Anne-Marie Albiach: Two Poems: Flammigère & The Line ... The Loss Click on book covers for more information, where available.
Translated
by Peter Riley.
Published 2004, A5 chapbook, 28pp. Out of print. Available in a downloadable e-book version by clicking on this link. ISBN 9780907562412
Anne-Marie Albiach is one of France's leading avant-garde poets. Although much of her work has been translated and published in the USA, littlehas so far been made available in Britain. This chapbook unites two texts from very earlyand very recently in her career: Flammigère was her first book, a long poem published as a limited edition by Siècle à Mains in 1967 in London, where she was then living; 'La ligne . . . la perte' appeared in 1999 in a festschrift volume dedicated to fellow poet Claude Royet-Journoud and was otherwise uncollected in France until the author's new book in mid-2005. This poem shows interesting parallels to the much earlier work. Flammigère has never been collected in any of Ms. Albiach's French volumes and she has always declined permission for its republication. She has however permitted an Italian translation and, now, an English translation.
Rosa Alcalá Undocumentaries
Published
2010. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610729 [Download a sample from this book here.]
'Rosa Alcalá, originally from Paterson, N.J. is a true daughter of W.C. Williams with a distinct, gutsy, and penetrating identity twining a public poeisis with her own luminous particulars. I know of no one else writing such poems that cut into and reenact the "plebeian" with such personal force, eloquence, and skill. "The syntax of worry rewrites cellular codes" she writes and then proceeds to investigate and expose the Industrial Age and its "genetic drifts". A worker is "fighting like a girl for gloves", a kind of child's cognitive dissonance documents improperly stored chemicals, "the deep sleep of field hands" stirs memory as does the more current and common "paycheck clean of union dues." Undocumentariesis Archive made Poetry. "Factory is both fact and act and/mere letters away from face/and story . . ." Alcalá's imagination and language disarmingly penetrate and extend these powerful devices and activating signals. The face we see is hers and our culture's own. I celebrate this book.' —Anne Waldman. Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
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Tim Allen: Settings
Published
2008. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610064 [Download a sample from this book here.]
"I had in mind a kind of anti prose poem that would look and smell like one but give a different taste and have a different texture. One way of doing this was by making the conclusion of each Set flat and deflationary, almost deliberately poor in the sense that they never approached closure, either artificially or in actuality." (Tim Allen)
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Martin Anderson: The Kneeling Room
Published 1981. 20pp, centre-stapled chapbook. Out of
print.
ISBN-10 0907562035
The author's first collection. Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine.
Martin Anderson: The Ash Circle
Published
1986. 40pp, centre-stapled chapbook. £4.00
ISBN 9780907562108
The author's second collection. A revised edition of this book appeared in the USA from Alma House Press, New York, in 1989.
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Martin Anderson: The Hoplite Journals
Published
2006. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562818 [Download a sample from this book here.]
This prose sequence, The Hoplite Journals, the first volume of an ongoing project of the same name, is characterised by rapid temporal and spatial shifts amidst observed and imagined realities. It returns again and again, however, to meditate upon notions of identity and of memory, of time and of space.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals XXX–LIX
Published
2010. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611146 [Download a sample from this book here.]
After many years in the Far East, Martin Anderson returned to the UK in 2001. The first volume of The Hoplite Journals(I–XXIX) was published by Shearsman Books in 2006. This second, and penultimate volume evokes, like its predecessor, events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, and continues the earlier volume's exploration of allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.
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Martin Anderson: Belonging
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610378 [Download a sample from this book here.]
The poems in this latest collection by Martin Anderson are largely concerned with the nature, from both a perceptual and ontological perspective, of continuing and intrinsic identities. We belong "To nowhere/to no thing/to the shortest abridgement/of air of word/to the cruel insignia/of our acquisitions". At the heart of all that we are, of all that we think, feel, see, touch, taste and smell, are 'shadows/pulled through/a world impatient/to sound'. A world, pregnant with meaning and language, which is, finally, a 'mirror colliding/with its reflection'.
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Anon (ed.) Tottel's Miscellany (1557)
Published
2010. Paperback, 300pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21 / Can$22.95
ISBN 9781848611030 Shearsman Classics Vol. 7 (The Tudor
Miscellanies Vol. 1) [Download a sample from this book here.]
1557 saw the publication of this ground-breaking volume: the first printed anthology of contemporary poetry in English. The book is built on a foundation of two recently-deceased aristocratic poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had by their example given English poetry a new direction, above all with the introduction of the Petrarchan sonnet, but also with the invention of blank verse. The anthology was to have an enormous impact, giving witness to the latest developments in English verse for a far bigger public than would have been the norm in the mid-16th century, when manuscripts tended to circulate anonymously and in a small circle of gentlemen.
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Anon (ed.) The Phoenix Nest (1593)
Published
2010. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17 / Can$18.95
ISBN 9781848611047 Shearsman Classics Vol. 8(The
Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 2) [Download a sample from this book here.]
Following the publication of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, a number of other such miscellanies appeared, none of them especially significant from an artistic point of view. In 1593, however, a still-unidentified gentleman known only by his initials (R.S.) published this relatively slim, well-printed and well-designed compilation, which included works by a number oif significant poets of the day—those identified are Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, Robert Greene, George Peele, the Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, and Thomas Watson. It is almost certain that the Phoenix of the title was Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), to whom the first three elegies in the book are dedicated.
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Merle Lyn Bachman: Diorama with Fleeing Figures
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610125 [Download a sample from this book here.]
The poems in Diorama with Fleeing Figures delicately point to devastating historical events. Instead of mounting judgments, the poems accrue power gently, even stealthily. Evoking a language at once lost, familiar, original, and dying, they balance fragments of culture, with a locus of Jewish Eastern Europe, against intimate imagery of the body—"the most confused part of the forest."
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Rachel Tzvia Back: On Ruins & Return
Published
2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700370 [Download a sample from this book here.]
On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 is Rachel Tzvia Back's second full-length collection and tracks the cycle of violence marking the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the last intifadah (uprising).
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María Baranda Ficticia
Translated
by Joshua Edwards
Published August 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611238 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.... [read more by clicking on the cover]
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Anthony Barnett: Miscanthus. Selected and New Poems
Published
2005. Paperback, 251pp, £11.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562559
A long-overdue survey of Anthony Barnett's work, this book provides a welcome opportunity for new readers to get to know his singular art—he is like no other poet of his generation writing in the UK, but both his elliptical lyrics and his work in longer spans should be part of the current consensus as to what constitutes modern English poetry.
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Ellen Baxt: Analfabeto / An Alphabet
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700363 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Analfabeto / An Alphabet was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, part historical record, it crosses genre boundaries narrating a story of fragmented shifts in identity—cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call "home."
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Fred Beake: New and Selected Poems.
Published
2006. Paperback, 143pp, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9780907562986 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Fred Beake has been writing since the late Sixties, and this New and Selected
provides a much needed overview of a constantly developing body of work. About
a third of the book is given over to the very fresh and colourful poems
that have been written since the author's move to South Devon in 2003.
Beake has maintained an interest throughout
his career in the short, often very visual lyric; but has also written off-beat
fictions around particular characters, and very musical longer pieces such
as 'Marona' and 'Towards the West' that reflect (if at a distance) the poet's
early interest in the French Surrealists. This is an unusual poetry, and hard
to place in terms of the modern scene. It occupies a position that is equidistant
between the Imagists and Objectivists, the Surrealists, and much older things.
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Ilhan Berk: Madrigals
Translated
by George Messo
Published 2008. Paperback, 104 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700738 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Madrigals is a collection of poems by Turkey's leading experimental poet, an 89-year-old still at the height of his powers. With spare texts, sometimes with only a few words to a page, this collection has a powerful meditative quality, even as the words trail away into silence and the whiteness of the page.
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Linda Black: Inventory
Published
2008. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700905 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Linda Black's first collection consists entirely of prose poems. The author says of the collection:" I like how the form allows for an ending that isn't an ending—I don't believe in the idea of closure; as in etching I'd want an image, fine detail, but also degrees of dark or shade with less definition, something implied, unseen, reverberating in the shadows."
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Elisabeth Bletsoe: Landscape from a Dream
Published
2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700875 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Landscape from a Dream is Elisabeth Bletsoe's first collection in over ten years and offers startling evidence of a powerful voice that should be better known. Very much a poet of place, Elisabeth Bletsoe fuses elements of folklore, botany, literature, myth and narrative into a poetry that at once feminist in spirit, forthright, and—to a certain extent—at odds with the prevailing British poetic styles, whether conservative or radical.
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Elisabeth Bletsoe Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works
Published 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610828 [Download a sample from this book here.]
In 2008 Shearsman published Elisabeth Bletsoe's most recent collection, Landscape from a Dream. We now offer a companion volume containing all—or almost all—of her previously published work, which has been out of print for some time. The book contains a number of short pieces, but the collection revolves around three major sequences: 'The Regardians', 'Portraits of the Artist's Sister' and 'Pharmacopoeia'. The book confirms Elisabeth Bletsoe's place as one of the most fascinating poets of her generation.
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Anne Blonstein: memory's morning
Published
2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700769 [Download a sample from this book here.]
A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them.
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Hanne Bramness: Salt on the Eye – Selected Poems
Translated
from Norwegian by the author & Frances Presley
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700417 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hanne Bramness is one of Norway's leading poets, and recently a winner of the prestigious Dobloug Prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy. She is also well-known in her native country for her translations of English-language poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Selima Hill, as well as the Estonian poet Marie Under.
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Andrew Brewerton: Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty
Published
2008. [Download a sample from this book here.]
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15; ISBN 9781905700783
Hardcover, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95; ISBN 9781905700776 (Available in
the UK only)
Raag Leaves is a sequence of poems offered the author's friend, the artist Paresh Chakraborty, one of whose works graces the cover of these two editions. The sequence of 37 short lyrics—printed on the recto pages only—demonstrates what some of us have known for some time: that Andrew Brewerton's quiet poetic voice is a powerful one, creating an ambitious new work that is very much in the modernist tradition.
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Ian Brinton (ed.): A Manner of Utterance — The Poetry of J.H. Prynne
Published
2009. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins [Download the introduction to this book
here.]
ISBN 9781848610422 (hardcover) £30.00 / $45
ISBN 9781848610439 (paperback) £12.95 / $20
A Manner of Utterance offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.
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Richard Caddel: Larksong Signal
Published
1997. 64pp, paperback. £6.50 / $9.95. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562238
The author's third full-length collection, covering work written between 1990 and 1995.
María do Cebreiro I am not from here
Translated
from Galician by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611115 [Download a sample from this book here.]
María do Cebreiro is a widely-acclaimed Galician-language poet and critical theorist. In March 2008 she was invited by the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales to be the first Galician Writer in Residence at Bangor University. Some of the poems included in this book were first written during the author's stay in North-Wales, where her translator, Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, also lives and works.
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David Chaloner: Delight's Wreckage
Published
2001. 64pp, A5 paperback. Out of print.
ISBN 0907562302
Chaloner's first full-length collection since 1989's Trans, this is an important collection by a significant figure from the (inaccurately-named) Cambridge School, associated in earlier years with the Grosseteste Review and the Ferry Press.
Avik Chanda: Footnotes
Published
2008. Paperback, 80 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700677 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Footnotes, Avik Chanda's first collection of poetry in English, brings together his work over the past five years. In this, he has set out to explore a deeply personal emotional landscape, employing memory to create snapshots from a poetic autobiography. While some of the pieces have a purely personal emphasis, as in the title poem 'Footnotes', a breadth of allusion throughout the collection hovers on the periphery of three larger-than-life domains—Painting, Music and History, which are his chief interests.
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Mary, Lady Chudleigh: Selected Poems
Edited
by Julie Sampson
Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610484 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656–1710) was a confidante of John Dryden and a leading figure amongst the women writers of her day. In many ways a proto-feminist, Lady Chudleigh was still a provincial aristocrat and devout Protestant, and her work shows many of the apparent contradictions of the early modern era. This is the only selection of her work available in paperback, and her work deserves to be known for more than a few anthology standards.
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