Ilma Rakusa: A Farewell to Everything
Translated
by Andrew Shields & Andrew Winnard
Published 2005. Paperback, 100pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562771
A Farewell to Everything is a translation of the author's 1997 German collection Ein Strich durch alles (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt): ninety nine-line poems written over a one-year period. The book is made available thanks to a translation grant from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Culture Foundation. Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. She lives in Zürich.
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Elaine Randell: Selected Poems 1970–2005
Published
2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562719 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume showcases over 30 years' work by Elaine Randell, a poet whose work has unaccountably drifted from public view these past several years. The Selected Poems demonstrates what we have been missing: a vibrant and original voice in an era too full of poetic clones, and a mixture of lyric poems and decidedly unsettling narative monologues, based on the author's experience of dealing with children at risk.
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Elaine Randell Faulty Mothering
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610897 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Faulty Mothering is based on my work with families but focusing on mothers in particular who are experiencing problems in attachment to their children. A backdrop to such difficulties maybe poverty, mental-health problems, substance misuse, adoption, fostering, domestic violence or being poorly parented themselves. I am interested in the capacity of people to change and in the courage of children and young people who adapt and survive adversity. The poems explore those issues. The 'Song Cycles', which make up the rest of the book, come from a call and response, using sentences sometimes written by others in novels which have resonated for me. — Elaine Randell
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Tessa Ransford (ed/trans): The Nightingale Question: 5 Poets from Saxony
Published
2004. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562528
In the 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns travelled
to Leipzig as part of a Scottish Arts Council travel award. While there,
Tessa investigated the local poetry scene and translated 5 poets based in
Saxony: one in Weimar, one near Dresden and three from Leipzig itself. Joyce
sketched portarits of each of the writers and made the portrait photographs
that grace the cover of the book. The poets included are Wulf Kirsten. Uta
Mauersberger, Andreas Reimann, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Elmar Schenkel and
Tessa Ransford herself.
The cover shows photographs of the five poets and
the translator, taken by Joyce Gunn-Cairns, copyright © Joyce Gunn-Cairns,
2002. Order from
the Shearsman Books online store.
Anna Reckin Three Reds
Published
October 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611832 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Landscape, textiles, plant-forms, the mysterious taxonomies of perfume are here themes for poetry that works the edge between lyric consonance and radical disjuncture. Three Reds, Anna Reckin's first book-length collection, draws on materials from China, Australia, Portugal and her native East Anglia to produce poems whose emotional complexities surface in the push and pull of sound patterns and visual design, and in the gaps and overlaps of words' makings and their givens.
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Jeremy Reed: Bona Drag
Published
2009. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610552 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Bona Drag, a rich, brilliantly inventive collection of poems covering every detail of the poet's obsessive life, from the colour of Posh Spice's heels, to London street encounters, underworld friends, urban survival tactics, neuroscientific concepts and extraterrestrials, more than confirms J.G. Ballard's assessment of Reed, as "the most gifted poet working today, an extraordinary talent."
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Jeremy Reed Bona Vada
Published
May 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Bona Vada (gay slang for "good looking"), the companion volume to Bona Drag (Shearsman, 2009), again finds Jeremy Reed—described by J.G. Ballard as having "an imagination almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance", and by the rock bandit Pete Doherty as "a legend"—piloting stunning imagery into vitally modern big city experience. Reed's image-grab often has him refer to himself as a kleptomaniac as his obsessive raids on streetwise visual detail are converted into powerfully original poetry. If Reed's operational grid is principally London's West End, then his exhilaratingly controversial remit continuously pushes poetry's frontiers out into the always excitingly controversially new.
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Peter Riley: Alstonefield
Published 1995. A5 Paperback, 32pp. £4.50 / $9.95.
ISBN 9780907562207
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London, this book comprises the first four sections of the long poem Alstonefield. Parts of section 5 subsequently appeared in Shearsman, P N Review and other journals. A new edition, including the complete Section 5 (which is longer than the first four sections put together) was published by Carcanet Press, Manchester, in 2003.
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Peter Riley: Snow Has Settled [...] Bury Me Here
Published 1997. A5 Paperback, 55pp. £6.00 / $9.95.
ISBN 9780907562245
Until the 2007 titles listed below, this was Riley's most recent full-length collection, apart from Passing Measures (Carcanet, Manchester, 2001), which is the author's Selected Poems, the experimental sequence Excavations (Reality Street Editions, 2005), and A Map of Faring, published only in the USA.
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Peter Riley: The Dance at Mociu
Published
2003. Paperback, 119pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562368 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
The Dance at Mociu is a collection of some thirty short prose pieces concerning Transylvania, the area of Romania that Peter Riley and his wife visit every year. Part travel report, part story, part epiphany, these luminous pieces cast light onto a mysterious area of 'Old Europe' where clashing empires and ever-changing borders ensured that nothing remained stable but the old traditions and wonderful music.
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Peter Riley: The Llyn Writings
Published 2007. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Since the 1970s, Peter Riley and his wife have been making regular trips to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, and he has been writing a series of poems and meditations about the place—a spectacular area of natural beauty. To date, many of these poems, and poem-sequences, have appeared in small-press and bibliophile editions, and in artists' books. Three of the sequences were also collected in the author's Selected Poems, Passing Measures, published by Carcanet in 2000. Now, for the first time, all of Peter Riley's Llyn writings—both poems and prose-poems—are collected together under one set of covers.
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Peter Riley: The Day's Final Balance – Uncollected Writings 1965-2006
Published 2007. Paperback, 212pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781905700097 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The subtitle says it all: here are numerous stray publications and lost poems, and prose-poems from throughout the author's career. Amongst many other works, the collection includes the previously unpublished sixth part of the long poem 'Alstonefield'.
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Peter Riley: Greek Passages
Published
2009. Paperback, 128pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610514 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Greek Passages is a set of 105 prose-poems derived from four sojourns in Greece, mostly in the vicinity of Argos and thus at the hub of early Greek power. The structure is entirely diurnal, building each poem from the day’s events, so that cognizance of monumental historical figures and events infiltrate from outside into notes of fauna, ruins, the news, books about Greece or not, American music listened to, pleasant dinners, dreams of northern England etcetera. Two shorter stays on the west coast of the Peloponnese furnish beginning and ending sections of a gentler, more lyrical cast, and there are interruptive excursions, mostly to the remains of cities and wars. Everywhere what is presented to the eyes is the starting-point for a poetical process creating lenses in location and sense.
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Peter Riley The Derbyshire Poems
Published
2010. Paperback, 204pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610927 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Derbyshire Poems brings back into print two important earlier collections (from the 1970s and 1980s) by Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts, together with the explanatory essays that were originally issued alongside the latter volume, and an uncollected sequence from the same period which belongs with the other poems dealing with the Peak District. This is an important volume which provides the bcakground to Riley's later forays into writing in, of, and under the landscape.
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Eléna Rivera The Perforated Map Click on covers for more information.
Published
April 2011. Paperback, 103pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611603 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
What guides us through the unknown? What offers us the keys? In The Perforated Map, Eléna Rivera’s guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.
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Peter Robinson The Returning Sky
Published January 2012.
Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611863 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] Poetry Book
Society Recommendation
Peter Robinson's new collection, The Returning Sky, carefully sequences the poems written over the four years from the time he left Japan and returned to England, through the global financial crisis, and into our current austerity culture. Opening with a sequence inspired by an unexpected visit to the United States, The Returning Sky then explores experiences of repatriation with the vividness and freshness of a reverse culture shock. The book takes up the inextricably financial, cultural, and emotional themes that Robinson had first scouted in collections from the years before his long economic exile, while his evocatively inventive forms invite new readers to follow his traces with the same warmth and candour he shows to his returning ones.
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Peter Robinson: The Look of Goodbye
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700455 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
This is Peter Robinson's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since returning from Japan to live and work in the UK — he is now Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Peter Robinson has published some 15 volumes of verse, including a substantial Selected Poems from Carcanet Press, as well as aphorisms and prose poems, literary criticism, and translations of such poets as Luciano Erba and Vittorio Sereni.
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Peter Robinson: Spirits of the Stair — Selected Aphorisms
Published
2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610620 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader, 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling chilled by global warming, and hot under the collar, the poet found no other respite than to reach for his notebooks. What came from them were wrung-out dishcloths and acupuncturists' needles, sound bites that chew on what they eschew, salves for old saws, and less-is-more morsels which were promptly anthologized in The Boodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007). Now, five years further, in this volume Robinson's enlarged and extended reflections look out on the world and see a wounded head bandaged in clouds. These words that didn't come to mind when occasion demanded, words that were the right thing to say when the moment had passed, now reach us with a timely lateness that appears, for all that, to be just what we were waiting for.
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Peter Robinson: Talk about Poetry — Conversations on the Art
Published
2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9781905700042 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years.
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Peter Robinson (ed.) An Unofficial Roy Fisher
Published
June 2010. Paperback, 222pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848611207
Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It begins with an unofficial gathering of poems and prose pieces covering the writer's entire career, none of which are to be found in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005, his most recent collected edition. This is followed by a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following among significant contemporaries and juniors, including Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, Laurie Duggan, August Kleinzahler, R.F. Langley, Angela Leighton, John Matthias, and John Wilkinson. This is followed by a group of informal essays and other prose comments on working with Fisher or Fisher's work by, among others, Charles Lock, Peter Makin, Ralph Pite, Richard Price, and David Wheatley. All in all, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a must-have for the poet's fans, new and old, with its sequence of intriguing insights into the oeuvre and abiding significance of this unique literary artist.
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Jaime Robles Anime Animus Anima
Published
March 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610880 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Anime, Animus, Anima is formed from a mass of influences but most prominently from three classic Japanese anime. Parts One and Three evolved from imagery in Ghost in the Shell (1995, Production I.G.), an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Ito, and Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Production I.G. and Studio Ghibli), written and directed by Mamoru Oshii. Part Two evolved from imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995, Gainax), both the television series and the movies, written and directed by Hideaki Anno. Imagery from Cowboy Bebop (1998), the Japanese animated television series directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and written by Keiko Nobumoto, appears throughout all three sections.
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Claudio Rodríguez: Collected Poems
Translated
by Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith
Published 2008. Paperback, 416pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781848610095 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodríguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (who was responsible for the Shearsman editions of Rosalía de Castro, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and César Vallejo) and Luís Ingelmo (who worked on the Bécquer edition with Michael Smith and wrote the introduction and notes for that volume, this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, but major literary figure. Perhaps the most important of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodríguez's work deserves to be better-known in the anglophone world.
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Mercedes Roffé: Like the Rains Come — Selected Poems 1987-2006
Translated
by Janet Greenberg, with the author.
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700554 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Like the Rains Come. Selected Poems (1987-2006) is Mercedes Roffé's first book-length collection published in English. Including poems from one of her earliest books, The Lower Chamber (1983), which placed her among the most innovative Latin American poets of the 80s, as well as the series 'Mayan Definitions'—her internationally-acclaimed poems from La ópera fantasma (2006)—, Like the Rains Come introduces a broad spectrum of Roffé’s compelling and protean poetics to the English-language reader.
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Wendy Saloman: Chrysalis in the Desert
Published
2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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.
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Sam Sampson: Everything Talks
Published
2008. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700486 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first book by a young New Zealand poet, whose work—experimental in form—owes much to music and to developments in American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. While consciously stretching the limits of the poem, Sampson's work remains very communicative, powerful for both ear and eye. Simultaneously published in New Zealand by Auckland University Press.
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Lisa Samuels Gender City
Published
June 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611696 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Gender City is in our skins, in the law, in our names (like Trudi and Terra), in places like the Barbie Doll Museum, in events like falling on the sidewalk, being in prison in a city with buildings made of skin, rupturing murder in language (pure meaning's urge), considering language as tattoo in a city with mouths that manifest like a disgorgement in your gender, in the city that has no center as the tattoo of poetry (the skin under your dress) has no center
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Lisa Samuels: Tomorrowland
Published
2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 104pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610507 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Tomorrowland is a book-length poem of bodily transit and colonial forgetting. Its names and events perpetually arrive in a new world, whose versions here combine promised lands and historical suicide. Eula moves among these real and imagined place-times with other symbolic names and unnamed figures, and Jack plays death. The primary formal note is the interrupted iambic.
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Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture
Published
2008. Paperback, 84 pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700851 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Invention of Culture is the third full-length collection of poems by Lisa Samuels, whose second volume also appeared with Shearsman. The poems in this new collection are committed to bending forms and genres. They mix prosodic syncopation with prose staccato and floating page space, as though the page were not only paper but also skin, film, and musical score and as though language were eyes and fingers tapping out the news. And there is news here: the strained topicality of the poems is an index of imaginative vision meeting the world's insistence that it be experienced. These poems are stories without names – literary cousins, parallax histories, dreams, compound love songs and dirges – whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world.
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Lisa Samuels: Paradise for Everyone
Published
2005. 96pp, paperback 9x6ins. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562672 [Download a sample PDF from
this book here.]
A first UK, and second full-length US collection for this talented young American writer, who teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property in the humanities, and on critical practices.
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Mark Scroggins Red Arcadia
Published
March 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611924 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems of Red Arcadia present a jittery, spasmodic—often obscured—series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism.
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Maurice Scully: Humming
Published
2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610590 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Humming is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since the Things That Happen project (1981–2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing
"how to
wait
what
to expect"
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Maurice Scully: Tig
Published
2006. 102pp, paperback 8.5x5.5ins. £8.95 /
$15.
ISBN 9780907562962 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
Maurice Scully is one of Ireland's most original poets, and most unusual. All of his work over the past 25 years has been part of one enormous project, under the umbrella title Things That Happen, which is completed with the appearance of this volume, the final section of the whole work, and Sonata (the penultimate section, also published in 2006 by Reality Street Editions). A criss-crossing of languages and cultures, and the point at which the personal life of the author intersects with the public domain, Tig is an absorbing book in its own right, as well as being the summation of one of the most interesting projects in recent Irish writing.
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Ian Seed: Anonymous Intruder
Published
2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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.
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Ian Seed Shifting Registers
Published
April 2011. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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.
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John Seed: New and Collected Poems
Published
2005. 156pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £9.95 / $17.
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.
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John Seed: Pictures from Mayhew – London 1850
Published
2005. 171pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £10.95 / $18.50.
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.
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John Seed: That Barrikins – Pictures from Mayhew II
Published
2007. Paperback,
160pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
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 usa hear the voices in a new context.
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Lutz Seiler: In the year one – Selected Poems
Translated from the German by Tony Frazer
Published in Australia, 2005, by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney; distributed
in the UK by Shearsman Books.)
Paperback, 93pp, 6.7x5.9ins. £8.00. $A20 in Australia. ISBN
9781920882112
The first book-length colection of Lutz Seiler's work in English translation, In the year one contains poems drawn from his second and third German collections: pech & blende (2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht (2003).
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Spencer Selby: Twist of Address
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781605700172 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poet, artist and historian of film noir, Selby was born and raised in the Midwest of the USA but lives in Oakland, California. This volume presents his first collection of verse in some years.
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Gavin Selerie: Music's Duel — New & Selected Poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 328pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22
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.
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Aidan Semmens A Stone Dog
Published
May 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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.
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David Sergeant Talk Like Galileo
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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.
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Robert Sheppard: The Anti-Orpheus – a notebook
Published
2004. A5 chapbook, centre-stapled, 16pp, £4. 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, £8.95 / $15
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.
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Robert Sheppard Berlin Bursts and other poems
Published
February 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
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."
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Robert Sheppard When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry — episodes in the history of the poetics of innovation
Published
February 2011. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22
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.
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Colin Simms: Otters and Martens
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562504 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Otters and Martens was Simms' first major British collection in some years, and his largest-ever book, this 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.
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Colin Simms: The American Poems
Published
2005. Paperback 9.25x7.5ins, 208pp. £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9780907562931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume is another 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.
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Colin Simms: Gyrfalcon Poems
Published
2007. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700356 [Download a sample PDF 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.
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Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo (eds & trans.) Cantes flamencos (Flamenco Songs): The Deep Songs of Spain
Published 2012.
Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612105 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, these are the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances — these are the songs wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace. Not high art certainly, but a part of deeper fabric of the real Spain, and a powerful influence on poets such Lorca.
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Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo Poems from Other Tongues
Published
March 2011. Paperback, 106pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611344 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A companion volume to Michael Smith's Maldon & Other Translations (2004), this volume collects his translations from Greek, Latin, Irish and Andalusian Arabic, the latter poems being co-translated with Luis Ingelmo.
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Michael Smith: Collected Poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 244pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848610538 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
This volume supersedes the author's Selected Poems, The Purpose of the Gift (Shearsman Books, 2004), which is being withdrawn from the catalogue as this new volume appears. Michael Smith is the author of seven previous collections, only two of which appeared in the UK, and a large number of translations, mainly from Spanish. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain with Trevor Joyce. Although better-known for his translations, his original work should be recognised for its own special qualities.
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Michael Smith: Maldon & Other Translations
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 154pp. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562603 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Maldon contains translations from the Anglo-Saxon (The Battle of Maldon), the 18th-century Irish (The Death of Art O'Leary and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen) and a large selection of cantes flamencos (flamenco songs) translated from an Andalusian dialect of Spanish. Although better-known in the UK for his translations of the baroque poets Góngora and Quevedo, Michael Smith has also translated the works of Rosalía de Castro, Neruda, Lorca and Miguel Hernández.
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Michael Smith: The Purpose of the Gift – Selected Poems
Published
2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 161pp. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562597 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
This volume represents a full-scale career retrospective for an Irish poet, who remains too little-known in Britain. He is the author of six previous collections, only one of which appeared in the UK. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain with Trevor Joyce. Although best-known for his translations from the Spanish, his own work should be better-known.
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Tupa Snyder: No Man's Land
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700608
[Download a sample PDF 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 includes a large proportion of work presented to the University of Exeter for the award of a Ph.D., and demonstrates the arrival of a confident new voice that straddles cultural divides. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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Gustaf Sobin: Caesurae: Midsummer
Published 1981. 18pp, A5 centre-stapled.
ISBN-10 0907562000. Out
of print.
Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine. The text has not been subsequently reprinted in this form, although approximately half of it did appear in the Montemora volume Celebration of the Sound Through (New York, 1982).
Gustaf Sobin: Carnets 1979-1982
Published 1984. 32pp, A5 centre-stapled. £3.00.
ISBN 9780907562061
Four of the author's annual poem sequences collected in one volume. Since reprinted in the New Directions volume The Earth as Air (New York, 1984).
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Gustaf Sobin: Nile
Published
1984. 8pp, centre-stapled. £2.50. Out of print.
ISBN 9780903375634
A single poem, subsequently collected in the New Directions volume Voyaging Portraits (New York, 1988). Published jointly with Oasis Books, London.
Gustaf Sobin: Blown Letters, Driven Aphabets
Published 1994. 24pp, centre-stapled chapbook, with jacket. £4.99.
ISBN 9780907562191
Contains three poems: 'On the Nature of the Iconic'; 'Transparent Itineraries 1991' and 'Transparent Itineraries 1992', all of which were later collected in the author's New Directions volume Breath's Burials (1995)
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Steve Spence A Curious Shipwreck
Published
2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins
ISBN 9781848610972 £8.95 / $15 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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. Shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Prize for best first collection.
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William Strode: Selected Poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610057 Shearsman Classics Vol. 5 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Edited by Tony Frazer.
William Strode, born in Plympton, Devon, in the early years of the 17th century, is a little-known poet 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.
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Janet Sutherland: Hangman's Acre
Published
2009. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610743 [Download a sample PDF 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. Her first collection, Burning the Heartwood,
was published by Shearsman in 2006.
The poems in Hangman's Acre are lyrical, weaving images of loss
and of love, of grief and light, of language and nature. Where there is beauty
it is beauty with an edge.
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Janet Sutherland: Burning the Heartwood
Published
2006. Paperback 8x5ins, 86pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562887 [Download a sample PDF 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.
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