Martin Anderson: Belonging Click on cover images for more information
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610378 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The poems in this latest collection by Martin Anderson are largely concerned with the nature, from both a perceptual and ontological perspective, of continuing and intrinsic identities. We belong "To nowhere/to no thing/to the shortest abridgement/of air of word/to the cruel insignia/of our acquisitions". At the heart of all that we are, of all that we think, feel, see, touch, taste and smell, are 'shadows/pulled through/a world impatient/tosound'. A world, pregnant with meaning and language, which is, finally, a 'mirror colliding/with its reflection'.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Merle Lyn Bachman: Diorama with Fleeing Figures
Published
March 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610125 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The poems in Diorama with Fleeing Figures delicately point to devastating historical events. Instead of mounting judgments, the poems accrue power gently, even stealthily. Evoking a language at once lost, familiar, original, and dying, they balance fragments of culture, with a locus of Jewish Eastern Europe, against intimate imagery of the body—"the most confused part of the forest."
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Ian Brinton (ed.): A Manner of Utterance — The Poetry of J.H. Prynne
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins
ISBN 9781848610422 (hardcover) £30.00 / $45
ISBN 9781848610439 (paperback) £12.95 / $20 [Download a PDF of the
introduction to this book here.]
A Manner of Utterance offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store (hardback). Order from the Shearsman Books online store (paperback).
Mary, Lady Chudleigh: Selected Poems
Edited
by Julie Sampson
Published September 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610484 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656–1710) was a confidante of John Dryden and a leading figure amongst the women writers of her day. In many ways a proto-feminist, Lady Chudleigh was still a provincial aristocrat and devout Protestant, and her work shows many of the apparent contradictions of the early modern era. This is the only selection of her work available in paperback, and her work deserves to be known for more than a few anthology standards.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Susan Connolly: Forest Music
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610262 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length
collection. Many poems in the book depict Susan Connolly's personal encounter
with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems
celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange
alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the
discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth
century.
Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve
a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense
of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from
left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead
of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Elsa Cross: Selected Poems
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781905700479 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Edited by Tony Frazer. Translated by Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Ruth Fainlight, John Oliver Simon, Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo.
Elsa Cross (b. 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English—a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work—ranging from the remarkable 'Bacchantes', which dates from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through 'Malabar Canto'—suffused with the spirit of India—to the odes, dithyrambs and elegies of the recent Greek-inflected works. Elsa Cross' work is typified by its strong metaphysical orientation, coupled with a dazzling surface and remarkable imagery, and offers the English-speaking reader a new experience. A poetry to be savoured, thanks to the efforts of the five translators at work here, all of whom worked closely with the author to bring these poems successfully across the language barrier.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Claire Crowther: The Clockwork Gift
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610323 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The Clockwork Gift is Claire Crowther's second collection. The poems here continue the lyrical and reflective voice of her first collection, Stretch of Closures, and examine the place of older women in contemporary culture. Claire Crowther combines a control of rhetoric with myth-making skill and these poems include striking new figures such as the yellow-furred thike and its human cousin, or the countrywoman who answers the call of Maleficence. This is also the landscape of looking back; memory is a faculty idolised in our time and shown here to be as fragile as the stuff of grandmother's dresses yet tough enough to bond complex human relationships.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Laurie Duggan: Crab & Winkle
Published
February 2009. Paperback, 164pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610491 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Crab & Winkle is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Andrew Duncan: The Council of Heresy —A primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $27
ISBN 9781848610071 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen 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.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
George Economou: Ananios of Kleitor
Published
in March 2009. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 978184860330 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Ananios of Kleitor introduces to the revolving stage of world literature the work of an ancient Greek poet largely unknown and hitherto unread outside of a small circle of cognoscenti. The poet's extant poems and fragments, as well as the record of their reception and preservation, are presented in this one-of-a-kind book of the sort that would have appealed to Menippus of Gadara and his followers, a medley of verse and prose and a diversity of genres, ranging from the epistolary novel to scholarly annotations and an Index Nominum. Ananios and his scholars and commentators perform their work at the edge of the real world and the margins of a thoroughly historicized and critically acute context.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Ken Edwards: Songbook
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610675 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This book, spanning two decades of work, contains songs that have never been and never will be sung; anti-lyric and narrative poems for which a musical equivalent has been constructed; and text written specifically for musical purposes. The volume is completed with scores composed by Elaine Edwards of settings of three poems from Ken Edwards' earlier book eight + six.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Paul Evans: The Door of Taldir — Selected Poems
Edited
by Robert Sheppard.
Published September 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610255 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Paul Evans (1945–1991) was a significant member of the group of new radical poets that appeared in England in the late 1960s, but his work remains scattered through a number of small-press publications from 1970–1987 and is now entirely out of print. This Selected Poems redresses the situation and makes available a broad selection of Evans' work from throughout his career—a career that was cut tragically short by a climbing accident.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Ann M. Fine: A Nest This Size
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610699 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Ann Fine's A Nest This Size is a journey embarked on via contradictory terms that occur when one attempts to explore the limitations of human (vs?) sentient abidance. Postmodern problems with things and places such as home, body, language, tradition, sleeve, machine/vehicle and rabbit hole become the relative metastructures through which these contradictions are channeled.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Keri Finlayson: Rooms
Published
May 2009.Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610347 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Keri Finlayson's first collection Rooms finds its centre in the etymology of the words camera, a chamber and stanza, a resting place. Both are forms of enclosure, of inclusion and exclusion that forge definition and force choices over the stories we want to be told and the stories we want to see. Rooms develops two intertwining narratives. In the first, the poet remembers and reimagines her grandmother as a young woman, and the family stories that surrounded her. Exploring the notions of editing and stitching, patterns and limits, it describes her seduction during the making of a silent film in Cornwall in 1919. The second concerns the history of film from the depiction of multiple movement in early cave painting, through the invention of the camera obscura, to The Jazz Singer; the first "talkie". What is a history of technology and a story of seduction and violence, is also a collection of stanza about camera, rooms about rooms.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Tony Frazer (ed.): Shearsman 79 & 80
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781848610231
The first double-issue of Shearsman for 2009 includes poetry by Michael Ayres, K.C. Clapham, Kelvin Corcoran, Sarah-Anne Cox, Jen Crawford, Catherine Hales, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Norman Jope, Helen Lopez, Alasdair Paterson, Nick Potamitis, Anna Reckin, Peter Robinson, Robert Saxton, Steve Spence, Nathan Thompson, Stefan Tobler, Alan Wall, and Tony Williams & translations of poetry by Melih Cevdet Anday & Özdemir Asaf by George Messo; Norbert Hummelt & Hendrik Jackson by Catherine Hales; Óscar Curieses by Valentino Gianuzzi; Antônio Moura by Stefan Tobler; Edoardo Sanguineti by Ian Seed.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Tony Frazer: Shearsman 81 & 82
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781848610279
The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2009 includes work by Isobel Armstrong, Linda Black, Chris Brownsword, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Mark Dickinson, Ray DiPalma, Sally Flint, Damian Furniss, Mark Goodwin, David H W Grubb, Lucy Hamilton, Lee Harwood, Sarah Hopkins, Kenny Knight, Mary Leader, Richard Makin, Deborah Meadows, Christopher Middleton, Elizabeth Treadwell, George Ttoouli, J L Williams; & translations of Elsa Cross by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo, of Günter Eich by Siriol Troup, of Niels Hav by P. K. Brask & Patrick Friesen, and of Elsa Morante by Cristina Viti.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.