Wendy Saloman: Chrysalis in the Desert Click on cover images for more information
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610361 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
The central poem in Wendy Saloman's new collection, and from which it takes its title, is the narrative of a woman's journey through various crises in Jewish history, from biblical times to modern Israel and Palestine. The protagonist, Rachel, is 'moving through time/as fire over water/as ash on ice'. 'Rivers and Revenants', the other main poem in the book, is again concerned with roots only this time the voyage is of a more personal nature: the author draws upon her own experiences of a visit to Lithuania in order to discover her grandfather's farmstead. In both these poems, and elsewhere in her work, there is conveyed the ever present drama between otherness and unity.
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Lisa Samuels: Tomorrowland
Published
March 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 104pp, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610507 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Tomorrowland is a book-length poem of bodily transit and colonial forgetting. Its names and events perpetually arrive in a new world, whose versions here combine promised lands and historical suicide. Eula moves among these real and imagined place-times with other symbolic names and unnamed figures, and Jack plays death. The primary formal note is the interrupted iambic.
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Maurice Scully: Humming
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610590 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Humming is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since the Things That Happen project (1981–2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing
"how
to wait
what
to expect"
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Ian Seed: Anonymous Intruder
Published
January 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610286 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
The poems and prose poems in Anonymous Intruder navigate the vulnerabilities revealed in relationships, only to abandon these in a wandering search for new encounters and new truths. The seeking 'self' goes into exile to be shattered and reconstructed. In a hesitant movement towards the transcendental, the poems consider the possibility and impossibility of returning home. They must first find a way to recognise the stranger approaching from a distance. Although these narratives are fragmented and elliptical, the imagery is stark and clear, the language concise, the rhythms and patterns engaging.
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Gavin Selerie: Music's Duel — New & Selected Poems
Published
May 2009. Paperback, 328pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848610033 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Music's Duel gathers work from across the Gavin Selerie's career, combining major sequences or extracts with a range of less available material, some previously unpublished. Placed together for the first time, these texts form an extended record of self and world, their focus twisting to reflect thought and language process. From a complex weave the book yields clarity and beauty, as in the treatment of landscape, death and desire. It is possible to see a development from heady, romantic pastoral to more satirical, closely-wrought urban texts, although continuities of concern and technique are evident. Distinguished by metaphysical wit and wordplay, Selerie's poetry excites both ear and eye. Genres and devices are torqued so as to enable the lyric tradition to operate within a fragmented sound and social context.
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Robert Sheppard: Warrant Error
Published
March 2009. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610187 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. [...] As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories—real, fantastic, or both—are only our stories so far.
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Michael Smith: Collected Poems
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 244pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848610538 [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
This volume supersedes the author's Selected Poems, The Purpose of the Gift (Shearsman Books, 2004), which is being withdrawn from the catalogue as this new volume appears. Michael Smith is the author of seven previous collections, only two of which appeared in the UK, and a large number of translations, mainly from Spanish. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain with Trevor Joyce. Although better-known for his translations, his original work should be recognised for its own special qualities.
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William Strode: Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 5 Edited
by Tony Frazer.
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610057 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
William Strode, born in Plympton, Devon, in the early years of the 17th century, is a little-known poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, but he was a fine lyric poet and little deserves his oblivion. Hitherto the only publication of his work was by Bertram Dobell in 1907, since which time he has often been anthologised but never again granted a volume of his own. This volume redresses the balance.
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Janet Sutherland: Hangman's Acre
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610743 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Born in Salisbury in 1957 and growing up on a dairy farm, Janet Sutherland
studied at Cardiff and Essex Universities and has an MA in American poetry.
After twenty years living and working in East London she moved to Lewes
in 2001 with her partner and son. Her first collection, Burning the
Heartwood, was published by Shearsman in 2006.
The poems in Hangman's
Acre are lyrical, weaving images of loss
and of love, of grief and light, of language and nature. Where there is
beauty it is beauty with an edge.
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Jon Thompson: After Paradise — Essays on the Fate of American Writing
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 136pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610415 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, Emily Dickinson's Letters and Michael Herr's Dispatches, After Paradise offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary history, After Paradise attempts to restore a sense of the original strangeness of American literature and culture by pushing the boundaries of the essay form.
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Siriol Troup: Beneath the Rime
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610309 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Beneath the Rime is Sriol Troup's second collection of poems. Rooted in real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Beneath the Rime explore memory, art and language, asking above all what it is to be human. This new collection finds her adopting voices—human and animal, colloquial and historical—in her search for a 'proper viewing distance' where life's messy fragments fuse together, enabling us to understand our position—and negotiate our survival—in a troubling world where 'our tracks once told us where we were' but which now seems, at times, no more than a 'shudder on the horizon'.
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Juan Antonio Villacañas: Selected Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Beatriz Villacañas. Edited by Luis Ingelmo.
Published September 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610637 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Juan Antonio Villacañas (1922–2001) was one of the most significant poets in post-war Spain, and this volume—prepared with the help of the poet's daughter—is the first edition of his work to be made available in English.
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Verónica Volkow: Arcana and Other Poems
Translated
by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo
Published October 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610569 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Verónica Volkow is one of Mexico's most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence Arcana, with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics to give an overview of this remarkable poet's oeuvre.
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Catherine Walsh: Optic Verve
Published
November 2009. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610798 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Optic Verve is the latest long poem by Catherine Walsh, perhaps Ireland's most radical experimental woman poet.
"It seems a shame that many Irish poetry readers are unaware of Catherine Walsh's very obvious gifts. Her brilliant punning, the way she assembles disjointed, yet perfectly rendered fragments of Dublin argot and her ability to imply simultaneous narratives mark her out from her contemporaries." —Dónal Moriarty: The Art of Brian Coffey
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Ellen Wehle: The Ocean Liner's Wake
Published
September 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610712 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Lush, languid, enamored with the natural world, The Ocean Liner's Wake is a book of longing. In these wide-ranging poems the Other takes many forms: lover or God, a bridge, a sprig of forsythia. But always, the poems seem to say, what we hunger for is union. In spare, chiseled lines Wehle examines what it means to be fully alive to the world.
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John Welch: Visiting Exile
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610767 [Download
a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this new collection John Welch returns to his longstanding preoccupation
with the inner city and its diversities, fuelled in part by his own past
experience as a teacher working in multicultural education. 'Out Walking'
(which was the title of his first collection back in the 1980s) the poet's
trajectory across the city is informed by London's imperialist past, by
the 7/7 bombings, and by a sense of the complexities and ambiguities inherent
in a deeply felt involvement with the Other.
A recurring presence in the poetry is 'All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go',
a sculpture by the London-based Lebanese artist Souheil Sleiman comprising
hundreds of fragments of broken mirror woven together to represent a group
of tower blocks, taken here to represent, among other things, the self-regard
and inherent fragility of 'the City' in its recent incarnation.
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Augustus Young: Diversifications — Mayakovsky, Brecht and Me
Published
April 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610446 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Diversifications includes a long poem by the author, 'The Long Habit of Living', together with his loose reworking of Mayakovsky's classic long poem 'Cloud in Pants', and some loose translations of Brecht, plus a number of poems "in the manner of Brecht". Each of the book's three sections offer the reader another aspect of Augustus Young, whether the voice be his own, or a kind of ventriloquy.
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