Rosa Alcalá Undocumentaries
Published
February 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610729 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
'Rosa Alcalá, originally from Paterson, N.J. is a true daughter of W.C. Williams with a distinct, gutsy, and penetrating identity twining a public poeisis with her own luminous particulars. I know of no one else writing such poems that cut into and reenact the "plebeian" with such personal force, eloquence, and skill. "The syntax of worry rewrites cellular codes" she writes and then proceeds to investigate and expose the Industrial Age and its "genetic drifts". A worker is "fighting like a girl for gloves", a kind of child's cognitive dissonance documents improperly stored chemicals, "the deep sleep of field hands" stirs memory as does the more current and common "paycheck clean of union dues." Undocumentaries is Archive made Poetry. "Factory is both fact and act and/mere letters away from face/and story . . ." Alcalá's imagination and language disarmingly penetrate and extend these powerful devices and activating signals. The face we see is hers and our culture's own. I celebrate this book.' —Anne Waldman
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Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals XXX–LIX
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611146 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
After many years in the Far East, Martin Anderson returned to the UK in 2001. The first volume of The Hoplite Journals(I–XXIX) was published by Shearsman Books in 2006. This second, and penultimate volume evokes, like its predecessor, events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, and continues the earlier volume's exploration of allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.
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María Baranda Ficticia
Translated
by Joshua Edwards
Published August 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611238 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.... [read more by clicking on the cover]
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Elisabeth Bletsoe Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works
Published
January 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610828 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2008 Shearsman published Elisabeth Bletsoe's most recent collection, Landscape from a Dream. We now offer a companion volume containing all—or almost all—of her previously published work, which has been out of print for some time. The book contains a number of short pieces, but the collection revolves around three major sequences: 'The Regardians', 'Portraits of the Artist's Sister' and 'Pharmacopoeia'. The book confirms Elisabeth Bletsoe's place as one of the most fascinating poets of her generation.
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Christopher Brownsword Icarus Was Right!
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611269 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Christopher Brownsword was born in Sheffield in 1981. Icarus Was Right! is his first collection. He has previously had work published in Angel Exhaust, ctrl+alt+del, Great Works, Shearsman and The Wolf. His work has also appeared in the Canting Academy anthology and in (the poultice route), a five poem pamphlet published in 2006, by West House Books/Gargoyle Editions. Christopher Brownsword also has his own imprint, Broken Compass Press.
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María do Cebreiro I am not from here
Translated
from Galician by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Published April 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611115 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
María do Cebreiro is a widely-acclaimed Galician-language poet and critical theorist. In March 2008 she was invited by the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales to be the first Galician Writer in Residence at Bangor University. Some of the poems included in this book were first written during the author's stay in North-Wales, where her translator, Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, also lives and works.
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Tom Clark Something in the Air
Published
March 2010. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611085 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A poet of original vision and gentle, careful word-shaping, Clark allows his images to merge and converge toward a resolution in which flow is not arrested but pauses to take thought; the images take over the controls and "do the talking," almost as if they had a mind of their own. What a relief when that happens, the poet confesses; he just follows along and tries to stay out of the way of whatever it is they seem to want to be saying.
And when the elements of image and sound and sense do then mysteriously come together in the moment, as Clark here proposes, "A point is fixed . . ."
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Adrian Clarke Eurochants
Published
June 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610958 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Testing some possibilities and limits of cultural and linguistic exchange, a selection of imitations of Max Jacob follow free improvisations on early Chinese love poems and texts by Persius, Tacitus and Villon. The Eurochants themselves are less translations of specific texts than plurilingual responses to aspects of the European lyric tradition with its characteristic themes of "despair, frustration, yearning" (Michael Riffaterre) that are by turns respectful and irreverent, attentive and oblique, measuring themselves against established forms—most frequently the sonnet—as they distort and resolve them. Taking their cue from Alain Bosquet's reflections on collective suicide, a set of Terminal Preludes responds to projects for "total war" and planetary depredation with fractured syntax, rhythmic insistence and determinedly impure diction.
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Jennifer Clement Widow Basquiat
New edition.
Published
January 2010. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610989 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Widow Basquiat explores the love story between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne, his muse and lover. It is also a profound portrait of New York City during the early 1980s' art scene and the striking cast of characters from that time: Andy Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and William Burroughs, among others.
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Mary Coleridge Selected Poems
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century and they certainly deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.
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Kelvin Corcoran Hotel Shadow
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611429 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hotel Shadow continues Kelvin Corcoran's remarkable poetic venture begun with Melanie's Book in 1996; here, with characteristically rich lyricism, Corcoran explores Greece ancient and modern. Travelling out from the real Hotel Shadow in the low season, the work encompasses: Aristomenes and the ethics of terror; paternal affection; Xenophanes of Colophon; the origins of poetry itself and a subsequent history; family mythology and the vagaries of DIY.
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Ian Davidson Partly in Riga and Other Poems
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611306 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Partly in Riga and other poems is a book in five sections, covering themes of birth (the arrival of a new son), travel in Latvia, in Greece and in Wales, contemporary politics, and the endless of vagaries and mysteries of people. "I like people, though they disturb me sometimes." (Ian Davidson, from the Foreword)
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Shira Dentz black seeds on a white dish
Published
November 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611283 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in black seeds on a white dish spring from the search for what is generated and discovered when loss and desire occupy the same space. But lamentation is not the primary focus—by destabilizing everything in its reach, loss disables rigidity. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them: "Nothing to do but let the form of things take over." Shapes themselves, including punctuation, become a language throughout.
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Tsvetanka Elenkova The Seventh Gesture
Translated
from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne
Published January 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins
ISBN 9781848610842 £8.95 / $15 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
The most striking image of extreme eros and extreme pain is that of Christ on the Cross. This book of 77 poems by the Bulgarian author Tsvetanka Elenkova navigates between these two extremes. The poems are like a pulsation, or a gesture, and don't take a breath. In this sense, there is no space or silence in them and yet a gesture, for example of pointing or stopping, when it is tired and the fingers relax, becomes one of blessing and so it is that the poet Iana Boukova writes of this book: "Gesture introduces silence, replacing words and their definitions. There are whole passages full of the underwater silence of one gesture." It is rare to have a book of Bulgarian literature published in English and the reader will find here many elements of Bulgarian culture and the Orthodox tradition.
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Englands Helicon (1600)
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 9 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol.
3)
Published November 2010. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848611054 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Following the publication in 1557 of Tottel's Miscellany, a number of other anthologies or miscellanies appeared. Englands Helicon differs from its predecessors in representing a particular style of writing—the newly fashionable pastoral style, with its origins in the classics, and above all Virgil, but actually adopted from Spanish, French and Italian models. Indeed, the largest selection of any one author in this book is of Bartholomew Yong, and his translations of Montemayor's Diana—a pastoral in verse and prose which was popular throughout Europe. It was not that these poets were actually much enamoured of nature or of the countryside: the pastoral style was like a suit of clothes that could be donned in order to express certain subjects—above all, love—without getting into hot water.
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Carrie Etter (ed.) Infinite Difference : Other Poetries by UK Women Poets
Published
March 2010. Paperback, 211pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610996 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
An anthology of radical new women's poetry from the UK, featuring work by: Sascha Akhtar, Isobel Armstrong, Caroline Bergvall, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Anne Blonstein, Andrea Brady, Emily Critchley, Claire Crowther, Carrie Etter, Catherine Hales, Frances Kruk, Rachel Lehrman, Sophie Mayer, Marianne Morris, Wendy Mulford, Redell Olsen, Frances Presley, Anna Reckin, Carlyle Reedy, Denise Riley, Sophie Robinson, Lucy Sheerman, Zoë Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Carol Watts.
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Brandel France de Bravo (ed.) Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices
Translated
by various hands.
Published July 2010. Paperback, 248pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848610576 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Mexico is one of the major centres of Hispanic poetry—something which is perhaps more visible from the USA than from Britain, but nonetheless something that needs to be realised by anyone who cares about contemporary poetry in Spanish, or indeed, contemporary poetry of any kind. This volume includes work by the following poets: Luis Miguel Aguilar, María Baranda, Efraín Bartolomé, Marco Antonio Campos, Hector Carreto, Elsa Cross, Jennifer Clement, Antonio Deltoro, Gloria Gervitz, Francisco Hernández, Elva Macías, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, Samuel Noyola, José Luis Rivas, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Pedro Serrano, Natalia Toledo, Manuel Ulacia, Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez and Verónica Volkow.
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Tony Frazer (ed.) Shearsman 83 & 84
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781848611092
The first double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2010. It contains poetry by Kate Ashton, Paul Batchelor, James Bell, James Berger, Richard Berengarten, Peter Boyle, Marianne Burton, Susan Connolly, Martyn Crucefix, Carrie Etter, Janice Fixter, Kit Fryatt, Mónica Gomery, Ralph Hawkins, Rachel Lehrman, Rachel McCarthy, Valeria Melchioretto, Nathan Shepherdson, Tupa Snyder, Craig Watson, and Tamar Yoseloff.
In addition there is an essay by Douglas Messerli, plus translations of poetry by Swantje Lichtenstein (by Kevin Perryman), of Gertrud Kolmar (by philip kuhn & ruth von zimmermann), of Jorge Palma (by Peter Boyle) and of Ziba Karbassi (by Stephen Watts, with the author).
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Tony Frazer (ed.) Shearsman 85 & 86
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781848611108
The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2010. The issue contains new work by Linda Black, Melissa Buckheit, Claire Crowther, Michael Farrell, Clive Faust, Angela Gardner, Giles Goodland, Mark Goodwin, Lucy Hamilton, Peter Larkin, Mary Leader, Tom Lowenstein, Christopher Middleton, Richard Owens, Frances Presley, Carlyle Reedy, Peter Riley, Ian Seed, Zoë Skoulding, Janet Sutherland and Astrid van Baalen. Also translations of Tadeusz Dabrowski (by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), Osip Mandelstam (by Alistair Noon), Gonca Özmen (by George Messo) and a selection of 4 Austrian Poets (by Donald Malcolm & Wolfgang Görtschacher).
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