Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems Click on covers for more information.
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700462
Jennifer Clement has published three collections of her work in bilingual editions in Mexico, where she was born and still lives. Although better-known outside Mexico as a novelist / prose-writer (A True Story Based on Lies, Widow Basquiat), she has been writing poetry for many years and runs the annual San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende with her sister, Barbara Sibley. This volume draws on her Mexican collections and also includes more recent work. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Peter Robinson: The Look of Goodbye
Published
January 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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Andrew Brewerton: Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty
Published
January 2008.
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15; ISBN 9781905700783
Hardcover, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95; ISBN 9781905700776
(Available in the UK only)
Raag Leaves is a sequence of poems offered the author's friend, the artist Paresh Chakraborty, one of whose works graces the cover of these two editions. The sequence of 37 short lyrics – printed on the recto pages only – demonstrates what some of us have known for some time: that Andrew Brewerton's quiet poetic voice is a powerful one, creating an ambitious new work that is very much in the modernist tradition.
Elisabeth Bletsoe: Landscape from a Dream
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700875
Landscape from a Dream is Elisabeth Bletsoe's first collection in over ten years and offers startling evidence of a powerful voice that should be better known. Very much a poet of place, Elisabeth Bletsoe fuses elements of folklore, botany, literature, myth and narrative into a poetry that at once feminist in spirit, forthright, and – to a certain extent – at odds with the prevailing British poetic styles, whether conservative or radical. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Jennifer Firestone: Holiday
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700530
While ostensibly documenting a European vacation, Holiday interrogates historical narratives and artistic representations, examining patriarchal and nepotistic political and religious connections that are repackaged into the souvenir experience. From stripped reportage to dream fragments, Holiday positions the "traveler" in a hyperconscious lens that undermines conventional notions about the meaning of a holiday. Beneath the careful recording of art, food, and guidebooks’ “most visited sites” are reverberations of war and power exposing the traveler's consumer culpability and the role of choice in demarcating and memorializing personal and historical trajectories. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Jill Magi: Torchwood
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700547
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. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Richard Deming: Let's Not Call It Consequence
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700660
In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."
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Anthony Hawley: Forget Reading
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700707
In Forget Reading, Anthony Hawley's second collection for Shearsman Books, poems speak up despite themselves, and in doing so they affirm poetry's slight, subterranean power inside a culture of overwhelming and decadent ugliness. Due to the very odds stacked against them, these beautifully moving poems enact a radical little protest, unheeded by the majority rule.
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Mercedes Roffé: Like the Rains Come — Selected Poems 1987-2006
Translated by Janet Greenberg, with the author.
Published January 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 from this book to your desktop.
David Jaffin: Thought Colors
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 325pp, A5 format, £12.50 / $20
ISBN 9781905700721. Published jointly with St-Johannis-Druckerei, Lahr,
Germany. Available from SPD in the USA, and direct from the press in the
UK.
Jaffin's collection for 2008 — the latest in his annual series of publications. One of the most prolific of poets since he returned to writikng in the late 1990s, Jaffin's fecund poetic imagination never allows his output to stray into mere repetition.
Kelvin Corcoran: Backward Turning Sea
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700684
Corcoran's first collection since his New & Selected Poems in 2004, Backward Turning Sea (i.e. the Mediterranean) shows the author deepening his engagement with Greece, both ancient and modern — but it is a place where contemporary politics can intrude, disturbing the reverie. The collection also includes a number of poems vased on the author's fascination with the paintings of the St Ives artist, Roger Hilton.
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Tamara Fulcher: The Recreation of Night
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700585
A first collection by Edinburgh-based Tamara Fulcher, winner of the 2006 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.
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Tony Frazer (ed): Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age, in contemporary English translations
Published
February 2008. Paperback,
120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700691
Some of the greatest writers of 16th and 17th century Spain are represented here, in translations from 16th and 17th century England. This was an era when translation was important for the dissemination of new styles and forms, and it gives a fascinating view of two great literatures interacting – for both were at their peak: the Spanish Golden Age stretches from roughly 1540 to 1660, and the first great era of English poetry and drama overlaps this almost exactly. Poems by Montemayor, Boscán, Garcilaso, Góngora, Quevedo, Cervantes, Argensola and Mendoza; translations by Sidney, Ayres, Fanshawe, Drummond, Stanley, Yong and Shelton. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Ilhan Berk: Madrigals
Translated
by George Messo
Published February 2008. Paperback, 104 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700738
Madrigals is a collection of poems by Turkey's leading experimental poet, an 89-year-old still at the height of his powers. With spare texts, sometimes with only a few words to a page, this collection has a powerful meditative quality, even as the words trail away into silence and the whiteness of the page.
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Avik Chanda: Footnotes
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 80 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700677
Footnotes, Avik Chanda's first collection of poetry in English, brings together his work over the past five years. In this, he has set out to explore a deeply personal emotional landscape, employing memory to create snapshots from a poetic autobiography. While some of the pieces have a purely personal emphasis, as in the title poem 'Footnotes', a breadth of allusion throughout the collection hovers on the periphery of three larger-than-life domains – Painting, Music and History, which are his chief interests. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture
Published
March 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 from this book to your desktop.
Anne Blonstein: memory's morning
Published March 2008. Paperback,
88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700769
A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Anamaría Crowe Serrano: Femispheres
Published
March 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700592
A first collection for Irish poet-translator Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Over the past two to three years her work has been appearing in magazines in Ireland, the UK and the USA, as have her translations from the Spanish and Italian.
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Mai Cheng: Selected Poems
Published
March 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700882
A bilingual (English & Chinese) collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is his first collection to be made available in translation.