César Vallejo: Trilce Click on covers for more information, where available.
Translated & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi.
Published 2005. Paperback, 256pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 /
$21
ISBN 9780907562726
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
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
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
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.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
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
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
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.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Alan Wall: Alexander Pope at Twickenham
Published
2008. Paperback, 112p, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700998
Accompanying Gilgamesh is Alan Wall's new collection of shorter poems and sequence, the centrepiece of which is the London section, in which the author inhabits the clothes of a number of old word masters who llived in London or its environs: Alexander Pope, of course, but also Thomas More, Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Burton, Rosenberg, Pound and others. Then, 'Lenses' deals with Alexander Topcliffe, an early astronomer, and the unlucky Marsyas also makes an appearance: the cast of characters is extensive, and each is presented with the skill of a novelist, mixed with the precision of the poet.
Order from
the Shearsman online store.
Alan Wall: Gilgamesh
Published
2008. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700981
This volume features two long pieces: the title work — a version & partial transposition of the Gilgamesh epic — and the mixed work in verse and prose, Jacob, originally published in the 1990s and long unavailable. In both works history, myth and the present collide. Jacob was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize when first published.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Catherine Walsh: City West
Published
2005. 84pp, paperback. £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9780907562542
Irish poet Catherine Walsh is noted for her long poems in experimental forms, and City West, completed in 2000, is her most recent such work, following Pitch (Pig Press, 1994) and Idir Eatortha (Invisible Books, 1996). Previously City West was only available in an Irish small-press edition, with a tiny print-run. A subsequent text, Optic Verve will be published by Shearsman in the future. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Alan Wearne: The Lovemakers
Published
2008. Paperback, 688p, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $35
ISBN 9781905700967
Centered on Australian suburbia in the 60s, 70s and 80s The Lovemakers explores the inner and outer tensions of families, friendships and society whilst charting the sleaze, mayhem and humanity that go to make a nation's life. A remarkable verse novel, this edition brings together the two prize-winning volumes published in Australia which are now out of print for a first complete edition.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
John Welch: Dreaming Arrival
Published
2008. Paperback, 224pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $21
ISBN 9781905700561
Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, Dreaming Arrival presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question Dreaming Arrival looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
John Welch: Collected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 452pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781905700578
In 2004, Shearsman published a major collection of John Welch's work, in the shape of The Eastern Boroughs. Four years on, and we are offering a career retrospective of the author's work, running from ca. 1970 until 2008, including as-yet-uncollected work. This Collected – the latest in a series of large-scale retrospectives from Shearsman Books – will demonstrate what a number of people have already recognised – that John Welch's apparently quiet art is a powerfully communicative one. The book will be published at the same time as the Dreaming Arrival memoir (see above). Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
John Welch: The Eastern Boroughs
Published
2004. 148pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562436
The author's fifth major collection, following And Ada Ann, Out Walking, Blood and Dreams & Greeting Want, containing work written over the past six years. A number of the poems in The Eastern Boroughs express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
Order from the Shearsman online store.
David Wevill: Figure of Eight
Published 1988. 26pp, centre-stapled. £2.50.
ISBN 9780907562139
Not to be confused with the much larger volume of the same name published by Exile Editions, Toronto. This chapbook was the author's only British publication since his departure for the USA until the publication of the Selected Poems shown below. Most of this chapbook is reprinted in the Selected.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
David Wevill: Departures – Selected Poems
Published
2003. Paperback, 144pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562344
This 144-page collection covers the entire poetic career of David Wevill, who has faded from view as a poet in the UK since his departure for the United States in the early 1970s. His first four collections won many prizes and gained him a reputation as one of the finest poets of his generation, as well as a place in all the major anthologies of the period and in the seminal Penguin Modern Poets series. His subsequent collections, with the exception of the slim chapbook listed above, were all published in the author's native Canada and have been difficult to obtain either in the UK or the USA. David Wevill now lives in Austin, Texas.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Nigel Wheale: Raw Skies. New & Selected Poems
Published
2005. 148pp, 9x6ins, paperback. £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562757
Raw Skies spans seven sequences of poems, written between 1979 and 2004, together with translations from the classical Arabic poet al-Mutanabbí (304—354 AH, 915—965 CE) made by Walid Abdul-Hamid and the author. Other books by Nigel Wheale are The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing and Society. Literacy, Print and Politics 1590—1660 (Routledge 1999). His press, 'infernal methods', has published pamphlets and collections since the 1970s, including work by John Welch, Peter Riley and R. F. Langley. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Yang Lian: Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Published
2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700912
Translated by Brian Holton
Riding Pisces brings together a number of hard-to-find and uncollected texts from almost the full extent of Yang Lian's career: from Masks and Crocodiles (Sydney, 1990—although the translations here are new), from the out-of-print collection Non-Person Singular (London, 1994), from Notes of a Blissful Ghost, published in Hong Kong in 2002, from the Sailor's Home six-handed anthology (Shearsman Books, 2005), and from the as-yet uncollected Dark Blue Verses. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Order from the Shearsman online store.
Yang Lian (ed.): Sailor's Home
Published
2005. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562863
A Sailor's Home suggests many years of travel, cross-cultural contacts, a place of rest after too much time spent on the high seas. This particular Sailor's Home is a record of a private poetry festival held in London in October 2005 at which six poets came together with a group of invited guests to read and discuss one other's work. This miscellany of the work written for the occasion is presented in the original languages and in English translation.
Order from the Shearsman online store.