Joseph Massey: Areas of Fog Click on cover images for more information
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610521 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
One needs only to watch and listen in gratitude as poems informed by Bronk, Niedecker, Olson (to name a few), and the landscape of Humboldt County, California take shape "In the room / of a memory // of a room" in Joseph Massey's first full-length collection, Areas of Fog.
"Joseph Massey sees with a composer's eye and sings in a microtonality all his own. Syllable by syllable phenomena miraculously unfold. This is fantastic work, understated, charmed, and open. The world simply happens in these poems and its moments are tuned marvels. You don't want to miss it." —Peter Gizzi
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Sophie Mayer: Her Various Scalpels
Published
May 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610408 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
These poems usher you into an intimate cinema where Gertrude Stein kisses Patti Smith. Where a bird steps through the screen and becomes a girl, where a girl moulds a cock and becomes a city, where a city striated with cinema becomes a glacier, where a glacier sits in the red velvet seats and sees herself as a star. In her mind imagined films take flight, cast from salt and swans. Stepping out of the darkness, she trips into blackouts over lines scratched into celluloid. Wrought as and from fragments—coinages, echoes, attitudes, glimpses—these poems collage new ways (or waves) of seeing.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Deborah Meadows: Goodbye Tissues
Published
January 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610132 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"From Anglo-Saxon diphthongs to that mysterious three-dimensional mirrored state of being, the enantiomorph, from Aquinas to Hölderlin to California, Deborah Meadows takes us on a journey through the tissues of memory and the patchwork of images that make up our contemporary world of learning, consuming and creating." —John Tranter
Order from the Shearsman online store
George Messo: Hearing Still
Published
June 2009. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610224 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The Middle East, both real and imagined, forms the background against which George Messo's third collection, Hearing Still, shapes its recurring themes: silence, destruction, resistance, and endurance. The poems are, at times, as sparse as the landscapes they inhabit; fragile breaths quivering at the edge of worlds driven by catastrophe and restored by human dignity. Ranging through Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, to the gravel deserts of Oman, and the desolate coastal plains of the Arabian Gulf, Messo's uniquely strange and illusive vision is at once mysterious and distressing.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
George Messo (ed): Ikinci Yeni — The Turkish Avant-Garde
Published
November 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $20.00
ISBN 9781848610668 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
In the mid-1950s a small but energetic group of young Turkish poets exploded
into creative life. Their vivid, cosmopolitan experimentalism sent shock
waves through the literary establishment. They became known as the Ikinci
Yeni (The Second New). Inspired by surrealism and the contemporary
European avant-garde, their influence was widespread and lasting—Turkish
poetry would never be the same again.
In this unique anthology George Messo
introduces broad selections from five of the leading Ikinci Yeni poets:
Ece Ayhan, Ilhan Berk, Edip Cansever, Cemal Süreya and Turgut Uyar.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Billy Mills: Lares / Manes — Collected Poems
Published
July 2009. Paperback, 360pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £13.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848610460 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. After spending some time in Spain and the UK, he now lives and works in the mid-west of Ireland. This collection brings together his seven previously published volumes, which have been revised and corrected, plus a selection of newer, previously uncollected work.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Chus Pato: m-Talá
Translated
by Erín Moure
Published March 2009. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp, £9.95
/ $17
ISBN 9781848610453 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
In 2000 in Galicia, in a maelstrom of rupture from her previous poetics, well-known poet Chus Pato gave readers a startling new book that instantly demarcated the literary landscape. This book was a reverberative crescendo, a roar and clamour of genres and fictions for the multipled "I" in a time of unspeakable catastrophes: m-Talá.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Christian Peet: Big American Trip
Published
March 2009. Paperback, 80p, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610156 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Assuming the form of postcards authored by an "alien" of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, et al), Big American Trip is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice behind these texts is at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Fernando Pessoa: The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 2, 1928–1935
Translated
by Chris Daniels
Published August 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 196pp, £12.95 /
$20
ISBN 9781905700257 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Álvaro de Campos, along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro is one of Pessoa's most important poetic heteronyms and, like these fellow fictitious poets, made his first appearance in 1914. He was also something of a public figure, his essays and reviews frequently appearing in Portuguese periodicals. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in the Algarve in 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, was widely travelled, and lived for a number of years in England, working as an engineer. In later life he returned to live in Lisbon. His poetry, especially the earlier work, celebrates the modern world and the machine age, and marks the eruption of futurism into Portuguese poetry.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Peter Philpott: Are we not drawn . . .
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610248 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Are We Not Drawn . . . takes off from a palindrome quoted in Anne Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces: "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?" Drawn onward; but trapped in repetition and mirroring. The mirrors are now fractured: each line breaks under the strain, as voices and images pour in. Verbal repetitions, starting with the words of the palindrome, give some sorts of paths through, continually evolving and shifting. A work of naïve realism, then, capable of recording how gardenias, Inca mummies and the iron mines of West Somerset determine our days. Just listen to what you are being told . . . Order from the Shearsman online store.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Boris Poplavsky: Flags
Translated
by Belinda Cooke & Richard McKane
Published November 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610606 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Flags was the only volume of poetry published by the Russian emigré poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935) during his own lifetime. A significant Surrealist volume, it is one of the "lost" creations of a man who has been called the greatest of the Russian emigré poets. Now recovered by Russian literary experts and re-edited for a new public, Poplavsky is gaining the readership that eluded him in his lifetime. Unusually, this book presents the complete contents of the original volume (Paris, 1933), rather than presenting a Selected or some other overview, and thus opens a window onto a fascinating and unfairly neglected figure.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Frances Presley: Lines of Sight
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610392 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Frances Presley's Lines of sight brings together
all her poems from 'Stone settings and longstones', a sequence framed by
the Neolithic stone monuments on Exmoor. The poems reflect the fragile,
elusive and even disputed existence of these sites, as well as the enduring
landscape which surrounds them. They reveal, too, more recent layers of
history, and the creation of new stone settings. The writings of a local
woman archaeologist are also a source of rediscovery and radical realignment.
This sequence is part of a collaboration and performance with Tilla Brading.
Other monuments are engaged with in 'Female figures'.
These are the rare statues of women in public spaces. The figures chosen are
Queen Anne, Margaret Thatcher and Julian of Norwich, along with the spaces
they overlook. The final poetic sequence 'The first book of her life', includes
a meditation on the war experiences of Frances Presley's mother, and creatively
rereads an old Dutch dictionary and primer, in a search for origins of identity
and language.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Jeremy Reed: Bona Drag
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610552 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Bona Drag, a rich, brilliantly inventive collection of poems covering every detail of the poet's obsessive life, from the colour of Posh Spice's heels, to London street encounters, underworld friends, urban survival tactics, neuroscientific concepts and extraterrestrials, more than confirms J.G. Ballard's assessment of Reed, as "the most gifted poet working today, an extraordinary talent."
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Peter Riley: Greek Passages
Published
July 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 8x5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610514 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Greek Passages is a set of 105 prose-poems derived from four sojourns in Greece, mostly in the vicinity of Argos and thus at the hub of early Greek power. The structure is entirely diurnal, building each poem from the day's events, so that cognizance of monumental historical figures and events infiltrate from outside into notes of fauna, ruins, the news, books about Greece or not, American music listened to, pleasant dinners, dreams of northern England etcetera. Two shorter stays on the west coast of the Peloponnese furnish beginning and ending sections of a gentler, more lyrical cast, and there are interruptive excursions, mostly to the remains of cities and wars. Everywhere what is presented to the eyes is the starting-point for a poetical process creating lenses in location and sense.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.
Peter Robinson: Spirits of the Stair — Selected Aphorisms
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610620 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader, 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling chilled by global warming, and hot under the collar, the poet found no other respite than to reach for his notebooks. What came from them were wrung-out dishcloths and acupuncturists' needles, sound bites that chew on what they eschew, salves for old saws, and less-is-more morsels which were promptly anthologized in The Boodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007). Now, five years further, in this volume Robinson's enlarged and extended reflections look out on the world and see a wounded head bandaged in clouds. These words that didn't come to mind when occasion demanded, words that were the right thing to say when the moment had passed, now reach us with a timely lateness that appears, for all that, to be just what we were waiting for.
Order from the Shearsman Books online store.