Stéphane Mallarmé: Sonnets Click on covers for more information.
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700424 Download
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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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D.S. Marriott: Hoodoo Voodoo
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6 ins, £9.95 / $17.00
ISBN 9781905700790 Download
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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."
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Victor Manuel Mendiola: Selected Poems
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700899 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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Kristy Odelius: Strange Trades
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 88p, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700844 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Strange Trades blends performances of language, verbal play, and narrative fragmentation with more conventional lyric approaches. Exploring the ways that sense is led or revealed via sound-texture, the collection frequently addresses the intellectual, domestic, and perception-based experiences of women. The poet Campbell McGrath has said of Odelius's work: "In her passionate whimsy she invokes influences from Wallace Stevens to the Robert Desnos praised by her 'Virgins of Chicago', marvelous creatures who 'who work nights at Federal/Screw Products'. Deft, dry-witted, fabulistic and musical, these are poems to be savored."
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Fernando Pessoa: Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See
Published
July 2008. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 84pp. £8.95 / $15.
ISBN 9781905700752 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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Peter Robinson: The Look of Goodbye
Published
January 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700455 Download
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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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Claudio Rodríguez: Collected Poems
Translated
by Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith
Published November 2008. Paperback, 416pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781848610095 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodríguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (who was responsible for the Shearsman editions of Rosalía de Castro, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and César Vallejo) and Luís Ingelmo (who worked on the Bécquer edition with Michael Smith and wrote the introduction and notes for that volume, this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, but major literary figure. Perhaps the most important of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodríguez's work deserves to be better-known in the anglophone world.
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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 Download
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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.
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Sam Sampson: Everything Talks
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700486 Download
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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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Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture
Published
March 2008.Paperback, 84 pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700851 Download
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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.
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Nathaniel Tarn: Avia
Published
June 2008. Paperback, 304pp, 9x6ins, Price £13.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610026 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
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.
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Nathan Thompson: the arboretum towards the beginning
Published
September 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610149 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Nathan Thompson mixes process and poetics with a dry wit, to produce texts that hold the reader's hand through landscapes of the tangential (with occasional diversions back to the straight and narrow). This first collection juxtaposes prose poems with more traditional verse idioms, to create a whole that can be read either as a kind of disjunct musical narrative or as a collection of free-standing associative post-lyrics.
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Scott Thurston: Momentum
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15.00
ISBN 9781905700325 Download
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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.
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Alan Wall: Alexander Pope at Twickenham
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 112p, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700998 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Accompanying Gilgamesh is Alan Wall's new collection of shorter poems and sequence, the centrepiece of which is the London section, in which the author inhabits the clothes of a number of old word masters who llived in London or its environs: Alexander Pope, of course, but also Thomas More, Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Burton, Rosenberg, Pound and others. Then, 'Lenses' deals with Alexander Topcliffe, the early astronomer, and the unlucky Marsyas also makes an appearance: the cast of characters is extensive, and each is presented with the skill of a novelist, mixed with the precision of the poet.
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Alan Wall: Gilgamesh
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781905700981 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume features two long pieces: the title work—a version & partial transposition of the Gilgamesh epic — and the mixed work in verse and prose, Jacob, originally published in the 1990s and long unavailable. In both works history, myth and the present collide. Jacob was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize when first published.
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Alan Wearne: The Lovemakers
Published
October 2008. Paperback, 688p, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $35
ISBN 9781905700967 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Centered on Australian suburbia in the 60s, 70s and 80s The Lovemakers explores the inner and outer tensions of families, friendships and society whilst charting the sleaze, mayhem and humanity that go to make a nation's life. A remarkable verse novel, this edition brings together the two prize-winning volumes published in Australia which are now out of print for a first complete edition.
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John Welch: Collected Poems
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 452pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781905700578 Download
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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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John Welch: Dreaming Arrival
Published
April 2008. Paperback, 224pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $21
ISBN 9781905700561 Download
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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.
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Yang Lian: Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Translated
by Brian Holton
Published
May 2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700912 Download
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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.
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