Jill Magi Cadastral Map
Published
September 2011. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611726 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Cadastral Map, Jill Magi writes: "I enter as a writer, one kind of mapmaker, needing to ask, is traditional nature writing in English a cadastral map? Abstracting, narrowing, taking an especially strong hold in North America, the New World that never was new? Even as 'green is the new black' and environmentalism gains moral momentum, is 'nature writing' still our flawed point of origin, creating ideas of the land and nature that tend to erase people and local knowledge as we go?" In answer to these questions, Magi arrives in three states: the New Jersey farmland of her childhood, a Kentucky of deep lyricism and painful inequities, and early 20th century Vermont where progressive policies established an idea of nature, pitting local needs against policies to attract tourists. She enters these questions and sites via poetry—because "a policy is a path that is made, an effect to feel."
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Jill Magi: Torchwood
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700547 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
A second collection, and first from Shearsman, by this Brooklyn-based poet, artist and small-press publisher.
While Torchwood documents the loss of a religion and at times, the loss of language, it gathers hope as it goes. The mostly serial works in this collection explore the possibility of faith in humanity — colleagues, classmates, strangers, lovers — attempting a language of clear-seeing and shared spirit. A poetry of inner and outer worlds, of the diary and of the subway, Torchwood moves between the sentence and its trust in storytelling, and the fragment — evidence of the need to create silence in order to tell.
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Mai Cheng: Selected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700882 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A bilingual (English & Chinese) collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is his first collection to be made available in translation.
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Phil Maillard: Sweet Dust & Growling Lambs
Published
2008. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Looking at this collection, Sweet Dust And Growling Lambs, I think I can perceive a few recurrent themes. The first relates to mythology, in a broad, story-telling kind of fashion. Of recent years, 'myths' have been regarded as universal, because archetypal, repositories of human experience. From there, it's a short step to the idea of 'fusion', of combining elements from different cultures in a single work. This is most familiar in music. In my poem The 'Confession' Of Gerald, for example, the Celtic story of Elidorus and his meeting with the fairy folk is developed by way of a Buddhist teaching story." (Phil Maillard)
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Stéphane Mallarmé: Sonnets
Published
2008. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700424 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Translated by David Scott
A fully bilingual edition of Mallarmé's Sonnets, with introduction and notes designed for the undergraduate. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarmé's engagement with this particular form.
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D.S. Marriott: Hoodoo Voodoo
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6 ins, £9.95 / $17.00
ISBN 9781905700790 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
D.S. Marriott's second collection, and first with Shearsman. With an introduction
by Romana Huk, in which she says: "D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in
this book . . . by refolding beautiful romantic lines . . . into new relation
with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts
in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole
of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just
the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic
doing, to light. Hoodoo Voodoo's last section's dark streaming of figures
through landscapes . . .
I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book."
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D.S. Marriott The Bloods
Published
May 2011. Paperback, 138pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611511 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In The Bloods, his third poetry collection, D.S. Marriott's recurrent theme is that of memory and absence: 'bound to what is remembered/ what is absent'. In poems that both embody and inhabit this double obligation, memory and absence prove to be equally central to the mysteries of ordinary language, the politics and philosophy of enslavement, as well as markers—typographic, archival, ethical—respecting the borders of what cannot, finally, be known. Spare, lyrical, and deeply haunting, and yet not without irony or hope, The Bloods continues Marriott's pursuit of a style and concept of the poem that is strictly his own.
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Camille Martin Sonnets
Published
2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16 / Can$17.95
ISBN 9781848610705 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In her second book of poetry, Camille Martin breathes fresh life into the sonnet in a collection that is at once edgy and lyrical. The word "sonnet" comes from "song," and the musicality of Sonnets is not surprising, given Martin's background as a classical musician. These poems demonstrate a virtuosic range of approaches and themes; some are inspired by texts as disparate as nursery rhymes, theories of cognitive science, a history of street names, and her own dream journals. The chorus of voices in this collection sing confidently and fluently, proving the sonnet to be an ideal vehicle for Martin's love affair with language.
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Joseph Massey: Areas of Fog
Published
2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610521 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One needs only to watch and listen in gratitude as poems informed by Bronk, Niedecker, Olson (to name a few), and the landscape of Humboldt County, California take shape "In the room / of a memory // of a room" in Joseph Massey's first full-length collection, Areas of Fog.
"Joseph Massey sees with a composer's eye and sings in a microtonality all his own. Syllable by syllable phenomena miraculously unfold. This is fantastic work, understated, charmed, and open. The world simply happens in these poems and its moments are tuned marvels. You don't want to miss it." —Peter Gizzi
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Joseph Massey At the Point
Published
May 2011. Paperback, 103pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611665 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In At the Point, Joseph Massey's second full-length collection of poems, memory gives way to edges and angles, to "Sound heaped/on sound," to spaces that "make the shade/tangible," as words arrange a place for the actual.
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John Matthias Trigons
Published
2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611252 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trigons derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon. The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled "Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda." Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and Pages: From a Book of Years. In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said that Trigons explores the poet's "usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicist" who becomes a shadowing doppelgänger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role.
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John Matthias Who Was Cousin Alice? and Other Questions
Published
May 2011. Paperback, 370pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848611689 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both the first question posed in the title about American poet John Matthias' early family memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and critical essays, a large number of others. These range from a search for some answers about his wife's British family in 'Kedging in "Kedging in Time",' to memoirs inquiring into 'Poetry and Insomnia,' 'Poetry and Murder,' and the literary imaginations of 'Grand Old Dirty Old Men' (J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, among others), an examination of erotic writing of the old and aging as a manifestation of "late style." Specifically literary essays include considerations of W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Roy Fisher, Paul Muldoon, John Berryman, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Michael Anania, and 'British Poetry at Y2K.' In this hybrid mix of genres—including both very recent work and a selection of pieces culled from the last twenty-five years—Matthias has added a number of poems that enter into a dialogue with his essays and memoirs.
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John Matthias Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2
Published
November 2011. Paperback, 2824pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611801 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is the first volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting all the poems of John Mattthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this initial release in the year that the poet turns 70, these books will bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both sides of the Atlantic need to know better.
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Sophie Mayer: Her Various Scalpels
Published
2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610408 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems usher you into an intimate cinema where Gertrude Stein kisses Patti Smith. Where a bird steps through the screen and becomes a girl, where a girl moulds a cock and becomes a city, where a city striated with cinema becomes a glacier, where a glacier sits in the red velvet seats and sees herself as a star. In her mind imagined films take flight, cast from salt and swans. Stepping out of the darkness, she trips into blackouts over lines scratched into celluloid. Wrought as and from fragments—coinages, echoes, attitudes, glimpses—these poems collage new ways (or waves) of seeing.
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Becka Mara McKay A Meteorologist in the Promised Land
Published
2010. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610835 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In these poems, the reader carries her "lone heartbeat" while sifting through the confusion of a psychically, physically rubbled world. There is loss, transcribed literally as spaces in the poems, because in truth there is no "word-/for-word translation." But in this stark landscape there is the "body's strange persistence"; there are meanings made and held close, words collected "in secret". Language equals transcendence and the bridge on which all other things are built: "tell me// your name."
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.Deborah Meadows: involutia
Published
2007. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700196 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Deborah Meadows' fourth collection is a rigorous and spellbinding series of poems: innovative, experimental, and featuring such unexpected collisions as Luce Irigaray & Gilles Deleuze encountering zen philosophy.
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Deborah Meadows: Goodbye Tissues
Published
2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610132 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"From Anglo-Saxon diphthongs to that mysterious three-dimensional mirrored state of being, the enantiomorph, from Aquinas to Hölderlin to California, Deborah Meadows takes us on a journey through the tissues of memory and the patchwork of images that make up our contemporary world of learning, consuming and creating." — John Tranter
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Victor Manuel Mendiola: Selected Poems
Published
2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700899 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Translated by Ruth Fainlight, Jennifer Clement and others.
This is the first collection in the UK for Mexican poet Victor Manuel Mendiola, although his work has been appearing in small-press editions, in others' collections and in journals for some time. His collected poems Tan oro y ogro (1987–2002) (UNAM, Mexico City) won New York's Premio Latino de Literatura (Latino Literature Prize) in 2005. This Selected shows the full range of his work, but begins with his astonishing erotic long poem 'Tu Mano Mi Boca' (Your Hand, My Mouth), which was so well received in Ruth Fainlight's translation when it was included in her latest collection of poems.
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George Messo (ed): Ikinci Yeni — The Turkish Avant-Garde
Published
2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $20.00
ISBN 9781848610668 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In the mid-1950s a small but energetic group of young Turkish poets exploded
into creative life. Their vivid, cosmopolitan experimentalism sent shock
waves through the literary establishment. They became known as the Ikinci
Yeni (The Second New). Inspired by surrealism and the contemporary European
avant-garde, their influence was widespread and lasting—Turkish poetry
would never be the same again.
In this unique anthology George Messo introduces broad selections from five
of the leading Ikinci Yeni poets: Ece Ayhan, Ilhan Berk, Edip Cansever,
Cemal Süreya and Turgut Uyar.
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George Messo: Entrances
Published
2006. Paperback 8x5ins, 83pp, £8.95
/ $15.
ISBN 9780907562900 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The author's second collection, Entrances is a remarkable follow-up to the
highly-praised debut collection, From the Pine Observatory. As Peter Didsbury
says of it: "It seems to me that Messo is somehow bringing a whole region
and set of cultures back into the European sphere. Any book which so beautifully
invents for us the Choruh River and eleventh-centry Georgia is OK by me."
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George Messo: Hearing Still
Published
2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610224 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Middle East, both real and imagined, forms the background against which George Messo's third collection, Hearing Still, shapes its recurring themes: silence, destruction, resistance, and endurance. The poems are, at times, as sparse as the landscapes they inhabit; fragile breaths quivering at the edge of worlds driven by catastrophe and restored by human dignity. Ranging through Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, to the gravel deserts of Oman, and the desolate coastal plains of the Arabian Gulf, Messo's uniquely strange and illusive vision is at once mysterious and distressing.
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Christopher Middleton: Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal
Published
2004. Paperback, 151pp, 9x6ins. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562511 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Christopher Middleton is one of the finest living British poets and this volume presents the voice of the man behind a remarkable body of work, firstly talking to poet Marius Kociejowski, and then talking to himself – 18 months' worth of journal entries from the late 1990s, in which he muses on matters poetic, social, political. The book also includes an essay-memoir by Marius Kociejowski that traces the growth of his fascination with Middleton's art.
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Christopher Middleton Poems 2006-2009
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 182pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611276 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Christopher Middleton remains, in his eighties, a restless and inventive poet of the very first order. This volume contains three complete collections, and is the first to be published since the author's Collected Poems were published to considerable acclaim in 2008.
"Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years." —August Kleinzahler, Threepenny Review
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David Miller: The Waters of Marah. Selected Prose 1973-1995
Published
2005. Paperback, 113pp, 8.5x 5.5ins. £8.95. Not
for sale in North America.
ISBN 9780907562665
The Waters of Marah brings together the best of David Miller's non-poetic output. The prose here however does include work that would be classified as prose-poetry in most quarters, as well as the longer work Tesserae which could be better described as experimental fiction. These pieces tend also to have verse interludes, which further confuses the definition of what category they actually belong to. In the end however, categories are irrelevant, and the work can be read on its own terms, be it prose, be it prose-poetry, be it fiction, be it poetry. This is musical work that explores the parameters of the sayable in a manner that does not repel the reader but rather draws him/her in as a participant in a remarkable enterprise.
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Billy Mills: Five Easy Pieces
Published 1997. A5 Paperback, 32pp. £4.50.
ISBN 9780907562221
Five Easy Pieces provides a very accessible opening into Mills' work, with all of his main themes and devices present: the found text, the expressive use of space on the page, the landscape as source and record, the personal lyric . . . (Randolph Healy, Orbis). THis book has since been reprinted in the author's Collected (see below).
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Billy Mills: Lares / Manes — Collected Poems
Published
2009. Paperback, 360pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848610460 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. After spending some time in Spain and the UK, he now lives and works in the mid-west of Ireland. This collection brings together his seven previously published volumes, which have been revised and corrected, plus a selection of newer, previously uncollected work.
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John Muckle London Brakes— a novel
Published
2010. Paperback, 296pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611016 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes—a motorcycle courier on a big bike, picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits—the answer to every question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London town. Set in the 1980s, London Brakes shows us an England of conflicting loyalties and low impostures—a city divided by inequality and opportunism: a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life.
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John Muckle: Firewriting and other poems
Published
2005. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins. £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9780907562641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This first collection of John Muckle's poetry, written 1998-2004, begins with a sequence about working in Care Homes, continues with poems whose literary subject matter ranges from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Coleridge and Philip K. Dick, reflections on life, love and politics, and closes with 'Firewriting', a long poem which imagines that German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin managed to escape over the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 and has ended up in contemporary London.
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