Barry Hill Naked Clay
Published
January 2012. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611870 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Naked Clay is an intimate response to the paintings of Lucian Freud—"the great amplifier of twentieth century figurative art"' as the critic Sebastian Smee has written. The poems are as urgent as the paintings, and taken together they constitute an essay on the ambiguous gifts from a painter of such mortal, material presences. Barry Hill has created a unique space for the senses and the intellect to be prompted, explored and disturbed.
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Tony Lopez Only More So
Published
January 2012. Paperback, 260pp, 9x6ins, £12.95. Not for sale in the
USA or Canada.
ISBN 9781848611887 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this twenty-first century poem, Tony Lopez samples and seamlessly combines writings from many fields of science and culture, composing by means of intuitive and discreet intervention something quite unique. In a review of Darwin (one 10% section of Only More So) Ron Silliman described this writing as "the most exquisitely constructed prose I've ever read—more lush than Proust"; he wrote that it “just might be the most beautiful poetry collection ever written". Only More So engages the darkest aspects of human nature, extinction and genocide; it may also be the first Constructivist poem composed on the pleasure principle.
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Tony Lopez False Memory
Published
January 2012. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17. 2nd edition.
ISBN 9781848611948 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"[…] by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year
[was] Tony Lopez's False Memory, a series of sonnet sequences collaging
and remixing the white noise of 1990s Britain into a disorienting, sometimes
hilarious, often sinister, and always satirical challenge."
—Robert Potts, The Guardian, 6 December 2003."
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Maxine Chernoff Without
Published
January 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611962 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The series of poems in Maxine Chernoff's Without are elegiac brushstrokes, each somewhat feathery and brushing in more than one direction, which creates tension and unexpected arrivals as well as departures: someone or something is missing. Parts of the world are wavering and parts have disappeared. What remains is treated in the subtle management of the lines without a hint of punctuation, which allows for "waves" of attention, as meaning rises and subsides. The emotional impact is powerful, as are the recognitions, such as "when darkness loses / its waiting mirror / and tuning forks / stand in for solace" and "readers asleep /mouthing their dreams / fears of whispering / become a creed / until life blurs / like any lens /that fails at attention." There's a sense of meaning passing with the solidity and darkness of time.
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Peter Robinson The Returning Sky
Published January 2012.
Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611863 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] Poetry Book
Society Recommendation
Peter Robinson's new collection, The Returning Sky, carefully sequences the poems written over the four years from the time he left Japan and returned to England, through the global financial crisis, and into our current austerity culture. Opening with a sequence inspired by an unexpected visit to the United States, The Returning Sky then explores experiences of repatriation with the vividness and freshness of a reverse culture shock. The book takes up the inextricably financial, cultural, and emotional themes that Robinson had first scouted in collections from the years before his long economic exile, while his evocatively inventive forms invite new readers to follow his traces with the same warmth and candour he shows to his returning ones.
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Bill Freind (ed.) Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums — Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada
Published
January 2012. [publication held over from 2011] Paperback, 339pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611849 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Araki Yasusada, allegedly a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, had his work published posthumously and in translation in the mid-1990s. The work was widely praised and seemed to fuse traditional Japanese forms and themes with more innovative North American techniques and a sprinkling of French critical theory. However, Yasusada was an invention, and while no one claimed responsibility for the work, most readers agree that Kent Johnson was the creator, although Johnson insists the actual author is Tosa Motokiyu, the pseudonym for an unnamed writer who is now dead.
This book considers all aspects of the Yasusada phenomenon.
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David Jaffin Always Now
Published January 2012.
Paperback, 374pp, A5 format, £12.50 / $20
ISBN 9781848612075
Jaffin must be one of the world's most productive poets, with at least 10 poems a day, not including the ones he rejects. Always Now is his volume for 2012.
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Andrew Jordan Hegemonick
Published
February 2012. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848612204 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Memory and rehearsal. The cognitive processes upon which we have learned to depend, they keep us in our context, which is where we are screwed. She said, "Use your imagination to set yourself free, be inspired to think the unthinkable." And I did. But there are so many things that contain us.
Hegemonick is a 'free history' of the war against children, something unearthed; it is a delusional narrative, an ode to oblivion; a hymn to the goddess, the once and future porn queen; a therapeutic journal, partially rewritten; a decoy (but not a plan).
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Tim Allen The Voice Thrower
Published
February 2012. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612051 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Voice Thrower is from a batch of long poems begun in the 90's, arising in my ‘anti poetry' phase. The title should speak for itself, except it doesn't, which is the whole point of being a voice thrower. The poem had a twin, The Submissive Bastards, initially sharing the trope of a red sky at dusk, but TVT's sky turned into a horizon at sea, specifically from Portland looking west across Lyme Bay (Portlanders call it West Bay anyway). (Read more by clicking on the cover)
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Mark Scroggins Red Arcadia
Published
March 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611924 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems of Red Arcadia present a jittery, spasmodic—often obscured—series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism.
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Michael Heller Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Poetry of George Oppen
Published February 2012.
Paperback, 176pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50. Expanded 2nd Edition.
ISBN 9781848612082 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These essays cover the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties, to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s. The volume is a revised and expanded edition of the 2008 publication.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust — A Tragedy
Translated by Mike Smith. Shearsman Classics Series.
Published
February 2012. Paperback, 206pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612143 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new translation of one of the greatest monuments of German literature. This is the famous first part (Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil), and does not include the extraordinary (and virtually unstageable) Part 2, completed many years later. First published in 1808, and then in a revised edition in 1829, the story—a variant of the old Faustus legend—concerns the scientist (or perhaps, better, natural philosopher), Dr Heinrich Faust, whose scientific quests, and their lack of success, lead him into a state of great frustration. Parallel to this, Mephistopheles (the Devil) lays a wager with God that he can subvert God's favoured human (for this is Faust). .... (more on the book page)
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Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo (eds & trans.) Cantes flamencos (Flamenco Songs): The Deep Songs of Spain
Published February 2012.
Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612105 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, these are the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances — these are the songs wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace. Not high art certainly, but a part of deeper fabric of the real Spain, and a powerful influence on poets such Lorca.
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Debby Jo Blank The Explosion of Binary Stars
Published
March 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611979 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Explosion of Binary Stars explores themes of loss in the author's own life and in the lives of her patients. The themes are universal: divorce, breast cancer, war, addiction, PTSD, ageing, depression and, most importantly in this book, the death of a sibling. The book is not maudlin, rather the intimate poems invite the reader to enjoy an honesty that ultimately celebrates life, while funny poems about love and travel are scattered throughout as a balm.
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Helen Moore Hedge Fund
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612013 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Like the vision it preserves and celebrates, the language of this collection draws its strength from a deep rootedness in the natural world. At once eulogist for all that sustains our life and elegist for all that we despoil, Helen Moore emerges in Hedge Fund as an urgent, compelling and compassionate voice for these critical times." —Lindsay Clarke
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Sandeep Parmar The Marble Orchard
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612044 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sandeep Parmar's powerful debut collection, The Marble Orchard, steps boldly through the personal archive of family histories to art, literature and the imagined lives of modern and ancient heroines, from Mina Loy to Ovid's Heroides. Her experiments are set apart by their pure charge of language and textual silences, inherited from the distance between home, identity and memory.
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Brooklyn Copeland Siphon, Harbor
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612020 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Siphon, Harbor are what happen when the element of freshwater is allowed to wash freely over the poet's intense and unabashed observations of new romance and the capricious nature of the American Midwestern summer. Copeland, anchored by the mutuality of her themes, wastes no time in layering her own intimacies upon the intimacy she creates with her reader. From the very first page we have access to both her process and the inevitable resultant verse. This verse, which may appear self-contained and compact, is in fact pliant and reciprocal. Among love poems that are unclouded by disingenuousness or cliché, we find a love that is both succinct and expansive, like a clear, gray lake that is deeper than it is wide.
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Paul Naylor Book of Changes
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611993 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in this book grow out of an extended encounter with the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching or Book of Changes, which is a collection of sixty-four hexagrams comprised of various combinations of broken (yin) and whole (yang) lines. — Paul Naylor
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Michael Heller Uncertain Poetries — Selected Essays
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 256pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $22. 2nd Edition
ISBN 9781848612082 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarmé and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.
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Melissa Buckheit Noctilucent
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612150 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Noctilucent begin where light exists or is created in darkness, a paradox. But this is not "dark / light" of metaphor, but of the real and of relationship, where algae illumines the deep sea, the light of dead stars reach us from deep space, and night is a doorway, an entrance into the interior—of self, other, cosmos. Melissa Buckheit bridges human experience—personal, historical, social—into this space where the very thing which is invisible or hidden, must be spoken. There is no Truth—but truths, identity, eros, suffering, loss gleam along the interstices of the lyric as meaning embedded in a strange and musical syntax. We are surprised, as if by a pale-white, fragrant Datura blooming unforgivingly in the dark of night, by her intimacy and electric force. In Noctilucent, the beloved is every human body, a decaying salmon, or the lilts of a lover's voice—our human memory in the impermanence of the world.
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Andre Bagoo Trick Vessels
Published March 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612037 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms … held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels." — Mervyn Taylor
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Ken Bolton Selected Poems 1975–2010
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 212pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20 / A$22
ISBN 9781848612099 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A gay, light-hearted bastard, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smudged, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid. Bolton, a poet & art critic—a 'Sydney' poet living in Adelaide, & working there at The Experimental Art Foundation—is editor of Little Esther books and at one time edited the magazines Magic Sam & Otis Rush. Major publications include Untimely Meditations and At The Flash & At The Baci—and, more recently, The Circus, A Whistled Bit of Bop and Sly Mongoose.
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Laurie Duggan The Pursuit of Happiness
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 94pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611993 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Pursuit of Happiness collects shorter poems written during and after the composition of Crab & Winkle, and concludes with 'The Nathan Papers', an earlier and longer work written in Australia. The poems address the state of the art and the state of the nation, investigating the spaces left for pleasure in this new dark age. As anthropological investigations, they shift from Robert Creeley, burgers and South African wine on Charing Cross Road to images of Santa Claus in Anglo-Greek Paphos and Japanese tourist signs in the Brontë country.
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Martin Anderson Snow — Selected Poems 1981–2011
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 152pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612129 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Martin Anderson was born and grew up in England. Shearsman Books first published his work in the 1980s. Anderson has lived a large part of his life as an expatriate and many of his poetry collections have been published abroad. His poetry is, as a result, not well known in the UK. The poems of Snow, written whilst resident for almost three decades in the Far East, look both to that region for their ostensible subject matter and back to the UK. Snow is a collection in its own right, not simply borrowings from Anderson's earlier collections. Its choice and arrangement of poems suggests a terrain richer and more complex than those of individual poems and collections, and one within which they may be rewardingly re-encountered.
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Lucy Hamilton Stalker
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612242 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The insidious peril that haunts these pages appears in various guises against a backdrop of France, Germany, Greece, the USA and the UK. Stalker is a collection of prose poems in which the narrator attempts to make sense of everyday experience, turning to Rilke, Van Gogh, Steinbeck and others in her quest for understanding.
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Alec Finlay Be My Reader
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611078 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Be My Reader is a trove of texts made and found by Finlay over the past two decades, touching on philosophy, landscape, dance, football, travel and technology. Affectionate, celebratory and vulnerable by turns, it includes such key texts as his popular homage to Robert Creeley 'I Know A Poem', the long poem-mapping of the Wittgenstein Hut in Norway, and poems which emerged from art projects for civic spaces and landscapes, all interspersed with pitch-perfect renderings of off-key phrases overheard and chanced upon. Formally adventurous and restlessly curious, Be My Reader is a unique confluence of contemporary experimental and generative forms together with the lyric voice.
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Manuel Rivas The Disappearance of Snow
Translated from Galician by Lorna Shaughnessy. Bilingual Galician/English edition.
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612211 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (Englsih texts only).]
Many readers outside Spain do not know that the acclaimed novelist, Manuel Rivas, is a significant poet in his homeland, writing in his native Galician. This volume redresses the balance, offering a bilingual edition of his 2009 collection A desapareción da neve, which, in an unusal move, was published in all 4 national languages under one set of covers — Galician, Castilian, Catalan and Basque.
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Shira Dentz Leaf Weather
Published April 2012.
Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £6.95 / $9.95
ISBN 9781848612273 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Veering—often within a single poem, often within a single line—from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words."
—Mark Levine
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Andrew Duncan The Long 1950s
Published
April 2012. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611375 [Download a PDF containing the introduction to this book here.]
"The story of poetry since 1960 is largely of people rebelling against what was there in the 1950s. But another story is about poets who didn't revolt against that, but went on with it—developing it organically. The present work deals with a complex of issues, but started with the double twist, that two 50s poets, Logue and Hill, have dominated the artistic scene over the last ten years (or, say, 1996 to 2006) and that the death of the main '50s style has liberated the official English poetry, with the decease of certain inhibitions which were glued together and brewed up to weapons grade quality back in the 1950s." —Andrew Duncan
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John Muckle My Pale Tulip — A Novel
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 228pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848612167 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There wasn't much to do in the battered, half-forgotten seaside resort of Jaywick Sands, Essex—nothing really, except to listen to the North Sea pound against the sea-defences and wait for the next run-down holiday shack to go up like a barbeque torch. Lee and Will were an odd pair, deeply eccentric kids, living alone with their mothers and struggling through resit classes in college. But all that was to change on the day they kidnapped Charley Price in an old motor they'd just stolen, and made a heroic run with her for the ferry to the far land where the tulips grow.
My Pale Tulip takes a scenic route across low countries to the beautiful cities of Delft and Utrecht—where darkness lies in ambush. It is a classic tale of flight and crash-landing: poignant, sharp-witted, with a voice all its own.
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Gertrud Kolmar Worlds
Translated from German by philip kuhn & ruth von zimmermann. Bilingual German/English edition.
With an introductory essay by philip kuhn and a foreword by Regina Nörtemann.
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17.
ISBN 9781848611986 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (English texts only).]
Welten (Worlds) is a cycle of poems written in the second half of 1937 by Gertrud Kolmar, who was to perish six years later in Auschwitz. The manuscript was passed in 1947 by her brother-in-law to Peter Suhrkamp, publisher at Suhrkamp Verlag—now Germany's premier literary press—and was one of the first books to appear from Suhrkamp after the war.
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César Vallejo The Complete Poems
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by 
Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi. Bilingual Spanish/English edition.
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 798pp, 9x6ins, £27.95 / $39.95
ISBN 9781848612266 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This large volume brings together under one set of covers the three volumes published by Shearsman in 2005 and 2007: The Black Heralds and Other Early Poems, Trilce and The Complete Later Poems. Some minor errors have been corrected and one additional poem—recently rediscovered—has been added to the Early Poems section.
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Tony Frazer (ed.) Shearsman 91 & 92
Published April 2012.
Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612174
The first issue of Shearsman for 2012 contains work by Amanda Ackerman, James Bell, Melissa Buckheit, Jen Campbell, Martyn Crucefix, Patricia Debney, Nikolai Duffy, Carrie Etter, Catherine Hales, Fiona Hile, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Gary Hotham, juli Jana, Paula Koneazny, Karen Lepri, Rob A. Mackenzie, Ian McEwen, James McLaughlin, James Midgley, Camilla Nelson, Jennie Osborne, Linda Russo, Sam Sampson, Alexandra Sashe, Nathan Shepherdson, Steven Toussaint, Robert Vas Dias, Steven Waling, Charles Wilkinson, Nicholas YB Wong, plus translations of Baudelaire by Jan Owen, and of Yves Bonnefoy by Ian Brinton & Michael Grant.
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