Fernando Pessoa: Message Click on book covers for more information, where available.
Translated
from Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin
Published 2007. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700271
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
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. For further Pessoa titles, published in 2008, see details here.
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Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Translated
from Portuguese by Chris Daniels
Published 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 196pp, £12.95
/ $20
ISBN 9781905700257
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.
Boris Poplavsky: Flags
Translated
by Belinda Cooke & Richard McKane
Published 2009. Paperback, ca.142pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610606
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.
Ilma Rakusa: A Farewell to Everything
Translated
from German by Andrew Shields & Andrew Winnard
Published 2005. Paperback, 100pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562771
A Farewell to Everything is a translation of the author's 1997 German collection Ein Strich durch alles (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main): ninety nine-line poems written over a one-year period. The book is made available thanks to a translation grant from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Culture Foundation. Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. She lives in Zürich.
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Tessa Ransford (ed/trans): The Nightingale Question: 5 Poets from Saxony
Published
2004. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562528
In the 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns travelled to Leipzig as part of a Scottish Arts Council travel award. While there, Tessa investigated the local poetry scene and translated 5 poets based in Saxony: one in Weimar, one near Dresden and three from Leipzig itself. Joyce sketched portarits of each of the writers and made the portrait photographs that grace the cover of the book. The poets included are Wulf Kirsten. Uta Mauersberger, Andreas Reimann, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Elmar Schenkel and Tessa Ransford herself.
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Claudio Rodríguez: Collected Poems
Translated
by Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith
Published 2008. Paperback, 416pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781848610095
The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodríguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (who was responsible for the Shearsman editions of Rosalía de Castro, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and César Vallejo) and Luís Ingelmo (who worked on the Bécquer edition with Michael Smith and wrote the introduction and notes for that volume, this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, but major literary figure. Perhaps the most important of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodríguez's work deserves to be better-known in the anglophone world.
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Mercedes Roffé: Like the Rains Come — Selected Poems 1987-2006
Translated
from Spanish 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.
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Lutz Seiler: In the year one – Selected Poems
Translated
from 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).
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Michael Smith: Maldon, & Other Translations
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. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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Lars Amund Vaage Outside the Institution — Selected Poems
Translated
by Hanne Bramness and Frances Presley
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610750
The first collection in English by Lars Amund Vaage, one of the most significant poets and novelists of his generation in Norway.
César Vallejo: Trilce
Translated
from Spanish & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi
Published 2005. Paperback, 256pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 /
$21.
ISBN 9780907562726
Trilce is one of the great monuments of 20th-Century Hispanic poetry, as important in Hispanic letters, as The Waste Land and The Cantos in the anglophone world, and all the more amazing for having been composed in remote Peru. Full of neologisms and symbols, the book is one that needs to be re-translated often, but this is only the second version to appear in the UK, and the fourth in the USA. A fully bilingual book, the Spanish texts are based upon the very latest scholarship, and are presented with full explanatory annotations for the English-speaking reader. Apart from the canonical text of 'Trilce', the book also includes an appendix of a further eleven poems, some of which are earlier variants and some which are poems connected to the main text, which it is useful to have available as background to the canonical version of Trilce. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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César Vallejo: Complete Later Poems 1923-1938
Translated from
Spanish & edited
by Michael Smith & Valentino
Gianuzzi
Published 2005. Paperback, 420pp, 8.5x 5.5ins, £16.95 /
$28.
ISBN 9780907562733
This volume brings together all of the post-Trilce work that has been identified by the latest scholarship and included in the most recent Peruvian edition of the author's works. The Spanish texts have benefitted from a number of corrections, as compared to previous publications. The poems are presented chronologically—as far as the chronology can be ascertained—and the book offers the most complete version yet of this magnificent body of work. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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César Vallejo: The Black Heralds & Other Early Poems
Translated from
Spanish & edited
by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi
Published 2007. Paperback,
268pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $21.
ISBN 9781905700103
The completion of the Shearsman Vallejo project. Translated & edited by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. Before writing his breakthrough poem-sequence Trilce, César Vallejo published The Black Heralds, his first book of poems, in 1919. Although heavily indebted to the aesthetics of modernismo, Vallejo's early volume finds a way to escape the merely decorative, and includes poems of indubitable originality, harbingers of his later masterpieces. The most thorough volume of Vallejo's early work yet to be made available in English. Download a sample PDF from this book here.
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César Vallejo: Selected Poems
Translated
from Spanish & edited by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi
Published 2006. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562993
In September 2005, Shearsman Books published the astonishing new translations of Vallejo's Trilce and Complete Poems 1923-1938, edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. This Selected fills an important gap on the bookshelves by making available a rigorously-edited bilingual selection of Vallejo's work, which draws on the two earlier Shearsman volumes as well as a group of poems from Vallejo's first publication, The Black Heralds, itself a fascinating work which demonstrates where his astonishing art came from, and what boundaries he had to cross in order to achieve the heights marked by Trilce.
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Dirk van Bastelaere: The Last to Leave – Selected Poems
Translated
from Flemish by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons and Francis R Jones.
Published 2005. 119pp, paperback. £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562702
Dirk van Bastelaere (1960) is one of the leading poets in Flanders. He came to prominence with his award-winning first collection Vijf jaar (1984) and then published Pornschlegel en andere gedichten (1988), one of the most hotly debated collections of Flemish poetry in recent times. This volume was to win for him recognition as the most important postmodern poet in Flanders. In 2000, he published Hartswedervaren, widely regarded as his finest book to date, and for which he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize. His latest collection, Zapruder Stress, appeared in Amsterdam in 2005.
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Juan Antonio Villacañas: Selected Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Beatriz Villacañas. Edited by Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610637
Juan Antonio Villacañas (1922–2001) was one of the most significant poets in post-war Spain, and this volume—prepared with the help of the poet's daughter—is the first edition of his work to be made available in English.
Verónica Volkow: Arcana and Other Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo
Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610569
Verónica Volkow is one of Mexico’s most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence Arcana, with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics to give an overview of this remarkable poet’s oeuvre.
Yang Lian: Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Published
2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700912
Translated by Brian Holton
Riding Pisces brings together a number of hard-to-find and uncollected texts from almost the full extent of Yang Lian's career: from Masks and Crocodiles (Sydney, 1990—although the translations here are new), from the out-of-print collection Non-Person Singular (London, 1994), from Notes of a Blissful Ghost, published in Hong Kong in 2002, from the Sailor's Home six-handed anthology (Shearsman Books, 2005), and from the as-yet uncollected Dark Blue Verses. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
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Yang Lian (ed.): Sailor's Home
Published
2005. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9780907562863
A Sailor's Home suggests many years of travel, cross-cultural contacts, a place of rest after too much time spent on the high seas. This particular Sailor's Home is a record of a private poetry festival held in London in October 2005 at which six poets came together with a group of invited guests to read and discuss one other's work. This miscellany of the work written for the occasion is presented in the original languages and in English translation.
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