Laura Walker Bird Book
Published
March 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611535 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
bird book is written in collaboration with a field guide to North American birds. Each page both borrows and departs from language found in an individual bird entry. The resulting text is an investigation into dissolved and dissolving narrative, into the permeable boundaries between "human" and "natural," and into the partial and shifting nature of narrative and memory themselves, "wet and traveling maps." Here, as in bird song, gap and repetition create their own story. To welcome "accidental field," "to take the songbird out of your mouth," to examine the ever-shifting relationship between what we receive and what we project, is to move through a porous and shared space, affecting and affected, where "yellow spectacle" hovers over "a suggested house": "exuberant ground."
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Alan Wall: Alexander Pope at Twickenham
Published
2008. Paperback, 112p, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700998 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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the Shearsman online store.
Alan Wall: Gilgamesh
Published
2008. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700981 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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Alan Wall Doctor Placebo
Published
2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611337 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. As a medical practitioner he broods about his patients; as a writer he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor. One thing at least remains constant: moonlight. The end of the western intellectual tradition, like Placebo himself, is insomniac.
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Published
2009. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610798 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Optic Verve is the latest long poem by Catherine Walsh, perhaps Ireland's most radical experimental woman poet.
"It seems a shame that many Irish poetry readers are unaware of Catherine Walsh's very obvious gifts. Her brilliant punning, the way she assembles disjointed, yet perfectly rendered fragments of Dublin argot and her ability to imply simultaneous narratives mark her out from her contemporaries." —Dónal Moriarty: The Art of Brian Coffey
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Published
2005. 84pp, paperback. £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9780907562542 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
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.
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Craig Watson Sleepwalking with Orpheus
Published
February 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611382 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Haunted by Cocteau's version of the Orpheus myth since 1968, Craig Watson collected a palimpsest of renderings, fragments and images from the Orphic tradition for the next 40 years. In 2008, he returned to these materials in the wake of a near fatal stroke. The result is Sleepwalking with Orpheus, a constellation of voices that recount the legendary singer's continuous journey through the realms that compose a life.
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Alan Wearne: The Lovemakers
Published
2008. Paperback, 688p, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $35
ISBN 9781905700967 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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Ellen Wehle: The Ocean Liner's Wake
Published
2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610712 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Lush, languid, enamored with the natural world, The Ocean Liner's Wake is a book of longing. In these wide-ranging poems the Other takes many forms: lover or God, a bridge, a sprig of forsythia. But always, the poems seem to say, what we hunger for is union. In spare, chiseled lines Wehle examines what it means to be fully alive to the world.
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John Welch: Visiting Exile
Published
2009. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610767 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
John Welch's first new collection since his Collected Poems and the analysis memoir, Dreaming Arrival.
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John Welch: Dreaming Arrival
Published
2008. Paperback, 224pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $21
ISBN 9781905700561 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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John Welch: Collected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 452pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781905700578 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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).
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John Welch: The Eastern Boroughs
Published
2004. 148pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562436 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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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.
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David Wevill: Departures – Selected Poems
Published
2003. Paperback, 144pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562344 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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Nigel Wheale: Raw Skies. New & Selected Poems
Published
2005. 148pp, 9x6ins, paperback. £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562757 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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JL Williams Condition of Fire
Published
2011. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, 8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611450 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before he was banished from
his beloved Rome and after travelling and observing many diverse and vibrant
landscapes. He may well have visited and was knowledgeable of the Aeolian
Isles where volcanoes cast molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the
winds of the god who made his home there.
It was to these rapturous, Edenic
and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write the poems
in this collection; poems inspired both directly by Ovid's tales and informing
the new story that emerges from the old—a post-apocalyptic vision of
the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth out of the ashen wasteland that
man has made of the world.
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Sir Thomas Wyatt Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.
Published
2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611023 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was born at Allington Castle in Kent. he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and served King Henry VIII in various capacities both at home and abroad. he was knighted in 1535, but was imprisoned in the Tower a year alter following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, but also perhaps because of suspicion that he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn—a woman he had known for many years and with whim he had been linked at one time. He was released the same year, then was to fall afoul of authority on at least two further occasions, but was again pardoned. He is remembered today as one of the most important poets in the English language, and as the m an who brought the sonnet into English, with his spectacular imitations and re-creations of Petrarch. His work is broader than that, however, and he also showed himself to be a fine elegist and satirist, as well as a lyric poet of the very first order.
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Yang Lian: Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Translated by Brian Holton
Published
2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700912 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
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.
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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.
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Augustus Young: Diversifications — Mayakovsky, Brecht and Me
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610446 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Diversifications includes a long poem by the author, 'The Long Habit of Living', together with his loose reworking of Mayakovsky's classic long poem 'Cloud in Pants', and some loose translations of Brecht, plus a number of poems "in the manner of Brecht". Each of the book's three sections offer the reader another aspect of Augustus Young, whether the voice be his own, or a kind of ventriloquy.
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Michael Zand lion: the iran poems
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611153 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
lion is a narrative of sorts, but it is necessarily disruptive and disjunctive: ideas and literary structures are questioned, even the fixed boundaries of language itself are challenged. lion is a meditation on the role of kinship in the development of cultural identity and the importance of rites of passage as cultural artifacts in the modern world. Ultimately, lion is about the impact of the loss of identity amongst the Iranian diaspora, and the creation of myths of origin.
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