Tim Allen: Settings Click on covers for more information.
Published
November 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610064 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"I had in mind a kind of anti prose poem that would look and smell
like one but give a different taste and have a different texture. One way
of doing this was by making the conclusion of each Set flat and deflationary,
almost deliberately poor in the sense that they never approached closure,
either artificially or in actuality."
(Tim Allen)
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Ilhan Berk: Madrigals
Translated
by George Messo
Published February 2008. Paperback, 104 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700738 Download
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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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Linda Black: Inventory
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700905 Download
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Linda Black's first collection consists entirely of prose poems. The author says of the collection:" I like how the form allows for an ending that isn't an ending – I don't believe in the idea of closure; as in etching I'd want an image, fine detail, but also degrees of dark or shade with less definition, something implied, unseen, reverberating in the shadows."
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Elisabeth Bletsoe: Landscape from a Dream
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700875 Download
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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.
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Anne Blonstein: memory's morning
Published
March 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700769 Download
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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.
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Andrew Brewerton: Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty
Published
January 2008. [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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Avik Chanda: Footnotes
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 80 pp, 8x5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700677 Download
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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.
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Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700462 Download
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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.
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Kelvin Corcoran: Backward Turning Sea
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700684 Download
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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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M.T.C. Cronin & Peter Boyle: How does a man who is dead reinvent his body? The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli
Published
November 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610163 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Subtitled The Belated Love Poems of Thean Morris Caelli—a neglected 20th century poet influenced by Celan and Vallejo—this collection represents the merging of two contemporary Antipodean poets into the consciousness of a mysterious third.
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Anamaría Crowe Serrano: Femispheres
Published
March 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700592 Download
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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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Catherine Daly: Vauxhall
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700714 Download
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Vauxhall is pitched where voice and experience coincide. The poems sing and dance through heavenly mansions and real bungalows, tourist traps and museums, pharmacies and vending machines. Vauxhall is a calendar. It's an "all occasion" greeting and gift.
The Hollywood pitch for Vauxhall might have been "Marianne Moore meets Joan Jett" or "Alexander Pope goes to night school."
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Richard Deming: Let's Not Call It Consequence
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700660 Download
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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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Du Fu: Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems
Translated by Jonathan Waley
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610002 Download
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The Tang dynasty (618 – 907 AD), is celebrated as the greatest moment in Chinese poetry, a time when poetry was highly rated, and some of China's most famous poets were writing. Du Fu (712–770 AD) is widely regarded as the greatest of these. He himself wrote that he aimed to startle his readers, and in some of his more avant-garde poems he combines and contrasts images in a way that has an almost modernist feel to it. On the other hand, he also enjoyed and celebrated the simple pleasures in life, and his (apparently) lighter poems about friendship and his natural surroundings show this clearly.
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Jennifer Firestone: Holiday
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700530 Download
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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.
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Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Collected Poems
Edited
by Anthony Barnett, and co-published with Allardyce Book.
Published May 2008. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700806
A revised Collected, bringing back into print an important body of work. This volume excludes the translations that were printed in the first posthumous gathering of the poet's work, but includes some extra poems and numerous revisions that have been discovered since that publication.
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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 Download
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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 an e-book of Lady Fanshawe's Memoirs here.
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Tony Frazer (ed.): Shearsman magazine. Issue 75/76
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781905700745
The first issue of Shearsman magazine for 2008 contains new poetry by Susan Connolly, Peter Dent, Ray DiPalma, Anne Gorrick, David Greenslade, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Tom Lowenstein, D.S. Marriott, Alasdair Paterson, Julie Sampson, Nathan Shepherdson, Robert Sheppard, C.K. Stead, Janet Sutherland, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Carolyn van Langenberg and Robert Vas Dias; there are also translations of Elsa Cross and David Huerta by John Oliver Simon, of Dieter Gräf by Andrew Shields and of Leticia Luna by Toshiya Kamei.
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Tony Frazer (ed.): Shearsman magazine. Issue 77/78
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781905700868
The second double-issue of Shearsman for 2008. Contents include poetry by Astrid van Baalen, James Bell, Linda Black, Susan Connolly, Claire Crowther, Carrie Etter, Gareth Farmer, Keri Finlayson, Janice Fixter, Mark Goodwin, Lucy Hamilton, Carolyn Hart, Sarah Howe, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa,Peter Larkin, Peter Makin, Christopher Middleton, Richard Owens, Matías Serra Bradford and Scott Thurston. There are also translations of Ilhan Berk and Birhan Keskin by George Messo; of Rita Dahl by the author; of F. van Dixhoorn by Astrid van Baalen, and of Daniel Muxica by Romina Freschi & Deborah Meadows.
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Hazel Frew: Seahorses
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700615 Download
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Scottish poet Hazel Frew's first collection of poems offers tales of families, of growing up, and of the world around us, seen with uncommonly fresh eyes.
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