Kristy Odelius: Strange Trades Click on covers for more information.
Published
2008. Paperback, 88p, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700844 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Strange Trades blends performances of language, verbal play, and narrative fragmentation with more conventional lyric approaches. Exploring the ways that sense is led or revealed via sound-texture, the collection frequently addresses the intellectual, domestic, and perception-based experiences of women. The poet Campbell McGrath has said of Odelius’s work: "In her passionate whimsy she invokes influences from Wallace Stevens to the Robert Desnos praised by her 'Virgins of Chicago', marvelous creatures who 'who work nights at Federal/Screw Products'. Deft, dry-witted, fabulistic and musical, these are poems to be savored."
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Toby Olson: Darklight
Published
2007. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700233 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
Author of ten novels (among others The Life of Jesus, Seaview and Utah) and over 20 collections of poetry (including We Are the Fire — Selected Poems, and Human Nature, both from New Directions), Toby Olson demonstrates in his new collection that the passage of time has only sharpened his narrative voice. Toby Olson is a story-teller, puckish and avuncular by turns, and this new collection will delight his many admirers.
Toby Olson divides his time between Philadelphia and Cape Cod.
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Ouyang Yu: Moon over Melbourne & other poems
Published
2005. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x 5.5ins, £9.95. Not
for sale in North America.
ISBN 9780907562856 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Moon over Melbourne is a revised edition of the author's first English-language collection, published in Australia in 1995.
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Gonca Özmen The Sea Within
Translated
from Turkish by George Messo. Bilingual edition.
Published February 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611481 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In just two short books, Gonca Özmen's startling and arresting poems have earned her an unprecedented reputation in Turkey. Her mysterious, dream-like imagery and her fresh, restless approach to language mark her as a poet of rare ambition and intelligence. In poems whose power to mourn and remember love, to celebrate and reinvent the sensuous appetites of the body, enacts a subtle, exacting beauty, Özmen's is a voice and spirit to be welcomed.
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Alasdair Paterson On the Governing of Empires
Published
2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611160 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Finding Kristallnacht in an optician's chart, flushing heresy from a Michelin guide, procuring princesses courtesy of furnishings catalogues and constructing a guided tour of Bedlam from the names of British moths, Alasdair Paterson brings a Byzantine range of techniques—cut-and-mosaic, palimpsest dialectic, diplomatic transplant and induced mutation—to a series of innocent texts, most without a prior thought of poetry in their heads, to build an indispensible vademecum for the imperially and post-imperially inclined.
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Chus Pato: Charenton
Translated
from Galician by Erín Moure
Published 2007. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700332 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Chus Pato is the leading contemporary poet in Galicia. All of her work is written in the Galician language (Galego), but contrary perhaps to one's expectations of work written in what is a minority language, and one also long-repressed, her work is avant-garde, postmodern, and reflects the author's Marxist beliefs as well as her belief in the necessity of independence for Galicia. This is a radical poetry that, despite its remote origins, can speak powerfully across borders and languages.
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Chus Pato: m-Talá
Translated
from Galician by Erín Moure
Published 2009. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp, £9.95 /
$17
ISBN 9781848610453 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
In 2000 in Galicia, in a maelstrom of rupture from her previous poetics, well-known poet Chus Pato gave readers a startling new book that instantly demarcated the literary landscape. This book was a reverberative crescendo, a roar and clamour of genres and fictions for the multipled "I" in a time of unspeakable catastrophes: m-Talá.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.Chus Pato Hordes of Writing
Translated
from Galician by Erín Moure.
Published June 2011. Paperback,90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611672 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There was death and death entered love; writing mutated. Even so, when the poem writes itself, it is loyal only to its own wound; this is its law of gravity. Hordes of Writing, the third book in a projected pentalogy, "Method", is an essential book from one of the most abysmal, mutant, indispensable and rupturist contemporary European poets.
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Christian Peet: Big American Trip
Published
2009. Paperback, 80p, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610156 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Assuming the form of postcards authored by an "alien" of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, et al), Big American Trip is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice behind these texts is at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.Simon Perchik: Mr Lucky
Published 1984. A5 centre-stapled, 36pp. £4.00. A few copies still
available.
ISBN 9780907562078
Since reprinted in the author's Collected Poems, Hands Collected (Pavement Saw Press).
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Omar Pérez López Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?
Translated
from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Published 2010. Paperback, 146pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611320 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Born in 1964 in Havana, Cuba, Omar Pérez is a member of the first generation to live fully under the auspices of the island's post-1959 government: children raised to envision the present and future in socially experimental terms. His second poetry collection, Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?, or Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, offered a mature, yet unusual, response to that ongoing challenge. The book was originally published by Letras Cubanas in 1998.
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Fernando Pessoa: Selected English Poems
Published
2007. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15.
ISBN 9781905700264 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Pessoa wrote a large number of poems in English, some of them in the guise of early heteronyms (such as Alexander Search and C R Anon) which prove to be fascinating precursors of the later, modernist work in Portuguese. While not the equal of the masterly Caeiro, Campos, Reis or Pessoa-himself, these poems deserve to be better known and at least available in the English-speaking world.
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Fernando Pessoa: Message
Translated from Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin
Published 2007. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700271 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Pessoa published only one collection of his Portuguese poetry during his lifetime, and then only in 1934, a year before his death: Mensagem (Message). This exquisite collection of apparently patriotic poems hides a deeply symbolic style, where famous figures from Portuguese history and national myth become symbols of the poet's life and quest. A second edition of the collection first published by Menard Press & King's College London in 1992.
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Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Translated from Portuguese by Chris Daniels
Published 2007. Paperback, 200pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781905700240 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Translated by Chris Daniels, one of the USA's leading translators of Lusophone poetry. The only integral collection of the Caeiro heteronym in English, this is accompanied by the introductory writings of Ricardo Reis and a memoir by Álvaro de Campos, two of the other major poetic heteronyms, as well as a poem by C. Pacheco, believed to be another one-off heteronym of Pessoa's.
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Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 2, 1928–1935
Translated
by Chris Daniels
Published 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 196pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700257 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Álvaro de Campos, along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro is one of Pessoa's most important poetic heteronyms and, like these fellow fictitious poets, made his first appearance in 1914. He was also something of a public figure, his essays and reviews frequently appearing in Portuguese periodicals. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in the Algarve in 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, was widely travelled, and lived for a number of years in England, working as an engineer. In later life he returned to live in Lisbon. His poetry, especially the earlier work, celebrates the modern world and the machine age, and marks the eruption of futurism into Portuguese poetry.
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Fernando Pessoa: Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See
Published
2008. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 84pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700752 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers after his death. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city — and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.Peter Philpott: Textual Possessions
Published
2004. Paperback, 9x6ins,
132pp, £9.95
/ $17.
ISBN 9780907562535 [Download a sample PDF from
this book here.]
Textual Possessions is the first large collection by Peter Philpott for many years. This volume brings together three long sequences of poems: In the Present Historic Tense, An Encounter Upon the Beach at Minehead With the Prince of This World, and On Being Voiced. Peter Philpott is editor of the online poetry journal Great Works.
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Peter Philpott: Are we not drawn . . .
Published
2009. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610248 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Are We Not Drawn . . . takes off from a palindrome quoted in Anne Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces: "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?" Drawn onward; but trapped in repetition and mirroring. The mirrors are now fractured: each line breaks under the strain, as voices and images pour in. Verbal repetitions, starting with the words of the palindrome, give some sorts of paths through, continually evolving and shifting. A work of naïve realism, then, capable of recording how gardenias, Inca mummies and the iron mines of West Somerset determine our days. Just listen to what you are being told . . .
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Boris Poplavsky: Flags
Translated
by Belinda Cooke & Richard McKane
Published 2009. Paperback, ca.142pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610606 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Flags was the only volume of poetry published by the Russian emigré poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935) during his own lifetime. A significant Surrealist volume, it is one of the "lost" creations of a man who has been called the greatest of the Russian emigré poets. Now recovered by Russian literary experts and re-edited for a new public, Poplavsky is gaining the readership that eluded him in his lifetime. Unusually, this book presents the complete contents of the original volume (Paris, 1933), rather than presenting a Selected or some other overview, and thus opens a window onto a fascinating and unfairly neglected figure.
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Frances Presley: Lines of sight
Published
2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610392 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Frances Presley's Lines of sight brings together
all her poems from 'Stone settings and longstones', a sequence framed by
the Neolithic stone monuments on Exmoor. The poems reflect the fragile, elusive
and even disputed existence of these sites, as well as the enduring landscape
which surrounds them. They reveal, too, more recent layers of history, and
the creation of new stone settings. The writings of a local woman archaeologist
are also a source of rediscovery and radical realignment. This sequence is
part of a collaboration and performance with Tilla Brading.
Other monuments are engaged with in 'Female figures'.
These are the rare statues of women in public spaces. The figures chosen are
Queen Anne, Margaret Thatcher and Julian of Norwich, along with the spaces
they overlook. The final poetic sequence 'The first book of her life', includes
a meditation on the war experiences of Frances Presley's mother, and creatively
rereads an old Dutch dictionary and primer, in a search for origins of identity
and language.
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Frances Presley: Myne: New & Selected Poems & Prose 1976-2005
Published
2006. Paperback, 9x6ins, 200pp, £11.95
/ $20.
ISBN 9780907562535 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Myne is a survey of Frances Presley's career to date, as well as a new collection of her poems. It begins with two recent cycles: the title sequence inspired by the Somerset landscape, and 'Stone Settings', which retraces the enigmatic patterns of prehistoric stones on Exmoor. Also here are the entire Somerset Letters, and Linocut, both originally published by Oasis Books, plus substantial selections from the author’s first two books, The Sex of Art and Hula Hoop.
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