Seren Adams Small History
Published July 2012.
Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £6.50 / $9.95
ISBN 9781848612457 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this is Seren Adam's first publication and concentrates on the small Somerset town of Radstock, and its history as a mining centre.
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Order all 5 of the 2012 chapbooks for £25, post-free.
Rosa Alcalá The Lust of Unsentimental Waters
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612334 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Rosa Alcalá's poems dwell in the liminal space between the personal and the political--poems built on the idea that "the world exists," and that work to define the metaphysical and ephemeral architectures of origin, migration, nationalism, and loss. Rosa Alcalá is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require." —Carmen Giménez Smith
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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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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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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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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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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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Robert Browning Dramatic Romances
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 164pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848612518 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Browning's bicentenary year, Shearsman publishes several volumes devoted to his work, starting with a collection of his shorter "long" poems, organised as the poet wished when he put together his complete works. 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is here, alongside 'The Last Duchess' and many other favoutite poems.
Browning divided many of his poems into groups: Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances, Men and Women (the latter also being the title of one of his more successful verse collections). This is the first of 3 volumes dedicated to this part of his work.
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Robert Browning Sordello
Published September 2012.
Paperback, ca.180pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848612525 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A book-length poem that caused great consternation when it first appeared in 1840, Sordello became a byword for poetic difficulty, both because of its unfamiliar subject-matter (as now, few people had a grasp of the arcana of Italian medieval politics), but also because of Browning's verse style. His language is here impacted, with the reader needing to be alert to follow the twists and turns of the narrative. Sordello is an important work, and crucial in Browning's development. It is also an astonishing work to come from the pen of a 28-year-old, and one can see why Ezra Pound treated it so seriously when he was about to embark upon The Cantos.
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Robert Browning The Ring and the Book
Published September 2012.
Paperback, ca.610pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $29.95
ISBN 9781848612532 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
If Sordello is a book-length poem, then The Ring and the Book—in its day regarded as Browning's greatest achievement, but today seemingly out of fashion—is something different. It is in fact a great novel, but one presented in blank verse, almost 21,000 lines of it, and in twelve books, each representing a different view of the action (a court case involving adultery and murder) by one of the protagonists. Why it has been called an "epic poem" is a puzzle; it is epic only in length; it is a poem only because it is in verse. Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin is everywhere regarded as a novel, although it is in verse. The Ring and the Book is the greatest of all English verse novels; it is one of the great English novels of the 19th century; it is a remarkably modern novel in terms of narrative technique; it is, by any standard,s a great work of English Literature. It is offered by Shearsman in the author's bicentenary year, as it simply should not be out of print.... if Penguin were doing its job, we wouldn't have to do it.
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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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David Caddy So Here We Are
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 156pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610910 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In April 2007, when Didi Menendez, publishing director of MiPO publications and miPOradio, invited me to present a monthly series of literary talks, my remit was to be personal, direct and contemporary in the manner of Alistair Cooke's Letters From America. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England began somewhat gingerly on 7 May 2007, with an essay on aspects of my poetic background, and picked up pace from there. I attempted to give some background to the contemporary poetry scene in England as well as responding to the deaths of poets, such as Bill Griffiths and Andrew Crozier. The talks were written quickly and intended as intelligent introductions rather than definitive statements. Their aim was to stimulate the reader / listener and prompt further reading and discussion.
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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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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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Peter Dent Tripping Daylight
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612341 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One might be looking at a game of consequences with serially switched pronouns … or a stranger-than-life biography where missed moves and alternatives compete with the actualité for attention. Nothing here, however, is blessed by what is commonly understood as 'finality', realised or imagined. Tripping Daylight, Peter Dent's latest collection, finds its unlikely protagonist connecting (or attempting to connect) the experiences of a 'life lived' with a welter of convenient 'truths'—known or suspected—and which may be seen as arguable every step of the way. Shared words and wisdom, occasioned by this singular work, allow both for the making of an expansive public field and the leaving of private tracks.
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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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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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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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Tsvetanka Elenkova (ed.) & Jonathan Dunne (tr.) At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 136pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612617 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria is an anthology of eighteen Bulgarian poets writing and publishing from the middle of the twentieth century to today. Rather than being a collection of emblematic poems, it is a thematic book which reflects the searching and original, distinctive styles of contemporary Bulgarian poetry, itself reminiscent of the city and landscape.
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Norman Finkelstein Track
Published May 2012.
Paperback, 310pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.00
ISBN 9781848612068 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Track is a book-length poem, originally released in the USA by Spuyten Divil in three volumes.
"Norman Finkelstein's Track undertakes a voyage beset by recombinatory duress. An excursis through realms where "the letters / arrive to be destroyed," this wickedly wise poem keeps on arriving long after it's done—a lingering trade or track of mind in mind, trouble in mind. It is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest." —Nathaniel MackeyOrder from the Shearsman Books online store.
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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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.
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Tony Frazer (ed.) Shearsman issue 93 & 94
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.50 / $13.50
ISBN 9781848612303
The second issue of the magazine for 2012. Contents include poetry by Kate Ashton, Linda Black, Susie Campbell, Geraldine Clarkson, Claire Crowther, Mark Dickinson, Ray DiPalma, Mark Goodwin, Harry Guest, Charles Hadfield, Lucy Hamilton, Mary Leader, Edward Mackay, Julie Maclean, James Mclaughlin, John Mateer, Alice Miller, Sharon Morris, Sean Reynolds, Peter Robinson, Robert Saxton, Andrew Sclater, Ian Seed, Aidan Semmens, Simon Smith, Cristina Viti, Corey Wakeling and G.C. Waldrep, plus translations of Yves Bonnefoy by Ian Brinton & Michael Grant, of José Kozer by Peter Boyle and of Marina Tsvetaeva by Christopher Whyte.
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