Gloria Gervitz: Migrations Click on covers for more information, where available.
Translated by Mark Schafer
Published 2004. Paperback, 9.25x7.5ins. 400pp. £15.95. Not
for sale outside the U.K.
ISBN 9780907562498
Migrations is a long poem, the final version of which runs to seven books. The first six were published in Mexico City in a single volume in 2002 by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. This volume presents the complete original text of Migraciones, with recent revisions, plus the seventh book, hitherto only available in a limited-edition chapbook, together with Mark Schafer's inspired translation of the entire text.
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Anna Glazova: Twice under the Sun
Translated
by Anna Khasin
Published 2008. Paperback, ca. 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 /
$15
ISBN 9781905700929
Twice under the Sun presents a cross-section of Anna Glazova's work from the past seven years, spectacularly translated—with the author's assistance—by Anna Khasin. The book is Ms Glazova's first book-length publication in English.
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Giles Goodland: What the Things Sang
Published
May 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610545
If Johnson believed that objects held primacy over language, why did he compose his dictionary following the arbitrary rule of alphabetical order? If (to contradict Wiitgenstein) poems are engaged in the language-game of giving information, how should that information be arranged? If Blake had, when he heard ringing in the trees, picked up the phone, what information would the things have sung to him? If Heraclitus had not been struck with his own lightning, would he be less fragmented to us now? This sequence of poems presents a number of possible and less possibleanswers to these questions. But more questions arise on the way.
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Mark Goodwin: Else
Published
2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700974
A first collection for Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
"It’s thrilling to welcome a new poet into the company of our seriously exciting younger nature writers such as Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane . . . Mark Goodwin is a poet whose surround-senses are as alert as an animal’s, and whose writing is exceptionally grounded in so many of the complexities of being fully human." (Catherine Byron)
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Anne Gorrick: Kyotologic
Published
2008. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610040
Anne Gorrick's first collection is a remarkable reworking of themes from the ancient Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
"A densely beautiful book, young poems growing out of old poems, vines round an ancient pine. Imagine language talking to itself, all skin and rain and blossoms, scattering like leaves, seeming to remember some other country some other time—yet always being vividly present like a strange food you've taken into your mouth that's too sweet—but after a moment, just barely sweet enough, as we get to like this world Gorrick has incarnated for us here, safe in our deepest feelings." (Robert Kelly)
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David H.W. Grubb: The Man Who Spoke to Owls
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610477
This new collection brings together three elements central to the poetry and prose of David Grubb. There is the world of surreal identities, of wonders, disturbances, angels, fire sermons and celebrations where animals and people speak with both words and silences. There is the unfinished business of growing up in a strict religious household and seeking meanings beyond rituals and texts. In the third section of the book Albania, Bosnia and other locations create a world where nothing is certain, the past provides constant challenges and distant voices call. The darkness is broken by stars.
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Harry Guest: Comparisons & Conversions
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610194
Comparisons considers the disparities between memory and expectation as well as the alteration in events separated by the gap of years—since, sometimes when we journey, we are "hoping by space to leave / the faults of time behind".
Conversions contains the poetry translated since Versions appeared from Odyssey in 1999. Harry Guest regards the effort of translation as a vital complement to creative writing, providing not only a technical challenge but also the strange effect of inhabiting another's consciousness for a while.
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Christopher Gutkind: Inside to Outside
Published
2006. Paperback 9x6ins, 116pp, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9780907562955
Through a variety of approaches Chris Gutkind shows a self exploring and working itself out across a range of preoccupations. It is a journey from inside to outside, from the more hermetic to the more expansive and from him to you, perhaps into you.
Born in the Netherlands and raised mostly in Canada, Chris Gutkind has lived in London for many years, where he is a librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies. This is his first collection of poetry. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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John Hall: Couldn't You?
Published
2007. Paperback,
92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700516
John Hall's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since the comprehensive Selected Poems published by Etruscan in 2002.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Robert Hampson: Seaport
Published
November 2008. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 88pp, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781848610293
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
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
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
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
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.
Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
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Michael Haslam: Mid Life
Published
2007. Paperback, 208pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95
/ $20
ISBN 9781905700394
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". Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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Ralph Hawkins: The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights)
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 110pp. £8.95
/ $13.95
ISBN 9780907562429
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.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Ralph Hawkins: Gone to Marzipan
Published 2009. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610217
"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
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.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Anthony Hawley: The Concerto Form
Published
2006. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 92pp. £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9780907562849
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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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
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.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Janet Holmes: The ms of m y kin
Published February 2009. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610354
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
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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Jeremy Hooker: Upstate – A North American Journal
Published
2007. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9781905700226
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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Peter Hughes: Nistanimera
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781905700288
A new collection from this Cambridge-based poet and painter, his first new collection in several years.
Download a sample PDF from this book here
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Peter Hughes: The Summer of Agios Dimitrios
Published
July 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610644
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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Judith Infante: Love: A Suspect Form — Heloise and Abelard
Published
2008. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700820
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
October 2009. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610682
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.
Kent Johnson: Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
Published
2008. Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781905700950
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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Andrew Jordan: Ha-ha
Published
2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781905700127
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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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
UK, €18 Ireland, $18 USA
ISBN 978-0-907562-37-5
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
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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