Catherine Hales hazard or fall
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611139 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"I think the necessity of poetry is to irritate, to evoke the uncomfortable response. Scraps of language from different places and registers—radio, tv, conversations, lawyer-speak, etc.—coalesce and collide, creating meaning from their juxtaposition, meaning that is not subject to control or definition but (among other things including just being what it is) questions the rules by which we are obliged to live, like grammar, syntax, meaning. Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision—utopias tend to end in concentration camps and piles of skulls. Putting the poem into something resembling conventional form is thus supremely ironic. It's like putting the genie back into the lamp." —Catherine Hales
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John Hall: Couldn't You?
Published
2007. Paperback,
92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700516 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
John Hall's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since the comprehensive Selected Poems published by Etruscan in 2002.
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Robert Hampson: Seaport
Published
2008. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 88pp, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781848610293 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Seaport deals with many aspects of the history and
development of Liverpool, drawing on a wide range of documentary sources, and
culminating with a vivid account of what the national press called the 'Toxteth
Riots' of 1981. This event is seen in the context of the repressive policing
methods of the day, especially as directed at black youths . . . [and] . .
. in the historical context of Liverpool's notorious role in the slave trade,
and of subsequent patterns of racial discrimination . . .
(from Peter Barry's Introduction to this volume)
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Martin Harrison: Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610088 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Subtle and sharply lyrical, these poems shimmer on the eye while being deeply held at the back of the mind. Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.
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Lee Harwood: Collected Poems
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 521pp. £17.95
/ $28
ISBN 9780907562405 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A major event, this volume was the first career-spanning collection of Lee Harwood's work, and its publication was timed to coincide with the author's 65th birthday in 2004. Most of Lee Harwood's work is currently out of print, including the large-scale Selected Poems (crossing the frozen river) published by Paladin in the late 1980s, and this Collected makes all of it available once again, including some hard-to-find material and some recent uncollected work.
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Lee Harwood: Selected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700936 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2004, Shearsman published Lee Harwood's Collected Poems, which proved what many of us had known for many years: that Harwood is one of our living masters. Four years on, and we now offer a smaller selection of his work, which will serve as an introduction for new readers, covering the period from 1965 to 2007. While the lion's share of the poems are drawn from the Collected, a few new poems are also featured.
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Lee Harwood & Kelvin Corcoran: Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood
Published
2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, Price £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610019 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
To accompany Lee Harwood's new Selected Poems, we offer also this book-length collection of interviews with Harwood by his long-time friend and admirer, Kelvin Corcoran — himself also a Shearsman author. An invaluable opportunity to "hear" Harwood talking about poetry and about his own work.
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Michael Haslam: Mid Life
Published
2007. Paperback, 208pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95
/ $20
ISBN 9781905700394 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Mid Life is subtitled 'Poetry 1980-2000', and is a revised and reconsidered Collected Poems covering the period 1980-1994 in terms of composition, and several further years of revision. The contents of this volume, in earlier versions, originally appeared as A Whole Bauble from Carcanet Press in 1995. Now much revised, this volume sums up the author's compositional "mid-life".
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Ralph Hawkins: The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights)
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 110pp. £8.95
/ $13.95
ISBN 9780907562429 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first full-length collection since the early 1990s by this highly original English poet. The volume includes the 'Pushkin' poems, previously only available in pamphlet form, as well as some 80 pages of previously uncollected work.
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Ralph Hawkins: Gone to Marzipan
Published 2009. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610217 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Ralph Hawkins' poems always give the impression of turning up late and being drunk when they do arrive. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules and values. —Andrew Duncan
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Anthony Hawley: Forget Reading
Published
2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700707 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Forget Reading, Anthony Hawley's second collection for Shearsman Books, poems speak up despite themselves, and in doing so they affirm poetry's slight, subterranean power inside a culture of overwhelming and decadent ugliness. Due to the very odds stacked against them, these beautifully moving poems enact a radical little protest, unheeded by the majority rule.
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Anthony Hawley: The Concerto Form
Published
2006. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 92pp. £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9780907562849 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Born in 1977, Anthony Hawley grew up in New England and was educated at Columbia University. He is the author of the chapbooks Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Vocative (Phylum Press), and his poems have appeared in various publications including Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, 26, and Volt. He currently lives in Nebraska with his wife and daughter and is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Concerto Form is his first full-length collection.
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Michael Heller Beckmann Variations & other poems
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610873 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles's shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
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Michael Heller Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Poetry of George Oppen
Published February 2012.
Paperback, 176pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50. Expanded 2nd Edition.
ISBN 9781848612082 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties, to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s. The volume is a revised and expanded edition of the 2008 publication.
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Michael Heller Uncertain Poetries — Selected Essays
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 256pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22. 2nd Edition
ISBN 9781848612082 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarmé and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.
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Robert Herrick : Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 2. Edited by Tony Frazer.
[Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Published
2007. 8.5x5.5ins, 120pp, £8.95 / $15. ISBN 9781905700493
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was perhaps the greatest poet to have worked in Devon. Born in London, the son of a goldsmith, he studied at Cambridge and later fell in with the London poets who had gathered around the magnetic figure of Ben Jonson. In order to make a living—since he had not pursued the family trade—he entered the Church and in 1627 was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, whom he accompanied on an unsuccessful military expedition in 1627. In 1629 he was appointed to the living of Dean Prior, a village on the edge of Dartmoor, about half way between Exeter and Plymouth. He was to remain there for the rest of his life, with the exception of the Cromwellian period from 1647–1660, during which he was expelled for his royalist sympathies and, no doubt, also doctrinal disagreements.
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Barry Hill Naked Clay
Published
January 2012. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611870 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Naked Clay is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud—"the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art"' as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences. Barry Hill has created a unique space for the senses and the intellect to be prompted, explored and disturbed.
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Lynne Hjelmgaard The Ring
Published
2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611474 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Ring is a book-length sequence of poems where the protagonist, a new young widow, moves from the strangeness of city to city, (from Copenhagen to London to Rome to Paris) trying to come to terms with her loss while looking forward to a possible new life. The title poem concludes the volume where the widow suggestively lets go of some of her past by taking off her ring.
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Emmanuel Hocquard: Elegies, and other poems
Translated
by John A. Scott. Published 1989. A5 Paperback, 48pp. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562153
The only collection of Hocquard's work available in the UK, this book includes the first five Elegies (originally published by P.O.L., Paris, 1979 & 1987) in translations by the renowned Australian poet-novelist, John A. Scott. The complete Elegies (1-7) were subsequently published by Picador Australia in 1990 in Scott's collected Translations. Elegies 6 and 7 were later published in Shearsman magazine in slightly revised versions.
Paul Holman: The Memory of the Drift – Books I-IV
Publilshed
2007. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781905700295 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume combines a revised text of the first part of The Memory of the Drift (written 1993-1999, and originally published in 2001) with the three interlocking, previously uncollected, books in which its argument is extended: In the Common Era, Dog Mercury and Vicinal.
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Janet Holmes: The ms of m y kin
Published
2009. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610354 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
If you write out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin — the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. (Janet Holmes)
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Brandi Homan: Hard Reds
Published
2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700813 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection for Chicago-based poet and small-press publisher, Brandi Homan.
"Like the stream of cut-paper hearts in her Valentine Factory, Brandi Homan's poems are connected 'at the blade's edge,' are all 'hard reds'—an intelligent and imaginative woman coming to terms with desire. This collection is an exciting 'kick-start' for her electric voice." — David Trinidad
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Brandi Homan Bobcat Country
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610859 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the "Fuck yeaaaah!"s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman ......" —Jennifer L. Knox
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Jeremy Hooker: Upstate – A North American Journal
Published
2007. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9781905700226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
An American journal — recorded while on an academic exchange in the North-East of the USA — by a leading English poet, whose collected poems, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965–2005 appeared from Enitharmon in 2006. Something of a companion volume to the same author's Welsh Journal (2001), which is still available from Seren.
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Peter Hughes: Nistanimera
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781905700288 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new collection from this Cambridge-based poet and painter, his first new collection in several years.
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Peter Hughes: The Summer of Agios Dimitrios
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610644 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Summer of Agios Dimitrios started out as a poetical journal kept on the west coast of the Mani peninsula in Greece as the summer of 2007 turned into its autumn.
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Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh The Pistol Tree Poems
Published
October 2011. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611719 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"As good as the movies." —John Hall
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Norbert Hummelt Berlin Fresco — Selected Poems
Translated
by Catherine Hales
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610965 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Berlin Fresco is the first volume in English by the German poet, translator, editor, and publisher, Norbert Hummelt. Born in the Rhineland in 1962, he has been a freelance writer since 1991, and editor of the literary-critical journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as Eliot's Four Quartets and The Waste Land.
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Judith Infante: Love: A Suspect Form — Heloise and Abelard
Published
2008. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700820 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Heloise and Abelard—Since the 12th century writers, artists, and musicians
have been inspired by the details of their story—famous philosopher
and his pupil, forbidden love affair, abandoned son, castration, monastic
life, and heresy trials.
In this remarkable
collection Judith Infante gives us a series of poems that form a verse novel
about the medieval lovers. The poems make clear how bound was their relationship
to its period, yet capture the intensity of their timeless and conflicting
emotions.
Heloise and Abelard
became different people as their story moved from romance to life apart and
finally to their individual deaths and the mysterious change that implies.
By interweaving Ovid’s myth of Atalanta with the story of Heloise and
Abelard, Love: A Suspect Form calls attention to
the many and often disorienting aspects we present to each other.
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W.D. Jackson: Boccaccio in Florence and other poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610682 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2002 and 2005, Menard Press published Then and Now – Words in the Dark and From Now to Then, as the first two books of a three-part work-in-progress. Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems is a selection from the on-going third instalment, Opus 3. It is also intended as a book in itself with a structure differing from Opus 3 as a whole. Whereas the latter, when completed, will be arranged thematically in three parts, dealing with the emotional/physical, ethical and spiritual life respectively, the order of the poems in the selection is more or less chronological—from Boccaccio and the Dance of Death to the present day. This arrangement offers the reader a historical pre-view of the three fundamental components or concerns of human life on which Opus 3 is based, while exemplifying the various sorts of poetry and prose to be found in it.
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Kent Johnson: Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
Published
2008. Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781905700950 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Homage contains a wide variety of poems and prose, representing all strands of Johnson's work: versions from the Greek, traduced to an extraordinary degree; anti-war poems, overflowing with rage; stink-bombs tossed in the direction of some famous poets, mostly meant in an ironic, joshing way. But not all. And then there are memoir poems of persons met and places visited, that may well be documentary in nature, or may also be artfully disguised. Memory is, after all, an awkward thing, and not to be trusted, just as politicians and their henchmen are not and there is no irony in their treatment in this book. No, sir, none at all.
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Kent Johnson & Roberto Echavarren (eds.) Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay
Published
October 2011. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848611894 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery's book of the same title, this is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years, and features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa Di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño.
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Norman Jope Dreams of the Caucasus
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611290 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy . . . although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream—and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates.
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Andrew Jordan Hegemonick
Published
2012. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848612204 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Memory and rehearsal. The cognitive processes upon which we have learned to depend, they keep us in our context, which is where we are screwed. She said, "Use your imagination to set yourself free, be inspired to think the unthinkable." And I did. But there are so many things that contain us.
Hegemonick is a 'free history' of the war against children, something unearthed; it is a delusional narrative, an ode to oblivion; a hymn to the goddess, the once and future porn queen; a therapeutic journal, partially rewritten; a decoy (but not a plan).
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Andrew Jordan: Ha-ha
Published
2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700127 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems explore the remnants of a system of ancient narrative trackways that criss-cross the landscapes of south and south west England. These flows of energy underpin the hermetics of enclosure. They are explored here for the first time. This book might be a strategy—a self help manual for the ontologically dispossessed—or just an encouragement to trespass in the newly enclosed purlieu of the self. Tell it how you want, emblematic landscapes—and how we perceive them—can mirror identity and relationship, creating a cultural space within which both can become tenable.
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Trevor Joyce: with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold. A Body of Work, 1966-2000
2nd
Edition. Published 2003. Paperback 9x6ins, 241pp, £11.95 / $18
ISBN 978-0-907562-37-5 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A collected poems by this late-modernist Irish poet who is finally being recognised for the important figure that he is. His first publication in the UK, this book is jointly published with New Writers' Press, Dublin. An earlier edition, in a slightly different format, was published in 2001, and is now o.o.p.
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Trevor Joyce: Courts of Air and Earth
Published
2008. Paperback 8x5ins, 92pp, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume extracts the author's remarkable translation of the epic 'Sweeny Peregrine' from the above volume and offers it together with a large group of other versions from the Old and Middle Irish, thus offering Anglophone readers a glimpse of some very unusual verse that rarely sees the light of day outside academic volumes, while also transposing it into a form that will seem familiar to readers of Joyce's own work.
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