Damian Furniss Chocolate Che
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 101pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611061 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Chocolate Che were written in Cuba
in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes
and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the
Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and
monks.
Damian Furniss
works images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving.
Using forms as varied as their subjects, with characteristic verbal intensity
and a probing wit, he returns to the fixations of his youth in wry but reflective
maturity. Along the way, he encounters the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; visits
the houses of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, only to find no one's
at home; and collects the stubs of cigars that might once have been smoked
by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but probably weren't.
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John Goodby Illennium
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610941 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Set in 'South-Wets Wales', Illennium is a cut-up sonnet sequence which draws on recent theories about the social role of shame as it traces the trajectory of a single attachment within a tangled set of friendships. Mixing disease and end-of-era career discontents, its plotlines cohere and decompose around the blown down sign of the No Sign bar, a local watering-hole. There they intermingle with texts that range from Enid Blyton to Keats, Rimbaud to Dafydd ap Gwilym. But the more shameless the embarrassment of riches, the more the lyric itself comes to seem 'a form of shame management', its anticipated plenitudes thwarted by 'silences stubbed out' on an 'I for an I / in the very temples of delight'. Even so, for all its anxieties concerning the 'dork inability' of the poet, or of poetry itself, to resist the abjection that follows, Illennium's brazenness is golden too; again and again, it reveals the peach-succulent heart of a recklessly playful work which spares no blushes in celebrating the 'brilliantly pointless' energies of language.
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Mark Goodwin Back of A Vast
Published
August 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611191 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"These poems disclose a poet's rich relationship to the natural world by stripping away, by letting a raw objectivist lyric scrape off any rhetorical surface to discover the details beneath. This happens in almost every line, every phrase—so much so that finally his individual words seem to do it by themselves. The result is that /nature/ here ticks and clicks as though it were trying to find a halfway-house language between itself and the writer. Illusion of course, the trick of poetry, and Mark Goodwin is the magician." —Tim Allen
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Anne Gorrick I-Formation I
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611184 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In this book, Anne Gorrick writes poems of heft and delicacy. Each is constructed as a musical thinking through of an idea, as she builds a poem through deft and fluid repetition and musical ways of speaking. Even though these poems exist here only on the page, her voice, unique and personal, is present in each, and it guides us through her surreal landscapes of concrete abstraction with gentle tenacity and a rich and vivid vocabulary. Everything exists, in her poems, as a thought, as a vision, as a sound through space, and all at once. What a poem must do to justify its existence is to surprise us with its necessary inevitability, which is what these poems do piece by piece, one by one, and together." —Geof Huth
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Catherine Hales hazard or fall
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611139 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"I think the necessity of poetry is to irritate, to evoke the uncomfortable response. Scraps of language from different places and registers—radio, tv, conversations, lawyer-speak, etc.—coalesce and collide, creating meaning from their juxtaposition, meaning that is not subject to control or definition but (among other things including just being what it is) questions the rules by which we are obliged to live, like grammar, syntax, meaning. Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision—utopias tend to end in concentration camps and piles of skulls. Putting the poem into something resembling conventional form is thus supremely ironic. It's like putting the genie back into the lamp." —Catherine Hales
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Published
March 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610873 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles's shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
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Brandi Homan Bobcat Country
Published
January 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610859 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the "Fuck yeaaaah!"s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman ......" —Jennifer L. Knox
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Norbert Hummelt Berlin Fresco — Selected Poems
Translated
by Catherine Hales
Published May 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610965 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Berlin Fresco is the first volume in English by the German poet, translator, editor, and publisher, Norbert Hummelt. Born in the Rhineland in 1962, he has been a freelance writer since 1991, and editor of the literary-critical journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as Eliot's Four Quartets and The Waste Land.
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David Jaffin Time shadows
Published
January 2010. Paperback, 370pp, A5 format, £12.50 / $20
ISBN 9781848611009
David Jaffin's annual collection for 2010, Time shadows presents another large selection of his trademark terse lyrics.
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David Jaffin A World mapped-out
Published
August 2010. Paperback, 360pp, A5 format, £12.50 / $20
ISBN 9781848611405
A World mapped-out is the second collection this year by this indefatigable expatriate American poet.
"David Jaffin is a prolific American poet whose work uses the minimum possible means of expression in order to reach for the essentials in his subject matter . . . The limpid texture of his work resists quotation or excerption; his deceptively simple surfaces use the tensions inherent in the vocabulary to open up new horizons. Delicate creations, his poems tend to be wonderfully light lyrics." (www.bogpriser.dk)
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Norman Jope Dreams of the Caucasus
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611290 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy . . . although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream—and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates.
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Cralan Kelder Give Some Word
Published
November 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611443 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A is for Accessible. Give Some Word is a somewhat irreverent book of poems. Cralan Kelder believes that people who read poetry should be delighted, not confused. Poems are not riddles. The poetry in Give Some Word is no exception; equal parts distilled language, contrary, and pushing everyday language out of conformity. Humor lurks just below the surface in many these shorter, condensed poems.
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Nancy Kuhl Suspend
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610866 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Suspend, Nancy Kuhl's second full-length collection explores the haunted languages of desire, sexuality, and fertility, erupting between choosing and not choosing motherhood. A series of poems, fragments, short prose pieces, and fractured nursery rhymes, Suspend inhabits the sexual and syntactic tensions that form not only in dreams and hidden corners of the unconscious, but within domestic spaces as well. The power of Suspend comes from its commitment to image and lyricism as means to engage conflicting internal forces, fraught historical circumstance, and their inevitable intersection: "the needle / the eye the pierce and stick the single / spot of red the smear and blur and // this moment this pinhole / the whole thing passes through."
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Maryrose Larkin The Name of This Intersection is Frost
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611177 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Monochromatic kaleidoscope of winter. Limited components revolving, generating a shifting mosaic that replicates the passage of the winter days themselves. A modeling of time, its observable passage through the observations of weather, interior and exterior. Seasons, shifting in microns, are the recurring vocabulary of time itself. This limited vocabulary, the vocabulary of nearly identical instants, forms the center of time's concealed circularity. To make this available in language requires a particular patience of attention. There are few elements on the face of the traditional watch—the action is circular and repetitive. The elements of late winter—what we can perceive—do perceive—arrive, if closely observed, on a sparsely adorned cylinder. There is a mathematics to the passage of time—a sense of odds—percentages—chances—intrinsic in time's forward motion. Yet, how can this strange, wondrous circularity be expressed on the page—where word must follow word—the project of the poem may be to arrange a paradox we live beside in such a way that we can enter it, inhabit it, view it intentionally, from the inside.
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Mary Leader Beyond the Fire
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611221 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The work in Mary Leader's third collection, Beyond the Fire, does not conform to any one habitation, nor aesthetic persuasion, nor name. On the contrary, just about every poem invents its own territory and its own terms. Some poems are straightforward narratives, while others repeat spells and castings. Many are figural; some are classical; some even aspire to anonymity. The book is designed to range the globe and fathom the centuries, albeit, in the end, the poet's settlement is but a momentary locality. Yet, if the beings who dwell in this book did have an infinitive, it would be "to survive."
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Published
October 2010. Paperback, 210pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848611313 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Karin Lessing — born in Germany, raised in the USA, and resident for decades in France — is one of those poets who exist outside the tides of literary fashion, and indeed beyond the ken of most readers, although she has a devoted band of supporters, among whom your editor at Shearsman Books must be counted. Her last two collections were published here, and this survey of her entire writing career, which brings together all of her books, together with a number of uncollected poems, is vital to reaching an understanding of her work.
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Rupert Loydell (ed.) From Hepworth's Garden Out
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611245
From Rupert Loydell's first visit to this small Cornish harbour town—an event recorded in one of the poems included in this book—he, along with many others, has been fascinated by the combination of sea, light, people and painting that constitute St. Ives. These themes, along with tourism & trade, myth and the nature of creativity itself, are the subject of this anthology, which has at its heart the sculptor Barbara Hepworth's garden and studio, now run by the Tate as a small museum. It is a secluded and magical place, however full of visitors, and it is from this small green oasis and its stone and metal inhabitants that this book starts its winding journey. Having explored Hepworth's garden and studied individual works of art, there follow introductions to painters such as Peter Lanyon, Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson, the poet W.S. Graham, and finally a view of 'the whole of the town'.
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Camille Martin Sonnets
Published
February 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16 / Can$17.95
ISBN 9781848610705 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In her second book of poetry, Camille Martin breathes fresh life into the sonnet in a collection that is at once edgy and lyrical. The word "sonnet" comes from "song," and the musicality of Sonnets is not surprising, given Martin's background as a classical musician. These poems demonstrate a virtuosic range of approaches and themes; some are inspired by texts as disparate as nursery rhymes, theories of cognitive science, a history of street names, and her own dream journals. The chorus of voices in this collection sing confidently and fluently, proving the sonnet to be an ideal vehicle for Martin's love affair with language.
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John Matthias Trigons
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611252 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trigons derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon. The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled "Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda." Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and Pages: From a Book of Years. In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said that Trigons explores the poet's "usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicist" who becomes a shadowing doppelgänger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role.
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