Maxine Chernoff Without
Published
2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611962 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The series of poems in Maxine Chernoff's Without are elegiac brushstrokes, each somewhat feathery and brushing in more than one direction, which creates tension and unexpected arrivals as well as departures: someone or something is missing. Parts of the world are wavering and parts have disappeared. What remains is treated in the subtle management of the lines without a hint of punctuation, which allows for "waves" of attention, as meaning rises and subsides. The emotional impact is powerful, as are the recognitions, such as "when darkness loses / its waiting mirror / and tuning forks / stand in for solace" and "readers asleep /mouthing their dreams / fears of whispering / become a creed / until life blurs / like any lens /that fails at attention." There's a sense of meaning passing with the solidity and darkness of time.
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Tom Clark Something in the Air
Published
2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611085 [Download a sample from this book here.]
A poet of original vision and gentle, careful word-shaping, Clark allows
his images to merge and converge toward a resolution in which flow is not
arrested but pauses to take thought; the images take over the controls and "do
the talking," almost as if they had a mind of their own. What a relief
when that happens, the poet confesses; he just follows along and tries to
stay out of the way of whatever it is they seem to want to be saying.
And when the elements of image and sound and sense do then mysteriously
come together in the moment, as Clark here proposes, "A point is fixed
. . ."
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Adrian Clarke Eurochants
Published
June 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610958 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Testing some possibilities and limits of cultural and linguistic exchange, a selection of imitations of Max Jacob follow free improvisations on early Chinese love poems and texts by Persius, Tacitus and Villon. The Eurochants themselves are less translations of specific texts than plurilingual responses to aspects of the European lyric tradition with its characteristic themes of "despair, frustration, yearning" (Michael Riffaterre) that are by turns respectful and irreverent, attentive and oblique, measuring themselves against established forms—most frequently the sonnet—as they distort and resolve them. Taking their cue from Alain Bosquet's reflections on collective suicide, a set of Terminal Preludes responds to projects for "total war" and planetary depredation with fractured syntax, rhythmic insistence and determinedly impure diction.
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Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700462 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Jennifer Clement has published three collections of her work in bilingual editions in Mexico, where she was born and still lives. Although better-known outside Mexico as a novelist / prose-writer (A True Story Based on Lies, Widow Basquiat), she has been writing poetry for many years and runs the annual San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende with her sister, Barbara Sibley. This volume draws on her Mexican collections and also includes more recent work.
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Jennifer Clement Widow Basquiat
Published
2010. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17 New
edition.
ISBN 9781848610989 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Widow Basquiat explores the love story between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne, his muse and lover. It is also a profound portrait of New York City during the early 1980s' art scene and the striking cast of characters from that time: Andy Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and William Burroughs, among others.
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Mary Coghill: Designed to Fade Click on covers for more information, where available.
Published
2006. 120pp, paperback. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700059 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Designed to Fade is a narrative poem about life in the modern city of London, a journey through a day in London seen through a woman's eyes. The drama begins in the early hours and ends at the same time the following day. Referring to city poetry by other poets and experimenting with poetic form in an attempt to develop a women's poetry of the city, the author has developed an intriguing post-modernist slant to the dramatic unities of time, place and character. As city dweller you will find yourself in here. There are place names, descriptions of commuter journeys and brushes with authority, work and bosses which will evoke an empathy that modern poetry has all too often omitted to express. Designed to Fade is a stylistic tour-de-force, and a most unusual sequence of poems.
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Peter Cole: What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998
Published
2005. 212pp, paperback. £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9780907562795 [Download a
sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume gathers between a single set of covers the two highly praised books of poems published by Peter Cole in the United States—Rift and Hymns & Qualms. The doubling of its title, however, runs deeper, and reflects Cole's long engagement with the cultures of Jerusalem and linkage at every level. Whether a poem takes up the patterns of bird flight, the Eros of speech, or the slaughter of Muslim worshippers by a Jewish settler in Hebron, the poet's concern throughout has been with forms of offering and strategies of sustenance.
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Mary Coleridge Selected Poems
Published
2010. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century and they certainly deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.
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Susan Connolly: Forest Music
Published
2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610262 [Download a
sample PDF from this book here.]
Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length
collection. Many poems in the book depict the author's personal encounter
with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems
celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange
alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the
discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth
century.
Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve
a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense
of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving
from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical
instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.
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Brooklyn Copeland Siphon, Harbor
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612020 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Siphon, Harbor are what happen when the element of freshwater is allowed to wash freely over the poet's intense and unabashed observations of new romance and the capricious nature of the American Midwestern summer. Copeland, anchored by the mutuality of her themes, wastes no time in layering her own intimacies upon the intimacy she creates with her reader. From the very first page we have access to both her process and the inevitable resultant verse. This verse, which may appear self-contained and compact, is in fact pliant and reciprocal. Among love poems that are unclouded by disingenuousness or cliché, we find a love that is both succinct and expansive, like a clear, gray lake that is deeper than it is wide.
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Kelvin Corcoran Hotel Shadow
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611429 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hotel Shadow continues Kelvin Corcoran's remarkable poetic venture begun with Melanie's Book in 1996; here, with characteristically rich lyricism, Corcoran explores Greece ancient and modern. Travelling out from the real Hotel Shadow in the low season, the work encompasses: Aristomenes and the ethics of terror; paternal affection; Xenophanes of Colophon; the origins of poetry itself and a subsequent history; family mythology and the vagaries of DIY.
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Kelvin Corcoran: Backward Turning Sea
Published
2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700684 [Download a sample
PDF from this book here.]
Corcoran's first collection since his New & Selected Poems in 2004, Backward Turning Sea (i.e. the Mediterranean) shows the author deepening his engagement with Greece, both ancient and modern—but it is a place where contemporary politics can intrude, disturbing the reverie. The collection also includes a number of poems vased on the author's fascination with the paintings of the St Ives artist, Roger Hilton.
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Kelvin Corcoran: New and Selected Poems
Published
2004, 196pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9780907562399 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Kelvin Corcoran's first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, appeared in 1985 and he has published eight subsequent collections with a range of British small presses. This volume presents a complete new collection, Against Purity, together with a previously unpublished shorter sequence, My Life With Byron, plus selections from each of his previous nine volumes of poetry, to give an overview of the work of one of the finest British poets of his generation.
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Kelvin Corcoran: When Suzy Was
Published
1999. 48pp, paperback. £5.50 / $7.50.
ISBN 9780907562252
The author's eighth collection, containing a number of poems focused on Greece.
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Cid Corman: Marginalia
Published 1996. 44pp, A5 Paperback, £5 / $9.95
ISBN 9780907562214
A rare UK publication for this major US poet, long resident in Japan, this is a collection of the short lyrics for which Corman (1924–2004) was renowned.
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Philip Crick: Episodes
Published 1981. 16pp, centre-stapled. Out of print.
ISBN-10 0907562027
Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine.
Philip Crick: Evolving the Idol: The Poetry of Gustaf Sobin
Published 1984. 28pp, centre-stapled. Out of print.
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London.
ISBN
9780903375641
The earliest study of Gustaf Sobin's poetry, partly based on conversations with him by the late author.
M.T.C. Cronin: <More or Less Than> 1-100
Published
2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 140pp, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562474 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The second British collection by this extraordinarily talented Australian poet, who is creating a stir in several parts of the world. Poems 1–13 and 88–100 from this one-hundred poem sequence appeared in Shearsman magazine, issue 54, but the full scope of the piece only becomes clear with publication of the complete book: one hundred poems, where poem 1 has 1 line, poem 2 has 2 lines, all the way to poem 50 with fifty lines, 51 with 49 lines and back down to 100 which is a one-liner again. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms. Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse.
Winner of the C J Dennis Prize in the Victoria State Premier's Awards, winner of the Innovation award in the Government of South Australia's 2006 Festival Awards; shortlisted for both the NSW Premier's Award (Kenneth Slessor Prize) and 'The Age' Book of the Year Award.Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
M.T.C. Cronin: Notebook of Signs
Published
2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 /
$15.
ISBN 9781905700110 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Another remarkable collection from this prize-winning Australian author. Her last Shearsman collection, the very original <More or Less Than> 1-100 won two of Australia's major literary awards; this new volume is as path-breaking as the last and proves that she is one of the most talented poets of her generation.
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M.T.C. Cronin & Peter Boyle: How does a man who is dead reinvent his body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610163 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Subtitled The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli—a neglected 20th century poet influenced by Celan and Vallejo—this collection represents the merging of two contemporary Antipodean poets into the consciousness of a mysterious third.
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Elsa Cross: Selected Poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700479. Edited by Tony Frazer. Translated
by Anamaría
Crowe Serrano, Ruth Fainlight, John Oliver Simon, Michael Smith
& Luis Ingelmo[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Elsa Cross (b. 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English—a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work—ranging from the remarkable 'Bacchantes', which dates from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through 'Malabar Canto'—suffused with the spirit of India—to the odes, dithyrambs and elegies of the recent Greek-inflected works. Elsa Cross' work is typified by its strong metaphysical orientation, coupled with a dazzling surface and remarkable imagery, and offers the English-speaking reader a new experience. A poetry to be savoured, thanks to the efforts of the five translators at work here, all of whom worked closely with the author to bring these poems successfully across the language barrier.
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Anamaría Crowe Serrano: Femispheres
Published
2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700592 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection for Irish poet-translator Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Over the past two to three years her work has been appearing in magazines in Ireland, the UK and the USA, as have her translations from the Spanish and Italian.
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Claire Crowther: Stretch of Closures
Published
2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The array of characters in this book of lyric poems personify twenty-first century language, found on adverts, shopfronts, train tickets. Stretch of Closures writes down an urban landscape in an alphabet made readable by its citizens. If it is the dead metaphors that define everyday lives, Claire Crowther shakes them up to show not just history but signposts to the future.
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Claire Crowther: The Clockwork Gift
Published
2009. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610323 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Clockwork Gift is Claire Crowther's second collection. The poems here continue the lyrical and reflective voice of her first collection, Stretch of Closures, and examine the place of older women in contemporary culture. Claire Crowther combines a control of rhetoric with myth-making skill and these poems include striking new figures such as the yellow-furred thike and its human cousin, or the countrywoman who answers the call of Maleficence. This is also the landscape of looking back; memory is a faculty idolised in our time and shown here to be as fragile as the stuff of grandmother's dresses yet tough enough to bond complex human relationships.
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Catherine Daly: Vauxhall
Published
2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700714 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Vauxhall is pitched where voice and experience coincide. The poems sing and dance through heavenly mansions and real bungalows, tourist traps and museums, pharmacies and vending machines. Vauxhall is a calendar. It's an "all occasion" greeting and gift.
The Hollywood pitch for Vauxhall might have been "Marianne Moore meets Joan Jett" or "Alexander Pope goes to night school."
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Ian Davidson: At a Stretch
Published
2004. Paperback, 9"x6", 109pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9780907562443
The author's second full-scale collection, following a series of fine chapbooks, and his largest collection so far. Ian Davidson is one of the most exciting and innovative English-language poets currently writing in Wales, and his radical engagement with landscape in these poems offers new ways of using and approaching landscape within the context of a poem.
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Ian Davidson: As if Only
Published
2007. Paperback, 9x6ins, 84pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700080 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The author's second Shearsman collection, following his successful first large collection, At a Stretch (2004). The author says of this book: "These poems were written in Bangor, in north Wales, in Barcelona, in London, on the Baltic coast and in Fez and Marrakech. Despite the distances involved they are the result of a period of introspection and self-possession. Travel doesn't necessarily broaden the mind. In some cases only the long lines would do, and the language had to be chewed over, while in others, when the town was quiet and the blood had stopped pounding in my head, I could clip the tone and measure out the words a few at a time."
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Ian Davidson Partly in Riga and Other Poems
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611306 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Partly in Riga and other poems is a book in five sections, covering themes of birth (the arrival of a new son), travel in Latvia, in Greece and in Wales, contemporary politics, and the endless of vagaries and mysteries of people. "I like people, though they disturb me sometimes." (Ian Davidson, from the Foreword)
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Richard Deming: Let's Not Call It Consequence
Published
2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700660 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."
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Peter Dent: Handmade Equations
Published
2005. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 100pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9780907562658 [Download a sample PDF
from this book here.]
A collection of over eighty poems written since the beginning of the new century, this book showcases Peter Dent's remarkable investigations into the possibilities of the modern lyric and the possibilities of language.
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Shira Dentz black seeds on a white dish
Published
2010. Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611283 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in black seeds on a white dish spring from the search for what is generated and discovered when loss and desire occupy the same space. But lamentation is not the primary focus—by destabilizing everything in its reach, loss disables rigidity. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them: "Nothing to do but let the form of things take over." Shapes themselves, including punctuation, become a language throughout.
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Du Fu: Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems Click on book covers for more information.
Published
2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610002 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Translated by Jonathan Waley
The Tang dynasty (618–907 AD), is celebrated as the greatest moment in Chinese poetry, a time when poetry was highly rated, and some of China's most famous poets were writing. Du Fu (712–770 AD) is widely regarded as the greatest of these. He himself wrote that he aimed to startle his readers, and in some of his more avant-garde poems he combines and contrasts images in a way that has an almost modernist feel to it. On the other hand, he also enjoyed and celebrated the simple pleasures in life, and his (apparently) lighter poems about friendship and his natural surroundings show this clearly.
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Laurie Duggan: Compared to What – Selected Poems 1971-2003
Published
2005. Paperback 9x6ins, 224pp, £11.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562610 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This book is Duggan's first collection to be published in Britain and the USA, and is a career overview which serves to introduce a vibrant and colourful new voice which will sound familiar at first—with its obvious influences from the New York School—but will then sound stranger, as a distinctive Australian element emerges, an element moreover that communicates well across borders.
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Laurie Duggan: The Ash Range
Published
2005. Paperback 9x6ins, 248pp, £11.95
/ $20
ISBN 9780907562696 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Ash Range is a long documentary poem that mixes prose, poetry, reportage and illustrations — somewhat in the manner of William Carlos Williams' Paterson — to narrate a history of the settlers' engagement with Gippsland, a southerly region of Victoria State. Like Paterson, which concerns itself with small-town New Jersey, The Ash Range is not constrained by its locality, but instead finds the universal in its extended examination of the local. While the work is enormously ambitious in its mix of materials, the whole is welded into a solid structure that facilitates communication of the theme, even to an audience that is unaware of the territory it describes.
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Laurie Duggan: Crab & Winkle
Published
2009. Paperback, 164pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610491 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Crab & Winkle is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.
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Andrew Duncan: Switching and Main Exchange
Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 62pp, £6.50
/ $9
ISBN 9780907562276
This collection consists of the second half of the author's Threads of Iron manuscript, subject of much discussion since its partial appearance in magazines in the early 1980s. The first half of Threads was collected in 1990 as Cut Memories and False Commands (Reality Studios, London).
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Andrew Duncan: Pauper Estate
Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 52pp, £6.00
/ $8.50
ISBN 9780907562283
A collection of the author's poems dating from the late 1990s.
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Order from Small Press Distribution
Andrew Duncan: Savage Survivals amid modern suavity
Published
2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 116pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700035 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Here are arcane mysteries, here are forgotten histories; here are assorted arcana and incunabula; and here there is a transposition of a Chinese classic to contemporary Glasgow, filtered through the mesh of a Chinese martial-arts movie. And what connects aerial photography, growing up in the Turkic lands, and sound-poetry (the difficulties of)?—Andrew Duncan's imagination, which ranges far and wide, but always brings back news of interesting climes, and landhaps even the poets' heads do grow beneath their shoulders.
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Andrew Duncan: The Council of Heresy —A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain
Published
2009. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $27
ISBN 9781848610071 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling aperçus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.
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Susanne Dyckman: equilibrium's form
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700202 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Susanne Dyckman's first full-length collection, following from her Etherdome Press chapbook published in 2005, poetic tonalities and phrasings are used to disrupt the chronology of past and present. Language plays—and replays—across the page, radiating from interiority to historical concreteness and back again. The reader is impelled through a temporal spiral, "the body as it moves in sequences of rain".
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