Camille Martin Looms
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612358 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The title of Looms signifies the weaving tool as well as the shadowing appearance of something, These "woven tales" were inspired by Barbara Guest’s statement that a tale "doesn’t tell the truth about itself; it tells us what it dreams about." The strands of their surreal allegories converse, one idea giving rise to another, and the paths of their dialogue become the fabric of the narrative. In a second meaning, something that looms remains in a state of imminent arrival. Such are these tales, like parables with infinitely deferred lessons.
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John Matthias Collected Longer Poems
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 356pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612402 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The second volume in the Collected Poems of John Matthias, following Vol. 2 of the Shorter Poems in 2011, this volume covers all of the author's long poems from before 2010. That year's Trigons is excluded and remains available from Shearsman. Texts included in the book are: Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest (1986); Northern Summer (1980–1983); The Stefan Batory Poems (1973); The Mihail Lermontov Poems (1976); An East Anglian Diptych (1990); Cuttings (1995); Pages: From a Book of Years (1998); Automystifstical Plaice (2000); Laundry Lists and Manifestoes (2003) and Kedging in Time (2006).
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George Messo Violades & Appledown
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612648 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
into winter light, you find me, straying
out from the forest's dark memory…
Itinerant Hebrew poet David Vogel, Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne and surveyor David Thompson are among the lost voices re-presenced in George Messo's enigmatic new book, Violades & Appledown. Messo's vivid reinvention of history and tradition, passes through explorations of fractured time and the timelessness of memory into a powerfully realized present of ever changing perspectives, mindful of its journey out of the past.
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Eduardo Milán Selected Poems
Edited by Antonio Ochoa.
Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon and 
Patrick Madden & Steven Stewart.
Published June 2012.
Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612006 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (English texts only).]
This is the first significant publication of Milán's poems in English — here offered in a biiingual edition that covers all periods of his work. A native of Uruguay, Milán has lived in exile in Mexico for over 30 years. His work also featured in Shearsman's Uruguayan anthology Hotel Lautréamont (2011).
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Geraldine Monk (ed.) CUSP — Recollections of Poetry in Transition
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 244pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612501 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or "cusp" I'm concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed."—from Geraldine Monk's introduction to this volume
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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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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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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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Manuela Palacios (ed.) Forked Tongues — Galician, Basque and Catalan Womens's Poetry
Translated from Galician, Basque and Catalan by 
various Irish poets. All texts are bilingual.
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 184pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612419 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here.]
Galicia, the Basque country and Catalonia have often found in Ireland an "inspiring Other" whether for political, social or cultural reasons. This anthology engages in an intercultural dialogue which redefines and strengthens the literary bonds among these communities. A selection of the most prominent Galician, Basque and Catalan contemporary women poets have their verse recreated in English by Irish writers. Together they enrich the European literary scene by celebrating its diversity.
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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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John Peck I Came, I Saw — Eight Poems
Published May 2012.
Paperback, 118pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848612136 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"For my money, the best poet of my generation… as indifferent to academic fashions as he is to those of the poetry market." —Clive Wilmer
"Perhaps the most challenging—and one of the most rewarding—poets of his generation." —Robert Archambeau
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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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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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Peter Robinson (ed.) Bernard Spencer — Essays on His Poetry and Life
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612549 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here.]
When Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.
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Lisa Samuels Wild Dialectics
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 84pp, 9x6ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612570 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts. The poems are verbal machineries of encounter, brain music in relational life.
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Robert Saxton The China Shop Pictures
Published October 2012.
Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848612563 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The China Shop Pictures ranges widely in time, space and subject matter, encompassing Jacobite wine glasses, pedagogical horses, a Japanese invention for walking on water, and a medley of viewpoints both famous and anonymous—from Virgil and Gérard de Nerval to a woman who's in love with "the monkey they left on the moon" and a man who complains (unfairly) to a sales assistant that the umbrella he's bought has a design fault.
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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 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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Gael Turnbull More Words: Gael Turnbull on poets and poetry
Edited by Jill Turnbull & Hamish Whyte
Published September 2012.
Paperback, 204pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610934 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here.]
This volume brings together a number of hard-to-find reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a central figure in the interaction between American and British poetry in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and also publisher of the excellent small press, Migrant. Shearsman published his Collected Poems, There are words... in 2006, and this companion volume fills out the picture of an influential figure in British letters, with a number of pieces on poets such as Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher, as well as nods in the direction of Olson and Creeley from the other side of the Atlantic. The book is introduced by the poet's widow, Jill Turnbull, who has also made the final selection of pieces to be included, in consultation with Hamish Whyte, the author's long-time publisher in Edinburgh.
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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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Alan Wall Raven
Published July 2012.
Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £6.50 / $9.95
ISBN 9781848612464 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this is a single long sequence of poems.
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Order all 5 of the 2012 chapbooks for £25, post-free.
John Welch Its Halting Measure
Published June 2012.
Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848612433 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The more I read these poems the more struck I am by the reflective and careful way in which the poet deals with both seeing and recognition, the relationship between the self and the other . . .The relationship between public and private is the domain of the lyric poet and John Welch is one of the finest writers nowadays whose concern is to connect that 'Then' with the 'Now'." —Ian Brinton, in Tears in the Fence
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Michael Zand The Wire & other poems
Published July 2012.
Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £6.50 / $9.95
ISBN 9781848612495 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this shows the further development in Michael Zand's work since his debut volume, Lion (2010).
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Order all 5 of the 2012 chapbooks for £25, post-free.