Peter Robinson: The Look of Goodbye Click on covers for more information, where available.
Published
2008. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700455
This is Peter Robinson's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since returning from Japan to live and work in the UK — he is now Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Peter Robinson has published some 15 volumes of verse, including a substantial Selected Poems from Carcanet Press, as well as aphorisms and prose poems, literary criticism, and translations of such poets as Luciano Erba and Vittorio Sereni. Shearsman also publish his Talk about Poetry: Conversations on the Art (2006).
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Peter Robinson: Talk about Poetry — Conversations on the Art
Published
2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9781905700042
Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years. Download a sample PDF from this book here
Mercedes Roffé: Like the Rains Come — Selected Poems 1987-2006
Translated
by Janet Greenberg, with the author.
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700554
Like the Rains Come. Selected Poems (1987-2006) is Mercedes Roffé's first book-length collection published in English. Including poems from one of her earliest books, The Lower Chamber (1983), which placed her among the most innovative Latin American poets of the 80s, as well as the series 'Mayan Definitions'—her internationally-acclaimed poems from La ópera fantasma (2006)—, Like the Rains Come introduces a broad spectrum of Roffé’s compelling and protean poetics to the English-language reader. Download a sample PDF from this book here
Sam Sampson: Everything Talks
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700486
A first book by a young New Zealand poet, whose work – experimental in form – owes much to music and to developments in American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. While consciously stretching the limits of the poem, Sampson's work remains very communicative, powerful for both ear and eye. Simultaneously published in New Zealand by Auckland University Press.
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Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture
Published
2008. Paperback, 84 pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700851
The Invention of Culture is the third full-length collection of poems by Lisa Samuels, whose second volume also appeared with Shearsman. The poems in this new collection are committed to bending forms and genres. They mix prosodic syncopation with prose staccato and floating page space, as though the page were not only paper but also skin, film, and musical score and as though language were eyes and fingers tapping out the news. And there is news here: the strained topicality of the poems is an index of imaginative vision meeting the world's insistence that it be experienced. These poems are stories without names – literary cousins, parallax histories, dreams, compound love songs and dirges – whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world. Download a sample PDF from this book here
Lisa Samuels: Paradise for Everyone
Published
2005. 96pp, paperback 9x6ins. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562672
A first UK, and second full-length US collection for this talented young American writer, who teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property in the humanities, and on critical practices.
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Maurice Scully: Tig
Published
2006. 102pp, paperback 8.5x5.5ins. £8.95 /
$15.
ISBN 9780907562962
Maurice Scully is one of Ireland's most original poets, and most unusual. All of his work over the past 25 years has been part of one enormous project, under the umbrella title Things That Happen, which is completed with the appearance of this volume, the final section of the whole work, and Sonata (the penultimate section, also published in 2006 by Reality Street Editions). A criss-crossing of languages and cultures, and the point at which the personal life of the author intersects with the public domain, Tig is an absorbing book in its own right, as well as being the summation of one of the most interesting projects in recent Irish writing.
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John Seed: New and Collected Poems
Published
2005. 156pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562634
This major retrospective volume brings back into print the author's previous four collections of verse, and adds to them a large number of uncollected poems, written between 1990 and 2004. Published simultaneously with the extraordinary Pictures from Mayhew.
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John Seed: Pictures from Mayhew – London 1850
Published
2005. 171pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £10.95 / $18.50.
ISBN 9780907562627
Every word in this book by John Seed is drawn from Henry Mayhew's writings on London, published in the Morning Chronicle from 1849 to 1850, then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, London Labour and the London Poor between December 1850 and February 1852, and then again in the four-volume work of the same title.
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John Seed: That Barrikins – Pictures from Mayhew II
Published
2007. Paperback,
160pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781905700523
The second volume of John Seed's exploration of Mayhew, recasting the voices from the original text in a Reznikoffian manner, freeing them from the confines of the narrative and thus letting usa hear the voices in a new context.
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Lutz Seiler: In the year one – Selected Poems
Translated from the German by Tony Frazer
Published in Australia, 2005, by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney; distributed
in the UK by Shearsman Books.)
Paperback, 93pp, 6.7x5.9ins. £8.00. $A20 in Australia. ISBN
9781920882112
The first book-length colection of Lutz Seiler's work in English translation, In the year one contains poems drawn from his second and third German collections: pech & blende (2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht (2003).
Spencer Selby: Twist of Address
Published
2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781605700172
Poet, artist and historian of film noir, Selby was born and raised in the Midwest of the USA but lives in Oakland, California. This volume presents his first collection of verse in some years.
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Robert Sheppard: The Anti-Orpheus – a notebook
Published 2004. A5 chapbook, centre-stapled, 16pp, £4.
ISBN 9780907562467
Robert Sheppard is well-known as a critic and a poet of a decidedly experimental bent – as exemplified by his enormous long poem Twentieth-Century Blues, many parts of which have been made available over the past decade or so. The Anti-Orpheus is a later composition which fuses his poetic and his academic concerns with poetics into one text, the whole full of humour, and of insight.
UK trade orders direct to the publisher, please. Not for sale in the USA.
Colin Simms: Otters and Martens
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562504
Otters and Martens was Simms' first major British collection in some years, and his largest-ever book, this volume unites all of his poems that concern or revolve around otters and martens, poems in which his concerns as a poet fuse with those of the naturalist that he also is. For lovers of poetry and mustelidae alike.
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Colin Simms: The American Poems
Published
2005. Paperback 9.25x7.5ins, 208pp. £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9780907562931
This volume is another retrospective edition of the work of Colin Simms, covering his North American poems and showcasing his six long poems on Amerindian themes: Rushmore Inhabitation, No Northwestern Passage, Parflèche, Missouri River Songs, A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course and Carcajou. While these poems still demonstrate the author's remarkable use of language they also show his engagement with open-field poetics, an aptly American format for the wide open spaces of the Great Plains and the all-encompassing narrative that he spins for the reader. To these long poems are added more than 50 shorter poems on connected themes, drawn from throughout the poet's career. Download a sample PDF from this book here
Colin Simms: Gyrfalcon Poems
Published
2007. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700356
This is Colin Simms' third Shearsman collection. A noted naturalist and expert on birds of prey, he collects here his poems on the subject of gyrfalcons, magnificent raptor birds that he has studied in Britain, North America, Iceland and Siberia. The book also contains some of his field drawings of the birds.
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Michael Smith: Maldon & Other Translations
Published
2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 154pp. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562603
Maldon contains translations from the Anglo-Saxon (The Battle of Maldon), the 18th-century Irish (The Death of Art O'Leary and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen) and a large selection of cantes flamencos (flamenco songs) translated from an Andalusian dialect of Spanish. Although better-known in the UK for his translations of the baroque poets Góngora and Quevedo, Michael Smith has also translated the works of Rosalía de Castro, Neruda, Lorca and Miguel Hernández.
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Michael Smith: The Purpose of the Gift – Selected Poems
Published
2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 161pp. £9.95 || $17.
ISBN 9780907562597
This volume represents a full-scale career retrospective for an Irish poet, who remains too little-known in Britain. He is the author of six previous collections, only one of which appeared in the UK. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain with Trevor Joyce. Although best-known for his translations from the Spanish, his own work should be better-known.
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Tupa Snyder: No Man's Land
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700608
No Man's Land is Tupa Snyder's first collection. Born in Calcutta, she has studied at universities in India, the United States and England. This book includes a large proportion of work presented to the University of Exeter for the award of a Ph.D., and demonstrates the arrival of a confident new voice that straddles cultural divides. Further details to come.
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