Tamara Fulcher: The Recreation of Night Click on covers for more information.
Published
February 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700585 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
A first collection by Edinburgh-based Tamara Fulcher, winner of the 2006 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize.
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Anna Glazova: Twice under the Sun
Translated
by Anna Khasin
Published October 2008. Paperback, ca. 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95
/ $15
ISBN 9781905700929 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Twice under the Sun presents a cross-section of Anna Glazova's work from the past seven years, spectacularly translated — with the author's assistance — by Anna Khasin. The book is Ms Glazova's first book-length publication in English.
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Mark Goodwin: Else
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700974 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
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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Anne Gorrick: Kyotologic: The Pillow Book
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610040 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Anne Gorrick's first collection is a remarkable reworking of themes from the ancient Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
"A densely beautiful book, young poems growing out of old poems, vines round an ancient pine. Imagine language talking to itself, all skin and rain and blossoms, scattering like leaves, seeming to remember some other country some other time—yet always being vividly present like a strange food you've taken into your mouth that's too sweet—but after a moment, just barely sweet enough, as we get to like this world Gorrick has incarnated for us here, safe in our deepest feelings." (Robert Kelly)
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Robert Hampson: Seaport
Published
November 2008. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 88pp, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781848610293 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Seaport deals with many aspects of the history
and development of Liverpool, drawing on a wide range of documentary sources,
and culminating with a vivid account of what the national press called
the 'Toxteth Riots' of 1981. This event is seen in the context of the repressive
policing methods of the day, especially as directed at black youths . .
. [and] . . . in the historical context of Liverpool's notorious role in
the slave trade, and of subsequent patterns of racial discrimination .
. .
(from Peter Barry's Introduction to this volume)
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Martin Harrison: Wild Bees — New and Selected Poems
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610088 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Subtle and sharply lyrical, these poems shimmer on the eye while being
deeply held at the back of the mind.
Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting
place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment
and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own
re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems
from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin
Harrison's Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems marks
a place of arrival and a new departure.
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Lee Harwood: Selected Poems
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700936 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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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 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
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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Anthony Hawley: Forget Reading
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700707 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
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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Brandi Homan: Hard Reds
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700813 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
A first collection for Chicago-based poet and small-press publisher, Brandi
Homan.
"Like the stream of cut-paper hearts in her Valentine Factory, Brandi
Homan's poems are connected 'at the blade's edge,' are all 'hard reds'—an
intelligent and imaginative woman coming to terms with desire. This collection
is an exciting 'kick-start' for her electric voice." — David
Trinidad
"These poems are Valentines drenched in gasoline; they'll make you forget 'how to breathe without burning.'"— Simone Muench
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Judith Infante: Love: A Suspect Form — Heloise and Abelard
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781905700820 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Heloise and Abelard
— Since the 12th century writers, artists, and musicians have been
inspired by the details of their story—famous philosopher and his
pupil, forbidden love affair, abandoned son, castration, monastic life,
and heresy trials.
In this remarkable collection
Judith Infante gives us a series of poems that form a verse novel about
the medieval lovers. The poems make clear how bound was their relationship
to its period, yet capture the intensity of their timeless and conflicting
emotions.
Heloise and Abelard became
different people as their story moved from romance to life apart and finally
to their individual deaths and the mysterious change that implies. By interweaving
Ovid's myth of Atalanta with the story of Heloise and Abelard, Love:
A Suspect Form calls attention to the many and often disorienting
aspects we present to each other.
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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.
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Kent Johnson: Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781905700950 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Homage contains a wide variety of poems and prose, representing all strands of Johnson's work: versions from the Greek, traduced to an extraordinary degree; anti-war poems, overflowing with rage; stink-bombs tossed in the direction of some famous poets, mostly meant in an ironic, joshing way. But not all. And then there are memoir poems of persons met and places visited, that may well be documentary in nature, or may also be artfully disguised. Memory is, after all, an awkward thing, and not to be trusted, just as politicians and their henchmen are not and there is no irony in their treatment in this book. No, sir, none at all.
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Trevor Joyce: Courts of Air and Earth
Published
November 2008. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 96pp, £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9780907562955 Shortlisted for the 2009 Cornelis
M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, awarded by the Poetry
Society of Great Britain and The Ratiu Foundation. [Download a PDF
sampler from this book here.]
This volume extracts the author's remarkable translation of the epic 'Sweeny Peregrine' from the above volume and offers it together with a large group of other versions from the Old and Middle Irish, thus offering Anglophone readers a glimpse of some very unusual verse that rarely sees the light of day outside academic volumes, while also transposing it into a form that will seem familiar to readers of Joyce's own work.
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Zbigniew Kotowicz: Fernando Pessoa – Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700318 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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Ira Lightman: Duetcetera
Published
November 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610118 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Duetcetera is about voices taking each other for granted, saying "etc etc" and not listening, nevertheless turning out to duet. It contains double- and multi-columned poems, where each column can be read in its own right (or left), and also read across the columns. Most of the poems (and translations) were written separately from each other, but happen to fit together. The themes of the collection range from celebration of marriage and fatherhood, to the feeling of being in a Quaker congregation wherever you go. The book ends on an extended sequence written half in the voice of a six-year-old boy, and half as a set of statements about what's influencing the language and ideas of the overall book.
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Rupert M Loydell: An Experiment in Navigation
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 172pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781905700943 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
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)
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Jill Magi: Torchwood
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700547 Download
a sample from this book to your desktop.
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.
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Mai Cheng: Selected Poems
Published
March 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700882 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
A bilingual (English & Chinese) collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is his first collection to be made available in translation.
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Phil Maillard: Sweet Dust & Growling Lambs
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700837 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"Looking at this collection, Sweet Dust And Growling Lambs, I think I can perceive a few recurrent themes. The first relates to mythology, in a broad, story-telling kind of fashion. Of recent years, 'myths' have been regarded as universal, because archetypal, repositories of human experience. From there, it's a short step to the idea of 'fusion', of combining elements from different cultures in a single work. This is most familiar in music. In my poem The 'Confession' Of Gerald, for example, the Celtic story of Elidorus and his meeting with the fairy folk is developed by way of a Buddhist teaching story." (Phil Maillard)
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