali and
Tour Eiffel—both marked by textual experimentation—were important for the rising wave of the new Spanish avant-garde. The 4 chapbooks were bookended, so to speak, by the French-language volume
Horizon carré and the Spanish-language collection,
Poemas árticos (both already issued in this series).
This second, expanded edition now offers the French version,
Équatoriale, as well as alternative versions of
Tour Eiffel in both French and Spanish.
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published March 2024. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619333 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya’s first birthday to the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnók and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.
Edited by Colin Bramwell, with Gerda Stevenson
Published February 2024. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619050 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Aonghas Macneacail (1942–2022) originally intended for this book to signal his return to the literary sphere after a long convalescence. As his health declined, he was clearly comforted by the fact that this work would see the light of day: we talked together frequently about it, until he was unable to do so. He wanted this book to correct the perception of himself as a Gaelic writer, first and foremost. Gaelic was one of his three languages – Scots and English were the others. Before we started working on the book, I visited him to interview him about the project. We both agreed that a book of English-language work might have some public utility, as proof that Scottish writing is polyglot by nature. We thought that correcting the public perception of him as a Gaelic poet entirely would also be to correct perceptions of division in the language situation in Scotland more generally. Now that the process of putting this book together has come to an end, the truth of that feels clearer, to me. Aonghas’s work looks forward to a future where, as he puts it in ‘last night’, ‘my language [will] embrace / its sister tongue’. As with any bilingual poet, the point must be made: his English poetry drew from the same source as his Gaelic work. It is the intertwining of tongues which creates the tenor of the work. Aonghas’s famous poem ‘tha gàidhlig bheò’ (‘gaelic is alive’) ends with the following lines: ‘ach dèan dannsa dèan dannsa / `s e obair th`ann a bhith dannsa’. ‘be dancing be dancing / it is work to be dancing’. Of course the dance will require a partner. English was a partner-language to Aonghas’s Gaelic. Scots was another. This linguistic hybridity defines him, as much as it defines the general tenor of Scottish literature today. —from Colin Bramwell's introduction
Published February 2024. Paperback, 478pp, 9 x 6 ins, £19.95 / $37.50
ISBN 9781848619227 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Toby began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master’s Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts.
The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young’s Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity’s Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions.
Published February 2024. Paperback, 480pp, 9 x 5ins, £19.95 / $37.50
ISBN 9781848619234 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of my efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 I found I had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while I continued with fiction, I also found I was writing poetry, and since then I have managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, also contains the collections Human Nature (New Directions), Darklight and Death Sentences (both from Shearman), and See / Saw, published here for the first time. (Toby Olson)
Published January 2024. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619135 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“I go to Ian Seed’s poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There’s a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live ‘joyously and seriously’ against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops – it deserves legions of readers.” —Luke Kennard
"Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling,
Night
Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafes, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding ‘obsession’, ‘unspeakable desire’, erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity’s transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, ‘I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story’ and reminds us, ‘It takes a stranger to see the beauty’. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a ‘poet soul’. A translator of Jacob’s poetry, Ian Seed in
Night Window, uncovers his own poet’s soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." —Cassandra Atherton
Published January 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619142 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Petra White is a singular voice in Australian poetry. She is known for a style that doesn’t fit neatly into any of its categories, a free-verse of startling energy and surprise.
That Galloping Horse
is her sixth collection, and the first to introduce her to UK readers. Written at first in Melbourne and then while resident in London, Berlin and Belfast between 2017 and 2023, these poems are haunted by places, but they also reach into the spiritual and the imaginary. Thirteen elegies take personal grief as their starting point and travel widely, mediating anguish through delight in language and the physical world. Rich in their variety and tones, these elegies are inhabited by the Ukraine War, the nature of modern work, domestic life in the reality of planetary demise, marriage and familial love. Alongside them, short mysterious lyrics build layers of irony and raw narratives traverse the Nullarbor Highway and the atomic cloud of Maralinga.
Published January 2024. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848619067 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In his fourth collection from Shearsman Books, Alasdair Paterson ranges as widely as ever – from the bewilderments of a Scottish childhood to the mixed messages of later life, from gnarly nature notes to an A-Z of lines salvaged from lost Russian novels. The spirit of Mercury – bringer of messages, patron of tricksters, keeper and crosser of boundaries – hovers invisibly and a tad unreliably overhead.
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