Lady Fanshawe: Memoirs

Example content image400kb, 8.5x5.5ins, 178pp, published online in June 2008.
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Made available as a supporting document for our recent anthology Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age, in which many of the translations were by Sir Richard Fanshawe, whose wife wrote this charming memoir after his death, as an instructive volume for their son. The book sheds light on how it was to be a senior diplomat (and the wife of one) in the mid-17th century, and Sir Richard was a very senior diplomat indeed, as Ambassador first to Lisbon (where he negotiated the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza), abd later to Madrid.

 

Ken Edwards: Chaconne

Example content image188kb, 6x6ins, 56pp, published online in May 2007.
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A long sequence of 5-line poems that are variations on musical themes, taking off from the form of Bach's Chaconne, while splicing elements of Coltrane and medieval music.

 

Geoffrey Squires: So

Example content image224kb, 4.5x6ins, 63pp, published online in May 2007.
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Another spare text by Geoffrey Squires, pendant in some ways to Lines (see below), in which a very few words, their position and a lot of white space allow contemplative reverberations to occur.

 

Rodney Nelson: Swede Poems

Example content image103kb, 6x5ins, 38pp, published online in June 2007.
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The Swede Poems are selections from a much longer work, Stranger Kin, found material and composed lyrics interweaving over a Scandinavian background.

 

Carlos T. Blackburn: Portraits

Example content image290kb, 6x6ins, 30pp, published online in July 2006.
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Carlos T. Blackburn's penetrating Portraits sequence is based on his work in a care home.

 

 

Geoffrey Squires: Lines

Example content image268kb, 5x6ins, 92pp, published online in June 2006.
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Geoffrey Squires' latest poem is a very spare text, consisting often of no more than one line per page. A poem that strains after the unsayable, that seeks meaning in the corners of language and in the echoes and repetitions of phrases, the text builds up slowly and insistently, challenging the reader's receptivity. To be read in single-page mode.

 

Gautam Verma: Tombs

Example content image156kb, 5x5ins, 44pp, published online in June 2006.
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Gautam Verma's second e-book with Shearsman is a long, spare, meditative work that revolves around death and its aftermath.

 

Gautam Verma: In Ladakh — A Poem

Example content image364kb, A5 format, 18pp, published online in May 2005.
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Gautam Verma, originally from India, now lives in Piacenza, Italy following the completion of his PhD in English at the University of Denver. His work has also appeared in Drunken Boat, Slant Review, Segue, Diagram, Folio, Free-Verse, and Art Times among others.

In Ladakh is a narrative poem of a journey in the Himalayas. Cover photo of crows at Lamayuru by the author.

 

Stephen Vincent: Triggers

Example content image80kb, A5 format, 40pp, published online in May 2005.
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Stephen Vincent lives in San Francisco. His most recent books include Walking (Junction Press), A Walk Toward Spicer (Cherry On the Top Press), and Sleeping With Sappho (faux ebooks). His blog of poetry, commentary and politics is found here.

 

 

Anne-Marie Albiach: Flammigère and The line . . . the loss

Translated by Peter RileyExample content image

112kb, A5 format, 27pp, published in print form February 2004, and online in January 2005.
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Anne-Marie Albiach is one of France's leading avant-garde poets. Although much of her work has been translated and published in the USA, little has been available in Britain. This chapbook unites two texts from very early and very recently in her career: Flammigère was her first book, a long poem published in 1967 as a limited edition by Siècle à Mains in London, where she was then living; 'La ligne ... la perte' appeared in 1999 in a festschrift volume dedicated to fellow poet Claude Royet-Journoud and has since been collected in the volume Figurations de l'image (Flammarion, Paris, 2004). Flammigère has never been collected in any of Ms. Albiach's French volumes and she has always declined permission for its republication. She has however permitted an Italian translation and, now, an English translation and Shearsman Books is grateful for her permission to bring these two poems together.

Robert Sheppard: The Anti-Orpheus: a notebook

Example content image100kb, A5 format, 18pp, published in print form February 2004, and online in January 2005.
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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.

 

Mark Weiss: Different Birds

Example content image248kb, 7x7ins, 44pp, published August 2004

Different Birds is a long poem that records the American author's encounter with Australia in 2003. Different birds, indeed . . .

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M T C Cronin: Talking to Neruda's Questions

Example content image(172kb, 7x6ins, 78pp, published July 2004)

First published in 2001 by Vagabond Press in Australia, Talking to Neruda's Questions is M T C Cronin's response to Pablo Neruda's final book, The Book of Questions (El Libro de las preguntas). Also available for download here is a separate PDF (70kb) containing the author's introductory essay to this project.

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Richard Burns: Avebury

Example content image(268kb, 9x6ins, 32pp, published September 2003)

First published in 1972 by Anvil Press, London, Avebury is a major poem-sequence of its time, and was made available here for the first time in many years, before its re-release in the author's For the Living: Selected Longer Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004).

Click on the image on the right to download the PDF now.

 

David Giannini: Others' Lines (Second Series)

Example content image(68kb, 8x5ins, 36pp, published September 2003)

A collection of poems that the author terms 'collage-haiku'. Collage, in that each three-line poem consists entirely of lines by other poets. (A full index of the sources is also provided, and you'll find the juxtapositions extraordinary.)

 

 

 

Michael Ayres: Recent Poems

Example content image(268kb, A5, 80pp, published July 2003)

Made available in connection with the special feature in the Shearsman Gallery, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, this e-book is 80 pages long and contains poems written since the completion of the author's second collection, a.m. (Salt, 2003). If you prefer to read this on-screen, rather than download, click here.

 

 

Michael Ayres: Dustless. An excerpt from Chapter 3, 'The Riders'.

Example content image(136kb, A5, 36pp, published July 2003)

Made available in connection with the special feature in the Shearsman Gallery, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, this e-book is 36 pages long and contains part of a chapter from Dustless, the author's fantasy-novel-in-progress, plus an afterword explaining the Dustless project. Please note that this text is a working draft rather than a finished text.

 

 

Michael Ayres: What Ariel Did Next. Poems from 'Dash'.

Example content image(296kb, A5, 45pp, published May 2003)

Made available in connection with the special feature in the Shearsman Gallery, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, this e-book is 45pp long and consists of poems from an abandoned book project from the mid-1990s, between the author's two major collections. This e-book includes 17 poems and a 4-page afterword in which the author discusses the project andthe nature of his work at the time.

 

 

John Muckle: Firewriting

Example content image(136kb, A5, 22pp, published February 2003)

Contains the entire text of the long poem featured in the Shearsman Gallery series. Firewriting imagines that the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin escaped death by his own hand on the French-Spanish border in 1940 – his revolver misfired – and has survived as a kind of wanderer and witness. After the war he returned to Paris, but later moved to London where, in the now of the poem at the age of 120, he is recalling some of his ideas – and confessing – to a nurse, whom he imagines might also be a student of his work. Click on the image on the left to download the PDF now. Please note that the version of Firewriting presented here is an earlier draft of the text which has since appeared in the author's first Shearsman collection Firewriting & other poems (2005).

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