Eileen Tabios Silk Egg — Collected NovelsClick on covers for more information.
Published
2011. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611436 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Last century, I temporarily borrowed Jorge Luis Borges' chatelaine. I slipped off a certain key and made a copy before I returned it to its chains and the old man (OMG: can he ever snore!). Since then, I've been able to slip into Jorge's Library of Babel whenever I wished—that permanent stain on the 7th floor's limestone windowsill was from the d'Yquem I'd carelessly spilled from my treasured wine glass (stolen previously from Vermeer). About a year after I wrote all of the novels that comprise Silk Egg, I returned to the Library of Babel's 7th floor with a bottle of Ajax cleanser ("stronger than dirt!") that I'd hoped would work this time in erasing proof of my unpermitted visitations: that hardened pool of "nectar of the gods" ever winking out a small sun from the bibliophilic dimness. (Eileen Tabios)
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Harriet Tarlo: Poems 1990-2003
Published
2004. 152pp, paperback. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562450 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
Poems 1990–2003 collects under one set of covers all of Harriet Tarlo's short sequences and shorter poems from 1990 onwards, and thus enables the reading public to get a clear overview of her work for the first time. Harriet Tarlo's poetry is best described as 'radical pastoral', where a late-modernist poetics engages with landscape in a most original way.
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Harriet Tarlo (ed.) The Ground Aslant — Radical Landscape Poetry
Published
2011. Paperback, 180pp, 9.25x7.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610811 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that "landscape writing" need not be confined to literary tourism, or the verbal equivalent of chocolate-box imagery, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. The Ground Aslant is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing, and presents the work of Tony Baker, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Thomas A. Clark, Ian Davidson, Mark Dickinson, Mark Goodwin, Nicholas Johnson, Pater Larkin, Helen Macdonald, Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley, Peter Riley, Colin Simms, Zoë Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts.
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Nathaniel Tarn: Avia
Published
2008. Paperback, 304pp, 9x6ins, Price £13.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610026 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Franco-Anglo-American poet Nathaniel Tarn worked for over fifteen years on researching and writing this long poem about the fate of fighter aircraft and their pilots in 1939–45. In this most surprising departure from his usual concerns, Tarn shows Charles Lindbergh dreaming of returning to the U.S. by air, instead of by sea (as ordered), after his great 1927 New York–Paris achievement. Once again he hears voices in his cockpit. These voices tell him the story of aviation in World War Two.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.Nathaniel Tarn: The Landsongs
Published 1982. 12pp, centre-stapled.
ISBN-10 0907562019. Out
of print.
Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine. Recently excerpted in the author's Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), and also collected in Palenque (see below).
Nathaniel Tarn: Palenque
Published 1986. 89pp, paperback. £7.50.
ISBN
9780907562092
A selection of Tarn's poems from the first 12 years of his American period. Only one of his subsequent American volumes—the long poem Lyrics for the Bride of God (not excerpted here)—was published in Britain, and thus this is the only large collection of Tarn's work to be published on this side of the Atlantic since 1975, apart from the epic Avia (see above).
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London. Not for sale in the USA.
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Mervyn Taylor No Back Door
Published
2010. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611412 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There are those inhabitants of islands who say they "'fraid sea",
meaning they have an abiding respect for the restless ocean and for whatever
lies unseen past the horizon. 'Sea have no back door' is the phrase they
use to indicate the idea of no return, of being swallowed up in the vastness
of a world outside the shore that is a natural boundary.
These poems chart
the journeys, metaphorical and literal, of those who stay, and those who go,
and the dilemma of the immigrant soul trying to live in two places at once.
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Jon Thompson: After Paradise — Essays on the Fate of American Writing
Published
2009. Paperback, 136pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610415 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, Emily Dickinson's Letters and Michael Herr's Dispatches, After Paradise offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary history, After Paradise attempts to restore a sense of the original strangeness of American literature and culture by pushing the boundaries of the essay form.
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Nathan Thompson The Visitor's Guest
Published
September 2011. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611818 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Who is looking at, listening to and leaning on whom? And what is left of looking, listening and leaning in what is ironically referred to as the post ultimate glade. Thompson, with understated assertiveness, doesn't answer these questions, but the poems in The Visitor's Guest changed the way I had to walk around the block this morning. Thompson's writing opens up a space with which I'm half familiar—perhaps it's the sense of honesty which underlies his slanted lyrical stance—but which continues to surprise. Many of these poems engage with 'love', as a perception, as a verb, but to say so underestimates them. Visceral, tangential, with a genuine sense of belief / refusal to believe. You might think that you've arrived but, most of all, how interesting it is trying to get there." —Lucy Burnett
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Nathan Thompson: the arboretum towards the beginning
Published
2008. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610149 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Nathan Thompson mixes process and poetics with a dry wit, to produce texts that hold the reader’s hand through landscapes of the tangential (with occasional diversions back to the straight and narrow). This first collection juxtaposes prose poems with more traditional verse idioms, to create a whole that can be read either as a kind of disjunct musical narrative or as a collection of free-standing associative post-lyrics.
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Isobel Thrilling: The Language Creatures
Published
2007. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700219 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
A fourth collection, and the first in some years, for Isobel Thrilling, whose delicate lyrics deserve a wider audience. Isobel Thrilling was born in Suffolk, and brought up in a mining village in the north-east of England; she read English at Hull University and spent many years as Head of Service for teaching English as a Second Language in a London borough. She first started writing after eye-operations that saved her sight.
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Scott Thurston: Hold
Published
2006. 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins. £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9780907562832 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hold is Scott Thurston's first book-length collection, and covers ten years of work, which have for some time now needed collecting. This is work which owes a lot to the tradition of innovative and experimental poetry in Britain and the USA, but which also sends out feelers in other directions. A radical but communicative poetry.
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Scott Thurston: Momentum
Published
2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.00
ISBN 9781905700325 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Momentum aims to recuperate what may be had of a lyric tradition refracted through a post-Language sensibility; generating, amongst other things, responses to Proust, Shelley and the experience of dancing. Change and time are intrinsic to the book's accumulative structure and the way in which the line-breaks argue with syntax attempts to show the process, the movement, of thinking in language in time: not a stream of consciousness, but rather more like a weir, a wave, or a rubble-filled alleyway.
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Scott Thurston Internal Rhyme
Published
2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610903 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Internal Rhyme is a sequence in four parts which continues the author's preoccupation with time and process as compositional elements. The book also explores how meaning can change when viewed from different perspectives as each poem in the book can be read vertically as well as horizontally. The subjects and themes are diverse and include poems responding to Blake, Klimt and Twombly alongside refigurings of the theoretical works of Alain Badiou. This is Scott Thurston's third collection with Shearsman.
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Published
October 2011. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848611917 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady, carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography.
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Elizabeth Treadwell: Birds and Fancies
Published
2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700165 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Rhyme and ancestry — literary and otherwise — become contemporary in Elizabeth Treadwell's newest collection, Birds & Fancies, which traces a deepening initiation into the mysteries and continuities of history and biology brought on by motherhood. "Oh daughter thou/shalt grounde & playe."
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Siriol Troup: Beneath the Rime
Published
2009. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610309 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Beneath the Rime is Sriol Troup's second collection of poems. Rooted in real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Beneath the Rime explore memory, art and language, asking above all what it is to be human. This new collection finds her adopting voices—human and animal, colloquial and historical—in her search for a 'proper viewing distance' where life's messy fragments fuse together, enabling us to understand our position—and negotiate our survival—in a troubling world where 'our tracks once told us where we were' but which now seems, at times, no more than a 'shudder on the horizon'.
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Gael Turnbull: There are Words: Collected Poems
Published
2006. 496pp, 9x6ins. £18.95 / $30
ISBN 9780907562894 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Gael Turnbull – poet, doctor, performer and morris-dancer – was for many years a transatlantic poetic nexus in the UK, both through his own work, and through his pioneering Migrant Press, founded in 1957, an early outlet for figures such as Roy Fisher and Edward Dorn. This Collected gathers almost all of Gael Turnbull’s published poetry as well as a selection of uncollected and unpublished works.
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Lars Amund Vaage Outside the Institution — Selected Poems Click on covers for more information.
Translated
by Hanne Bramness and Frances Presley
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610750 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first collection in English by Lars Amund Vaage, one of the most significant poets and novelists of his generation in Norway.
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César Vallejo: Trilce
Translated & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi.
Published 2005. Paperback, 256pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 /
$21
ISBN 9780907562726 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trilce is one of the great monuments of 20th-Century Hispanic poetry, as important in Hispanic letters, as The Waste Land and The Cantos in the anglophone world, and all the more amazing for having been composed in remote Peru. Full of neologisms and symbols, the book is one that needs to be re-translated often, but this is only the second version to appear in the UK, and the fourth in the USA. A fully bilingual book, the Spanish texts are based upon the very latest scholarship, and are presented with full explanatory annotations for the English-speaking reader. Apart from the canonical text of 'Trilce', the book also includes an appendix of a further eleven poems, some of which are earlier variants and some which are poems connected to the main text, which it is useful to have available as background to the canonical version of Trilce.
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César Vallejo: Complete Later Poems 1923-1938
Translated & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi.
Published 2005. Paperback, 420pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £16.95 /
$28
ISBN 9780907562733 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume brings together all of the post-Trilce work that has been identified by the latest scholarship and included in the most recent Peruvian edition of the author's works. The Spanish texts have benefitted from a number of corrections, as compared to previous publications. The poems are presented chronologically—as far as the chronology can be ascertained—and the book offers the most complete version yet of this magnificent body of work.
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César Vallejo: Selected Poems
Translated & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi.
Published 2006. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562993
In September 2005, Shearsman Books published the astonishing new translations of Vallejo's Trilce and Complete Poems 1923-1938, edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. This Selected fills an important gap on the bookshelves by making available a rigorously-edited bilingual selection of Vallejo's work, which draws on the two earlier Shearsman volumes as well as a group of poems from Vallejo's first publication, The Black Heralds, itself a fascinating work which demonstrates where his astonishing art came from, and what boundaries he had to cross in order to achieve the heights marked by Trilce. Shearsman Books publishes the complete Black Heralds in 2007, together with some uncollected poems from the pre-Trilce period.
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César Vallejo: The Black Heralds & Other Early Poems
Translated & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi.
Published 2007. Paperback, 268pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781905700103 [Download a sample PDF from
this book here.]
The completion of the Shearsman Vallejo project. Translated & edited by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. Before writing his breakthrough poem-sequence Trilce, César Vallejo published The Black Heralds, his first book of poems, in 1919. Although heavily indebted to the aesthetics of modernismo, Vallejo's early volume finds a way to escape the merely decorative, and includes poems of indubitable originality, harbingers of his later masterpieces. The most thorough volume of Vallejo's early work yet to be made available in English.
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Dirk van Bastelaere: The Last to Leave – Selected Poems
Translated by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons and Francis R Jones.
Published 2005. 119pp, paperback. £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562702
Dirk van Bastelaere (1960) is one of the leading poets in Flanders. He came to prominence with his award-winning first collection Vijf jaar (1984) and then published Pornschlegel en andere gedichten (1988), one of the most hotly debated collections of Flemish poetry in recent times. This volume was to win for him recognition as the most important postmodern poet in Flanders. In 2000, he published Hartswedervaren, widely regarded as his finest book to date, and for which he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize. His latest collection, Zapruder Stress, appeared in Amsterdam in 2005.
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Robert Vas Dias Still • Life
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611214 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this generous assembling of work fromthe past ten years, the Anglo-American poet Robert Vas Dias explores meanings and resonances inherent in art and the suggestive implications of objects which both make up the quotidian and help to define us. This is a poetry of 'domestic tranquillity' as well as chaos, of the absurd and the numinous, of the serious and comedic.
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Juan Antonio Villacañas: Selected Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Beatriz Villacañas. Edited by Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610637 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Juan Antonio Villacañas (1922–2001) was one of the most significant poets in post-war Spain, and this volume—prepared with the help of the poet's daughter—is the first edition of his work to be made available in English.
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Verónica Volkow: Arcana and Other Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo
Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610569 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Verónica Volkow is one of Mexico’s most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence Arcana, with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics to give an overview of this remarkable poet’s oeuvre.
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