John Welch: Dreaming Arrival
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 224pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $21
ISBN 9781905700561
Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, Dreaming Arrival presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question Dreaming Arrival looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
John Welch: Collected Poems
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 452pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781905700578
In 2004, Shearsman published a major collection of John Welch's work, in the shape of The Eastern Boroughs. Four years on, and we are offering a career retrospective of the author's work, running from ca. 1970 until 2008, including as-yet-uncollected work. This Collected – the latest in a series of large-scale retrospectives from Shearsman Books – will demonstrate what a number of people have already recognised – that John Welch's apparently quiet art is a powerfully communicative one. The book will be published at the same time as the Dreaming Arrival memoir (see above).
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Catherine Daly: Vauxhall
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700714
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." Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Mark Goodwin: Else
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700974
A first collection for Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1998.
“It’s thrilling to welcome a new poet into the company of our seriously exciting younger nature writers such as Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane . . . Mark Goodwin is a poet whose surround-senses are as alert as an animal’s, and whose writing is exceptionally grounded in so many of the complexities of being fully human.” (Catherine Byron)
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Rupert M Loydell: An Experiment in Navigation
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 172pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781905700943
Rupert Loydell's second Shearsman collection is another large compendium of his many-faceted experimental writing.
More than ever, Rupert Loydell's new book An Experiment in Navigation reminds me that he is a painter. By which I don't mean that his writing is primarily visual, but that he rejoices in discovering what his medium is capable of. (Jane Routh)
Loydell renders with equal deftness the plainsong of direct statement and melodious phrasal waves of speech. While he acknowledges that it is ". . . easier to map out fictions and wallow in distant clouds that deal with linear time", Loydell gives terra firma its full due. His work displays engagement with the figurative "folded pocket map". (Sheila E. Murphy) Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
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.
D.S. Marriott: Hoodoo Voodoo
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6 ins, £9.95 / $17.00
ISBN 9781905700790
D.S. Marriott's second collection, and first with Shearsman. With an introduction by Romana Huk, in which she says:
"D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book . . . by refolding beautiful
romantic lines . . . into new relation with the real that haunts him, which
he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems
do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun',
but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a
lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. Hoodoo Voodoo's last
section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes . . .
I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book." Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
Scott Thurston: Momentum
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.00
ISBN 9781905700325
Scott Thurston's second Shearsman collection consists of three long sequences of poems and marks a significant new phase in his work.
Momentum aims to recuperate what may be had of a lyric tradition refracted through a post-Language sensibility; generating, amongst other things, responses to Proust, Shelley and the experience of dancing. Change and time are intrinsic to the book's accumulative structure and the way in which the line-breaks argue with syntax attempts to show the process, the movement, of thinking in language in time: not a stream of consciousness, but rather more like a weir, a wave, or a rubble-filled alleyway. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
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.
Yang Lian: Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Published
May 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.
Du Fu: Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610002
Translated by Jonathan Waley
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. Download a sample from this book to your desktop.
Hazel Frew: Seahorses
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700615
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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Lee Harwood: Selected Poems
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700936
In 2004, Shearsman published Lee Harwood's Collected Poems, which proved what many of us had known for many years: that Harwood is one of our living masters. Four years on, and we now offer a smaller selection of his work, which will serve as an introduction for new readers, covering the period from 1965 to 2007. While the lion's share of the poems are drawn from the Collected, a few new poems are also featured.
Lee Harwood & Kelvin Corcoran: Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, Price £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610019
To accompany Lee Harwood's new Selected Poems, we offer also this book-length collection of interviews with Harwood by his long-time friend and admirer, Kelvin Corcoran — himself also a Shearsman author. An invaluable opportunity to "hear" Harwood talking about poetry and about his own work.
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Nathaniel Tarn: Avia
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 304pp, 9x6ins, Price £13.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610026
Franco-Anglo-American poet Nathaniel Tarn worked for over fifteen years on researching and writing this long poem about the fate of fighter aircraft and their pilots in 1939–45. In this most surprising departure from his usual concerns, Tarn shows Charles Lindbergh dreaming of returning to the U.S. by air, instead of by sea (as ordered), after his great 1927 New York – Paris achievement. Once again he hears voices in his cockpit. These voices tell him the story of aviation in World War Two.
Victor Manuel Mendiola: Selected Poems
Published June 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700899
Translated by Ruth Fainlight, Jennifer Clement and others.
This is the first collection in the UK for Mexican poet Victor Manuel Mendiola, although his work has been appearing in small-press editions, in others' collections and in journals for some time. His collected poems Tan oro y ogro (1987–2002) (UNAM, Mexico City) won New York's Premio Latino de Literatura (Latino Literature Prize) in 2005. This Selected shows the full range of his work, but begins with his astonishing erotic long poem 'Tu Mano Mi Boca' (Your Hand, My Mouth), which was so well received in Ruth Fainlight's translation when it was included in her latest collection of poems.
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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Stéphane Mallarmé: Sonnets
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700424
Translated by David Scott
A fully bilingual edition of Mallarmé's Sonnets, with introduction and notes designed for the undergraduate. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarmé's engagement with this particular form.
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Linda Black: Inventory
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700905
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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Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos, Vol. 2: 1923-1935
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 9x6ins. ca. 250pp / price tbc, but approx £13
/ $22.
ISBN 9781905700257. This volume
is delayed. Publication date will be confirmed as soon as possible.
Translated by Chris Daniels
This volume features Chris Daniels' versions of the latter half of Pessoa's output under the Campos heteronym. This is the largest single-volume selection of Campos' poetry in English, and will be followed in 2009 by a companion volume covering the earlier Campos poems, from 1913-1922, composed during Pessoa's Futurist and Sensationist period. The two volumes will make the complete works of this heteronym available in English for the first time.
Fernando Pessoa: Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 84pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700752
In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers after his death.
The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city – and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found.
Zbigniew Kotowicz: Fernando Pessoa – Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700318
A second, revised edition of the Menard volume from 1996, with an updated bibliography. Zbigniew Kotowicz's study of Pessoa was the first extended treatment of Pessoa's poetry in English, and it remains an important volume, offering anglophone readers a path into the complexities of the poet's work. Uniform in design with the rest of the Shearsman Pessoa series, this volume also features portrait drawings—and a cover painting—of Pessoa by the English artist Aldous Eveleigh.
Andrew Duncan: The Council of Heresy – A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $27
ISBN 9781848610071
Andrew Duncan's latest study of British contemporary poetry offers studies of some thirteen modern poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling aperçus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.