2018 Titles — alphabetical by author

Published June 2018. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616165 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Through these poems set within a major south-east Asian city Anderson weaves, against the rotting entablatures of monumental imperial ambition, slowly degraded aspirations of native and non-native inhabitant.

The Shearsman Library 5

Published April 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615892 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Avebury first appeared as a slim volume in 1972, from Anvil Press, and remains something of an outlier in the author’s work. A sequence of poems triggered by the remarkable standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire – older than Stonehenge, which is not too far away, but part of the same evidently sacred landscape. 

The Shearsman Library 12

Published October 2018. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615953 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In 1977 and 1981, Martin Booth—then a poet and small-press publisher, but today better-known as a novelist—published two collections of work about Knotting, the Bedfordshire village where he then lived: The Knotting Sequence and The Cnot Dialogues . The books were published in fine, limited-run editions by The Elizabeth Press in New Rochelle, New York, and few copies travelled across the Atlantic. Indeed, the second of the two books was one of the final books to be published by Elizabeth and received only limited distribution. Here we have spliced the two books together, otherwise unchanged.

Published June 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Geraldine Clarkson’s work brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s remark that 'a thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility'. Clarkson is one of few poets whose work insists on, and succeeds in, finding new and more ambitious ways to integrate affective experience, emotion, thought and an imaginative expansiveness that is entirely her own. Her rare gift is to produce a poetry that sings, even as it swinges." — Ahren Warner

Translated from Spanish by Urayoán Noel

Published September 2018. Paperback, 292pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848613775 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Pablo de Rokha was one of the great Chilean modernists, but he is arguably known more for his feud with Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro than for his vast and remarkable poetry. De Rokha is relatively unknown outside Chile, and this volume redresses that by offering an introduction to this astonishing body of work, the first comprehensive selection in English. Daniel Borzutkzy calls this book "an event, a monumental work of translation and poetry that will force us to rethink our understanding of global modernism and the hemispheric avant-garde."

Published June 2018. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615984 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

At this point in time Andrew Duncan is better known as a critic of contemporary poetry — and an entertaining, waspish, and unusual critic at that. His own poetic work has been under-recognised and his previous collections — barring those from Shearsman — are out of print. This Selected edition gives the poetry-reading public a valuable chance to re-engage with a very original voice. Certainly no experimentalist, but also not a mainstream writer by any stretch of the imagination, he engages with narrative and history in a way that has become unusual in contemporary British poetry.

Published June 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616134 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

I’ve played, watched and loved football all my life. Along with birds and birding it is my most enduring passion. So I thought I’d write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. I started fluently, but one thing and another got in the way and the footballing Muse abandoned me after about twenty poems. The poems in this chapbook are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. Plus a sub. Messi comes last, but it is definitely not him. (Steve Ely)

Published July 2018. Chapbook, 42pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

PASS PORT is a travel document—a transcript of the first half of the at-sea installation SOUNDING((ING))S, which ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea across the English Channel, and underneath the seabed through the Channel Tunnel. Bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny refugees movement across the English-French border. The installation offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts, and the asylum-seeking body within the EU.

The Shearsman Library 10

Published July 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615960 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Harry Guest’s remarkable sequence of Elegies were first published as a chapbook in 1980 by Pig Press in Durham, and were later collected in Lost and Found a large collection of the author’s work in 1983. here we take the chance to return the poems to their original chapbook environment, convinced that the world still needs work like this. Still available in the author’s Anvil collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest , they benefit from being able to breathe more easily in their original form…

Published April 2018. Paperback, 184pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615786 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“James is decidedly un-English in his love of French and German poetry, in his unembarrassed (and unembarrassing) celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and in his Marxist and republican politics – which seem to legitimate a taste for the finer things on the grounds of international solidarity against a British suppression of the capacity for joy … John James is one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry.” —John Wilkinson

Translated from German by Tony Frazer.

Contains 12 colour woodcuts and 44 black-and-white woodcuts by Kandinsky.

Published May 2018. Paperback, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £16.95 / $30

ISBN 9781848616066 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Hardcover edition with higher-qualty images: see below

Klänge (Sounds) was Kandinsky’s only poetry publication—a collection of prose poems, accompanied by 56 of his own inimitable woodcuts, 12 of them in colour. It appeared in late 1912, or early 1913 (the exact date is uncertain) from the Munich publishing house, Piper, and thus came at a crucial time in Kandinsky’s artistic life: just after he had made the great breakthrough into abstraction, and likewise just after the publication of his seminal text, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). These were not the only poems that he wrote—others are preserved in the artist’s papers—but these are the ones he chose to publish, and in a lavish edition. 

The Shearsman Library 3

Published February 2018. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615861 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Serpentine was first published by Oasis Books in 1985 in a deliberately low-tech edition. Alas, it made little headway and the somewhat shoddy production almost certainly militated against its adoption by bookshops. It thus became Middleton’s “lost book”, although parts have been reprinted elsewhere. Subtitled (at least in the author’s correspondence, if not in the published edition) “prose pieces on the nature of evil”, the book shows Middleton at his playful, experimental best.

Published April 2018. Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616141 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In the final year of my 40s

I shall abdicate responsibility

for all my poems say, do, or be

so they might get a life

away from me.

Join Simon Perril as he writes an ecstatically elastic 50th birthday poem bidding adieu to his 40s. Written on the skin of the moment, the membrane of occasion, these poems nod, wink, cajole, caress, proclaim and defame their way across 80 plus freewheeling stanzas.

Published July 2018. Chapbook, 38pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616219

This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passagebetween J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation,subsequent eventually to Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).

Translated from German by David Need.

Published October 2018. Paperback, 228pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848616028 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognized as one of the great poets of 20th century European modernism. From 1921-1926, he lived in southern Switzerland, in a region called the Valais. Following the completion of the Duino   Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais, Quatrains Valaisans , was published in 1926. In May of that same year, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German language poems as a possible manuscript; the bulk of these date to 1924, but the collection included both material culled from a recently recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems written over the last two years of his life. Rilke sent the last of these in August 1926; he would die of complications from leukaemia just four months later.

      This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke had set down in 1926. The arrangement translated here has only appeared in German as Aus Taschen-Büchern und Merk-Blättern , (Insel-Verlag, 1950).

The Shearsman Library 1

Published February 2018. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615854 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 19798, spliced together with Tarn’s Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was poor, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney’s first collection, vanished from view. Also, a valuable expansion of tarn’s anthro-poetics, gained little or no attention, whether in Alaska or in the lower states. The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche.

The Shearsman Library 9

Published May 2018. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615922 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Nathaniel Tarn emigrated to the USA in the early 1970s, and took up a position teaching at Rutgers in New Jersey, he quickly confirmed his new identity as an American poet by publishing two major volumes: Lyrics for the Bride of God , a book-length work, with New Directions, which is still in print, and this collection, which was published on the opposite coast by Black Sparrow Press. Both books staked out his territory in a startling manner, and laid the foundations for a burgeoning oeuvre.