Seren Adams Small History
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612457 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this was Seren Adams' first publication and concentrates on the small Somerset town of Radstock, and its history as a mining centre.
Sascha Aurora Akhtar 199 Japanese Names for Japanese Trees
Published 2016. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614307 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sascha Akhtar's method-writing invites the poetry into a pre-envisaged form which is then adhered to stringently. The manuscript was written continuously on exactly 199 pages. The poet was interested in the idea of 99 names of Divine Power in Sufi philosophy, with the 100th name being a secret. The title was pre-assigned as a philosophical & semantic conundrum that arose whilst on a walk through Kew Gardens. The horticultural convention of the English has always been to re-name and assign a Latin name. In this way, the native identity or "is-ness" of types of flora may never be known. A tree that only grows native to Japan, has its own identity in its country, in Japanese. By merit of simply transplanting it, that name may never be known. Within these pages are journeys to other planets, jaguars, ibexes, toothless sharks, the "vanguard" of poetry, a woman abandoned, cruelty, a depth of thought & emotion that stays steady holding the reader in its thrall and strange creatures mentioned only as 'jagged kittenstars'. The book is honestly, pure transcendental rock n' roll epic.
Tim Allen Settings
Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610064 [Download a sample from this book here.]
"I had in mind a kind of anti prose poem that would look and smell like one but give a different taste and have a different texture. One way of doing this was by making the conclusion of each Set flat and deflationary, almost deliberately poor in the sense that they never approached closure, either artificially or in actuality." (Tim Allen)
Tim Allen
The Voice Thrower
Published 2012. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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)
Tim Allen A Democracy of Posions
Published 2021. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617889 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tim Allen lived for many years in Plymouth working as a primary school teacher. For two decades he helped, through the magazine Terrible Work
and the Language Club reading series, to establish a vibrant poetry community. A Democracy of Poisons, a sequence of prose poems, is Tim Allen’s third Shearsman book and his first completed work following a move to Lancashire where he has been heavily involved with the avant
wing of the North-West poetry scene. The texts run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its fall-out, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of language. Motifs arising from the perspective of age and change echo, but sparsely; what really unites the poems is a cruel humour, as often self-directed as aimed at the democracy of poisons.
Martin Anderson The Kneeling Room
Published 1981. 20pp, centre-stapled chapbook. Out of print.
ISBN-10 0907562035
The author's first collection. Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine.
Martin Anderson The Ash Circle
Published 1986. 40pp, centre-stapled chapbook. £4.00
ISBN 9780907562108
The author's second collection. A revised edition of this book appeared in the USA from Alma House Press, New York, in 1989.
Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals (complete in one volume)
Published 2013. Paperback, 292pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848612914 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This compendium edition of all three volumes of Martin Anderson's The Hoplite Journals
evokes events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, exploring allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.
Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals (Volume 1)
Published 2006. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562818 [Download a sample from this book here.]
This prose sequence, The Hoplite Journals, the first volume of an ongoing project of the same name, is characterised by rapid temporal and spatial shifts amidst observed and imagined realities. It returns again and again, however, to meditate upon notions of identity and of memory, of time and of space.
Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals XXX–LIX
Published 2010. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611146 [Download a sample from this book here.]
After many years in the Far East, Martin Anderson returned to the UK in 2001. The first volume of The Hoplite Journals (I–XXIX) was published by Shearsman Books in 2006. This second, and penultimate volume evokes, like its predecessor, events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, and continues the earlier volume's exploration of allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.
Martin Anderson The Hoplite Journals (LX–LXXXIX)
Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612907 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This third and final volume of Martin Anderson's The Hoplite Journals, like its predecessors, evokes events and places largely in South East and South Asia as well as the West, and continues the earlier volumes' exploration of allegiances and identities within the troubled context of mostly colonial and ex-colonial possessions.
Martin Anderson Belonging
Published 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610378 [Download a sample from this book here.]
The poems in this latest collection by Martin Anderson are largely concerned with the nature, from both a perceptual and ontological perspective, of continuing and intrinsic identities. We belong "To nowhere/to no thing/to the shortest abridgement/of air of word/to the cruel insignia/of our acquisitions". At the heart of all that we are, of all that we think, feel, see, touch, taste and smell, are 'shadows/pulled through/a world impatient/to sound'. A world, pregnant with meaning and language, which is, finally, a 'mirror colliding/with its reflection'.
Martin Anderson Snow —
Selected Poems 1981–2011
Published 2012. Paperback, 152pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
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.
Martin Anderson The Lower Reaches
Published 2013. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613119 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Lower Reaches is framed within precise geography, the Lower Hope region of the Thames estuary where the author was born and grew up beside a river on which "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire" floated. Anderson lived for decades in the Far East. His meditation interrogates the formation of national identity and freights with poignant significance the old maxim that so much of British history happened overseas.
A few copies remain for sale. Subsequently collected in Obsequy for Lost Things (see below).
Martin Anderson Obsequy for Lost Things
Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613508 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Obsequy For Lost Things
consists of three prose-poetry sequences. The first two share the setting of the Thames estuary. They all share, however, like the author's previous collection of prose-poetry sequences (from Skylight Press) Interlocutors of Paradise, a concern with history and the psychology of colonialism.
Martin Anderson Ice Stylus
Published 2017. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615205 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The sequences of meditations which comprise Anderson’s last two books trace fault lines deeply inscribed within the Judeo-Christian psyche of the West. Ice Stylus
is the final volume of Anderson’s Unsubdued Singing trilogy. Many of the sequences in Interlocutors of Paradise and Obsequy
for Lost Things begin in a geography which is both real and subliminal: the Essex Thames-side salt marsh. … In this “dark land”, perhaps intimating archetypal adventure, his passage takes him through the trials and ordeals of many wastes of water. What such a journey eventually delivers to him, however, is not a sacred fire of illumination or boon of wisdom to take back to his old world to re-vivify it. Instead, he is vouchsafed the white isotope of destruction, turning everything dark and possessing the potential to annihilate the very products of time he has so violently sought to wrest from others.
Martin Anderson In the Empire of Chimeras
Published 2018. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616165 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A collection of re-written poems that, in their original form, were published in a book in Manila, where the author was then working. Asia is everywhere in these poems, permeating every line.
Martin Anderson A Country Without Names
Published 2022. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617957 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A Country Without Names
offers a conspectus of human activity from its earliest imagined days and the formation of agrarian state sedentism to our own day. Its tesserae, gathered from beyond the boundaries of a single country or culture, constitute a mosaic in which might be gleaned all the fury and fatuity of the pursuit of that gilded phantasmagoria of a just and beneficent state.
Whilst a certain sombreness – from 'Flowering Midnight'’s dark elegy for the English pastoral lyric, to the fate of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the contemporary, and near contemporary, political parallels animating 'Under Jui-yi Shan' – imbues the collection it should be seen, however, as no more than the corollary of an unsentimental probing of experience, in a collection which is both paean for the natural world and indictment of those human qualities and structures which threaten it.
Roselle Angwin Bardo
Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611634 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Angwin's interest, broadly, is in a Zen take on psychogeography, and Bardo
is a book of transitions—inner, outer and usually both; a series of journey meditations recorded in prose poems and poetry. Consider, she says, the human being as an intersection of time and space. Whether she's contemplating a Neolithic longbarrow, the woodpecker on her birdfeeder, the implications of quantum reality, a Palestinian refugee camp or the unpredictability of human love, her attention turns on how we navigate transience and uncertainty and find a stillpoint within that.
Anon (ed.) Tottel's Miscellany (1557)
Shearsman Classics No. 7 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 1)
Published 2010. Paperback, 300pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611030 [Download a sample from this book here.]
1557 saw the publication of this ground-breaking volume: the first printed anthology of contemporary poetry in English. The book is built on a foundation of two recently-deceased aristocratic poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had by their example given English poetry a new direction, above all with the introduction of the Petrarchan sonnet, but also with the invention of blank verse. The anthology was to have an enormous impact, giving witness to the latest developments in English verse for a far bigger public than would have been the norm in the mid-16th century, when manuscripts tended to circulate anonymously and in a small circle of gentlemen.
Anon (ed.) The Phoenix Nest (1593)
Shearsman Classics No. 8 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 2)
Published 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848611047 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Following the publication of Tottel's Miscellany
in 1557, a number of other such miscellanies appeared, none of them especially significant from an artistic point of view. In 1593, however, a still-unidentified gentleman known only by his initials (R.S.) published this relatively slim, well-printed and well-designed compilation, which included works by a number oif significant poets of the day—those identified are Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, Robert Greene, George Peele, the Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, and Thomas Watson. It is almost certain that the Phoenix of the title was Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), to whom the first three elegies in the book are dedicated.
Anon (ed.) Englands Helicon (1600)
Shearsman Classics No. 9 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 3)
Published 2010. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611054 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Following the publication in 1557 of Tottel's Miscellany, a number of other anthologies or miscellanies appeared. Englands Helicon
differs from its predecessors in representing a particular style of writing—the newly fashionable pastoral style, with its origins in the classics, and above all Virgil, but actually adopted from Spanish, French and Italian models. Indeed, the largest selection of any one author in this book is of Bartholomew Yong, and his translations of Montemayor's Diana—a pastoral in verse and prose which was popular throughout Europe. It was not that these poets were actually much enamoured of nature or of the countryside: the pastoral style was like a suit of clothes that could be donned in order to express certain subjects—above all, love—without getting into hot water.
David Annwn (ed.) Shape-Shifter — a tribute to Gavin Selerie
Published 2022. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618732 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Gavin Selerie – poet, and Shearsman author – is currently one of the most skilful and imaginative exponents of the long, book-length poem in English. His friends and colleagues gather together here in this volume to offer poems, essays, interviews, memoirs, photographs and artworks in his honour, along with some reprinted pieces by Gavin himself.
Contributors with Gavin himself are Gilbert Adair, Gillian Allnutt, David Annwn, Tilla Brading, Ian Brinton, Lyndon Davies, Laurie Duggan, Andrew Duncan, Ken Edwards, Amy Evans Bauer, Allen Fisher, Harry Gilonis, John Goodby, Giles Goodland, Alan Halsey, Robert Hampson, Randolph Healy, Jeff Hilson, Paul Holman, David Hackbridge Johnson, Ian MacFadyen, Matt Martin, Ian McMillan, Susana Medina, Anthony Mellors, Peter Middleton, David Miller, Lesley Newland, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, Peterjon Skelt, Yasmin Skelt, Simon Smith and Mandie Wright.
Kate Ashton Who by Water
Published 2016. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614802 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems came into being as a result of new nearness to loss and to the sea. They are intimate, an attempt to express the beauty of untamed power that demands respect of the human heart; the terror it strikes into the soul. The form of each poem or sequence flows freely from its emotional or visual impetus: often dark, sometimes joyous or ecstatic or pictorial. Always there is an underlying sense of awe, of the unknowable and the impossibility of knowing. Neutrality is sought in echoing the earliest Anglo-Saxon or Chinese poetry. The sea becomes witness, calm interlocutor, feared judge, absent lover, intercessor. The aim is impersonality, to evoke the eternal in relation to the present; ‘now-ness’, as David Jones put it.
Marc Atkins The Logic of the Stairwell
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611610 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This fascinating, intoxicating and often hallucinatory book ranks amongst the best prose poetry collections of the last half-century. Atkins is a Surrealist visionary whose prose creates a murmuring dream in every sentence, a visual universe in every paragraph. HisLogic of the Stairwelltakes you into a world of verbi-voco-visual intrigues that explore the mechanisms of perception and memory while blurring accepted boundaries between the narrative and the lyrical, the sensuous and the philosophical, the essential and the residual.". —Michel Delville, author of The American Prose Poem
Michael Ayres Kinetic
Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700431 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Michael Ayres' Shearsman collection, following his Odyssey and Salt volumes, this book features shorter works than he has been known for in recent years.
Josephine Balmer Ghost Passage
Published 2022. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617940 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848617940 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ghost Passage
explores the ways in which we write ourselves in to the landscape, leaving our
own trace, making our mark. From inscribed ancient artefacts and recently excavated writing
tablets of Roman London — the earliest known written texts in the city — to tombstones in a
remote Kent churchyard, the collection deciphers the hidden texts that weave through our
past, articulating lost and often overlooked voices. Outside the usual boundaries of literature,
here are graffitied tiles and household jugs, spells written on pewter amulets, stamped beer
barrels and medical potions, as well as the everyday accounts and letters, even alphabet
practice, of the writing tablets. Ghost Passage
offers poetry — and history — from the ground
up as it blossoms in unexpected places, resonating down through the centuries, providing the
same power to protect and comfort even in the darkest times. These are the untold stories not
of a literate upper class but of the diverse, ordinary inhabitants of a great city and beyond; the
words we leave behind to ‘score these shuddering, ghosted streets / back into form and place’.
Josephine Balmer The Paths of Survival
Published 2017. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615298 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Paths of Survival
explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which, by each fresh miracle, it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus’s lost tragedy, Myrmidons, which notoriously depicted the doomed love of the Greek hero Achilles for his fellow warrior Patroclus, the volume moves backwards in time across two and a half millennia; from a tiny scrap of papyrus in a present-day Oxford library to the dying Aeschylus revising his masterpiece in 5th-century BCE Sicily. Along the way, the poems’ dramatic monologues introduce clerks and conquerors, pagans and popes, tyrants and tricksters, as well as translators, anthologists, editors, librarians – and, of course, readers – as each one responds to the text, transforming and perverting it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly, for better, for worse, but always with passion.
Anthony Barnett Miscanthus. Selected and New Poems
Published 2005. Paperback, 253pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins. OUT OF PRINT
ISBN 9780907562559
ISBN 9780907562559
A long-overdue survey of Anthony Barnett's work, this book provides a welcome opportunity for new readers to get to know his singular art—he is like no other poet of his generation writing in the UK, but both his elliptical lyrics and his work in longer spans should be part of the current consensus as to what constitutes modern English poetry.
Fred Beake New and Selected Poems.
Published 2006. Paperback, 143pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562986 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Fred Beake has been writing since the late Sixties, and this New and Selected
provides a much needed overview of a constantly developing body of work. About a third of the book is given over to the very fresh and colourful poems that have been written since the author's move to South Devon in 2003.
Beake has maintained an interest throughout his career in the short, often very visual lyric; but has also written off-beat fictions around particular characters, and very musical longer pieces such as 'Marona' and 'Towards the West' that reflect (if at a distance) the poet's early interest in the French Surrealists. This is an unusual poetry, and hard to place in terms of the modern scene. It occupies a position that is equidistant between the Imagists and Objectivists, the Surrealists, and much older things.
James Bell On the Royal Road — with Hiroshige on the Tokaido
With 61 full-colour woodblock prints by Hiroshige
Published 2021. Paperback, 138pp, 8 x 8ins, £14.95 / $25
Published 2021. Paperback, 138pp, 8 x 8ins, £14.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617865 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Long fascinated by Hiroshige’s woodblock prints, and especially the famous Tokaido Road albums, James Bell (1950-2021) began to work on an extended series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the second of Hiroshige’s albums (1840–42), the famous Kyoka sequence in which each image contains a short comic poem. The sequence contains 56 images – one for each of the 53 stations, or stops, on the route from Edo to Kyoto, plus one for the starting point (Edo’s Nihonbashi Bridge) and two for the terminus in Kyoto, the second of which is the Imperial Palace. This volume reunites James’s wry poems with the images that inspired them, and includes an appendix of five further poems written to images from the first, so-called Great Tokaido Album (1833–34), the work that made Hiroshige’s name.
A book for those who love poetry and also those who love art; those who love both will be doubly rewarded.
Richard Berengarten For the Living (Selected Writings, Vol. 1)
Published 2011. Paperback, 240pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611757 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This first volume of Selected Writings
by Richard Berengarten consists of longer poems written between 1965 and 2000, in Greece, Italy, England and Yugoslavia. While some poems, like 'Avebury' and 'Croft Woods', have their focal points in a recognisably English landscape and consciousness, there is no insular limitation on the matter. Berengarten (formerly known as Burns) has written: "I would rather think of myself as a European poet who writes in English than as an 'English' poet."
Richard Berengarten The Manager (Selected Writings, Vol. 2)
Published 2011. Paperback, 192pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611764 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The action of this book-length poem unfurls in the public and private worlds of corporate man. The Manager
is a poet's response to challenges thrown down by T.S. Eliot more than eighty years ago in The Waste Land. Its ground is identity, sexuality and vision. Its occupation is mind, heart and spirit.
This revised edition of The Manager
is the second volume in the ongoing series of Richard Berengarten's Selected Writings.
Richard Berengarten The Blue Butterfly (Selected Writings, Vol. 3; The Balkan Trilogy, Vol. 1)
Published 2011. Paperback, 172pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611771 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Winner of the Wingate Prize.
Taking its departure from both the Nazi massacre at Kragujevac in former Yugoslavia in 1941, and a moment at the memorial museum in 1985, when a blue butterfly descended onto Berengarten's writing hand, this profound book crafts living poetry out of suffering and tragedy. Passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, this moral and joyous work is European in context but universal in scope and relevance.
Richard Berengarten In a Time of Drought (Selected Writings, Vol. 4; The Balkan Trilogy, Vol. 2)
Published 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611788 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, In a Time of Drought
explores the images and realities of war, destruction and dictatorship, and of fertility, nurture and peace. The key figure is the Balkan rain maiden. This gypsy or peasant girl takes on an ancient mythological authority and a wholly modern moral presence. In the wake of waste and war she is the incarnation of hope and renewal.
In a Time of Drought has received the international Morava Charter Award. It forms the second part of Richard Berengarten's Balkan Trilogy
and is published with the other two parts, The Blue Butterfly
and Under Balkan Light. This edition is also the fourth volume of his Selected Writings.
Richard Berengarten Under Balkan Light (Selected Writings, Vol. 5; The Balkan Trilogy, Vol. 3)
Published 2011. Paperback, 178pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611795 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Written during and after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, this book presents a complex vision of the Balkans that flinches from neither brutality nor beauty but honours dignity and courage. The book starts with a tour-de-force, the long poem 'Do vidjenje Danitsé' ('Goodbye Balkan Belle'), and continues with a series of memorial tablets for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp. The book includes a sequence in memory of the Serbian, Yugoslav and Mediterranean poet, Ivan V. Lalic.
Under Balkan Light forms the final part of Richard Berengarten's Balkan Trilogy
and is published together with the first two parts, The Blue Butterfly
and In a Time of Drought. It is also the fifth volume of his Selected Writings.
Richard Berengarten Imagems 1
Published 2013. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613126 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein
Richard Berengarten Imagems 2
Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616851 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Imagems 2 contains six statements by a poet who continues to challenge modernism and post-modernism alike. This chapbook complements and elaborates Richard Berengarten’s Imagems 1 (2013). In this sequel, the borders between poetic theory and practice blur, for some of these texts are prose-poems in themselves. While their themes are rooted in the here-now, their 12-point structures call to mind early 20th century manifestos and late 20th century memoranda. Themes include the birth of poetry in sound, breath, and inner speech; the interdependence of the universal and the particular; and language, light and vision. Imagems 3 is on the way.
Richard Berengarten Manual (Selected Writings, Vol. 6)
Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613256 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Manual, the sixth volume in the ongoing series of Richard Berengarten's Selected Writings, is an ambitious work-in-progress, a single poem, whose central theme is human hands.
This present collation is divided into five sequences and subdivided into one hundred small poems, with two frame-pieces at the start and end. Numerological patterning, an articulated feature of much of Berengarten's writing, occurs in each poem's formal structure: ten lines, ten fingers; two stanzas, two hands.
Richard Berengarten Notness
Published 2015. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613812 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This sequence of one hundred sonnets was composed between 1967 and 2013. The title, Notness, is an anagram of the word ‘Sonnets’. The word ‘Metaphysical’ in the subtitle is, I hope, a pointer to some of the tendencies and intentions in and surrounding the title. The only further key – or, rather, hint – that I think needs to be offered here is that the so-called ‘core’ of isness is notness, just as at that of notness is isnesss: a never-ending dance. Others more adept at quieting the buzzing mind will know a good deal more about this than I do. —Richard Berengarten
Richard Berengarten Changing
Published 2016. Paperback, 584pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $35
ISBN 9781848615076 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Richard Berengarten’s Changing is the most ambitious poem ever written outside the Chinese language in honour of the Book of Changes, or Yijing
[I Ching]. Changing
is a homage both to this ancient text and to Chinese history and culture. The poem takes direct inspiration from the Chinese classic, as well as its form and the inter-relationships of its parts. The work is a remarkable achievement in its own right and a living testament to the enduring and universal quality of the Yijing. Berengarten has been exploring the Yijing
for more than 50 years.
Paschalis Nikolaou & John Z. Dillon (eds.) Richard Berengarten — A Portrait in Inter-Views
Published 2017. Paperback, 204pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $22.00
ISBN 9781848615120 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Spanning a period of fifteen years, these five ‘Inter-views’ with Richard Berengarten explore the many facets of his writings. Hospitably and expansively, they yield insights into the work of a poet of our time, his methods, motives, and patterns of thought.
Based in dialogue, an interview is always a collaborative venture. It discovers difference and clarifies commonalities between writer and reader. By working closely together in composing, editing and revisiting transcripts for each interview, Richard Berengarten and his five interlocutors reveal the potential of the literary interview itself, as they articulate and test its reticent boundaries.
Richard Berengarten Avebury
The Shearsman Library 5
Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615892 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein
Richard Berengarten Balkan Spaces — essays
Published 2021. Paperback, 458pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30
ISBN 9781848617537 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This first volume of essays and prose-pieces by Richard Berengarten reflects his sustained involvement in the Balkans over a period of more than thirty-five years. By focusing on his experience of Yugoslavia before, during and after that country’s dissolution, Balkan Spaces locates, tracks and celebrates aspects of history, folk tradition, literary culture, educational practice, politics and poetry, while also including affectionate memoirs of many friends, most of them writers. Through intimate explorations and careful research, Berengarten discovers some of the patternings, varieties and bounties of the Balkan and Yugoslav heritage. While his keen eye questions and explores what William Blake called the “minute particulars”, his overall vision is panoramic and multi-faceted. This book embodies a commitment to the values and varieties of Balkan civilisation, to the poetic imagination, and to the poet’s vocation and craft.
Richard Berengarten The Wine Cup
Published 2022. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618503 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1,000 years. But a sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time ever in English, is a suite of twenty-four of them. The delicate instrument of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao Yuanming, Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine, who lived more than 1,500 years ago.
Linda Black Inventory
Published 2008. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700905 [Download a sample from this book here.]
ISBN 9781905700905 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Linda Black's first collection consists entirely of prose poems. The author says of the collection:" I like how the form allows for an ending that isn't an ending—I don't believe in the idea of closure; as in etching I'd want an image, fine detail, but also degrees of dark or shade with less definition, something implied, unseen, reverberating in the shadows."
Linda Black Root
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611702 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is a collection in search of origins, a kind of 'delving', 'trying to get to the bottom of it'. In a series of unsettling prose poems Black offers pieces of a fractured past. The effect is memorable and often menacing, each poem glinting like a sliver from a broken mirror; language enacting the struggle to retrieve and reassemble an unauthorised past. The difficulties of truth-finding and telling are explored through shifts in identity and a syntax of qualifications and hesitations where everyday phrases take on a new and frightening resonance. Domestic objects and rituals loom large in the distorted reflections of the poems, conveying a sense of wonderland gone wrong.
Linda Black Slant
Published 2016. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614680 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Step into the magical word-world of Linda Black. Singsong and urbane by turn, these poems are rich in Hardyesque rhythms and moods undercut by an astute and often funny commentary. Using techniques more usually found in nonsense poetry, pastoral and ballad, this collection devises ‘a route map of liquid thought’. Linda Black leads the very few British poets who present the process of consciousness and she does it in a wholly original way. " —Claire Crowther
Linda Black Then
Published 2021. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617452 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Linda Black’s sparkling poems charm and beguile – and then, quite often, twist a small knife. Under a rubric of ‘little involuntary musings’, she makes a miscellany of different forms: prose poems, grid poems, extended aphorisms with a sting in the tail, fantastical flash-fiction. They toy with nostalgia, trailing threads of real memories into imaginary word-gardens bristling with tricks. Words ‘collude / allude’, slip over each other, with many near-misses. They lean into one another, threaten connection, narrowly miss and ricochet in another direction. Allusions are so nearly (neatly-delightfully) pinned down, are always on the verge of escaping. Daintiness jostles disgust as the poems joke, jibe, curse, cast spells – about food, fripperies, old china, seemingly new-to-you trifles that really aren’t trifling at all. Then tugs and teases – at possible pasts, possible consequences, half-glimpsed narratives – all assembled into glittering bricolage." —Anna Reckin
Elisabeth Bletsoe Landscape from a Dream
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700875 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Landscape from a Dream
is Elisabeth Bletsoe's first collection in over ten years and offers startling evidence of a powerful voice that should be better known. Very much a poet of place, Elisabeth Bletsoe fuses elements of folklore, botany, literature, myth and narrative into a poetry that at once feminist in spirit, forthright, and—to a certain extent—at odds with the prevailing British poetic styles, whether conservative or radical.
Elisabeth Bletsoe Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works
Published 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610828 [Download a sample from this book here.]
In 2008 Shearsman published Elisabeth Bletsoe's most recent collection, Landscape from a Dream. We now offer a companion volume containing all—or almost all—of her previously published work, which has been out of print for some time. The book contains a number of short pieces, but the collection revolves around three major sequences: 'The Regardians', 'Portraits of the Artist's Sister' and 'Pharmacopoeia'. The book confirms Elisabeth Bletsoe's place as one of the most fascinating poets of her generation.
Elisabeth Bletsoe Birds of the Sherborne Missal
Published 2021. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £12.95 / $22.
Full colour edition; includes 22 medieval illustrations from the Sherborne Missal.
Full colour edition; includes 22 medieval illustrations from the Sherborne Missal.
ISBN 9781848617483. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In this poem-cycle, each bird was observed in its native habitat within the boundaries of the Sherborne diocese and then linked back to the missal by means of religious iconography, imagery relating to books, pigments or methods of illumination as well as bird mythology, the latter often subverting the original Christian intention." — Elisabeth Bletsoe
“Elisabeth Bletsoe’s prose-and-verse constructions take on the beauty of densely sparkling mosaics.” —London Review of Books
Anne Blonstein memory's morning
Published 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700769 [Download a sample from this book here.]
A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them.
anne blonstein to be continued
Published 2011. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611733 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this collection, her second volume from Shearsman, Anne Blonstein continues to explore the possibilities of novel poetic forms. These poems have been compared to gemstones, changing "in sense and shape and sound according to the particular sign (or space) that catches the eye, or the breath". to be continued is divided into three parts. The short poems of the opening section, 'mistress of the crazy chromosome', are structured by the Jewish date on which they were written. For the long poem 'thou shalt not kill', the Hebrew letters of the sixth commandment provide the skeleton for the poem. The concluding section, which lends its name to the volume, is a sequence of love poems.
Andrew Brewerton Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty
Published 2008. [Download a sample from this book here.]
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18; ISBN 9781905700783
Hardcover, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95; ISBN 9781905700776 (Available in the UK only)
Raag Leaves is a sequence of poems offered the author's friend, the artist Paresh Chakraborty, one of whose works graces the cover of these two editions. The sequence of 37 short lyrics—printed on the recto pages only—demonstrates what some of us have known for some time: that Andrew Brewerton's quiet poetic voice is a powerful one, creating an ambitious new work that is very much in the modernist tradition.
Martin Booth The Knotting Poems
The Shearsman Library 12
Published 2018. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615953 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 1977 and 1981, the late 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.
Ian Brinton (ed.) A Manner of Utterance — The Poetry of J.H. Prynne
Published 2009. 188pp, 9x6ins. [Download the introduction to this book here.]
ISBN 9781848610422 (hardcover) £29.95 / $45
ISBN 9781848610439 (paperback) £12.95 / $22
A Manner of Utterance
offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.
Ian Brinton (ed.) For the Future — Poems & Essays in Honour of J.H. Prynne on His 80th Birthday
Published 2016. Paperback, 242pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848614901 [Download a PDF of the Introduction to this book here.]
J.H. Prynne is one of Britain's most significant living poets, and his friends, colleagues and admirers have come together in this volume to offer poems and also essays on his work—the latter being particularly helpful to students of the poet's work. Contributors are: Masahiko Abe, Anthony Barnett, Ian Brinton, David Caddy, Elaine Feinstein, Ian Friend & Richard Humphreys, Harry Gilonis, Peter Gizzi, Michael Grant, John Hall, Matthew Hall, Michael Haslam, David Herd, Peter Hughes, John James, Peter Larkin, D.S. Marriott, Anthony Mellors, Rod Mengham, Joseph Persad, Peter Riley, Gavin Selerie, Iain Sinclair, Simon Smith, Michael Tencer, Nigel Wheale and John Wilkinson.
Ian Brinton (ed.) 'An intuition of the particular': some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes
Published 2013. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612969 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume, featuring essays by a number of poets and critics, is the first survey of Peter Hughes' poetry, and is published simultaneously with his Selected Poems
(see above). The book features contributions from Andrew Bailey, Riccardo Duranti, John Hall, Simon Howard, David Kennedy, Simon Marsh, Ian McMillan, Peter Riley, Derek Slade, John Welch and Nigel Wheale.
Andy Brown Watersong
Published 2015. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614505 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Watersong begins with the first of the great cholera epidemics of 19th Century England. Focussing on the poet’s home city of Exeter, the poems interlace select details from Exeter’s 1832 cholera outbreak, in which over 400 people died, with imagined narratives of the epidemic, and other related episodes in the city,factual and invented.
Andy Brown Casket
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Franks Casket (or Auzon Casket) is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest, donated to the British Museum by a private owner from Auzon, France. Made from whalebone, the front, back, sides and lid of this small chest are decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Each rune has an equivalent letter in the Latin alphabet, allowing for Anglo-Saxon and modern English translations. Each rune also has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ (‘fisc’), f signifies ‘wealth’, i ‘ice’, s ‘sun’ and c ‘torch’, yielding a sequence of four images. To write the poems in this collection, I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word and then used these images, or variants of them, to write the poems. Using this multilevel technique of ‘translation’, the following poems are an attempt to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present, of the place where I now live: the River Teign and its surrounding area. —Andy Brown
Andy Brown (ed.) "The Writing Occurs as Song": a Kelvin Corcoran Reader
Published 2014. Paperback, 262pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613201 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This book offers a critical overview of the work of the British poet Kelvin Corcoran who, over nearly 30 years, has established a reputation as one of the most significant innovative British lyric poets; 'a giant of the middle generation' as Andrew Duncan has described him, placed between the radical poetics of the '60s and '70s and subsequent generations. Essays by Martin Anderson, Zoë Brigley Thompson, Andy Brown, Ian Davidson, John Hall, Lee Harwood, David Herd, Luke Kennard, Katherine Peddie, Peter Riley, Jos Smith, Simon Smith, Alicia Stubbersfield, Scott Thurston, plus some recent poetry by Kelvin Corcoran.
Robert Browning Dramatic Romances
Shearsman Classics No. 15
Published 2012. Paperback, 162pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
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.
Robert Browning Sordello
Shearsman Classics No. 16
Published 2012. Paperback, 208pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
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.
Robert Browning The Ring and the Book
Shearsman Classics No. 17
Published 2012. Paperback, 618pp, 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 standards 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.
Christopher Brownsword Icarus Was Right!
Published 2010. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95
ISBN 9781848611269. OUT OF PRINT.
Christopher Brownsword was born in Sheffield in 1981. Icarus Was Right! is his first collection. He has previously had work published in Angel Exhaust, ctrl+alt+del, Great Works, Shearsman and The Wolf. His work has also appeared in the Canting Academy anthology and in (the poultice route), a five poem pamphlet published in 2006, by West House Books/Gargoyle Editions. Christopher Brownsword also has his own imprint, Broken Compass Press.
sean burn is that a bruise or a tattoo?
Published 2013. Paperback, 82pp,9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612945 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
sean burn's third full-length poetry collection ranges across poems on the great punk collage artist linder, on the little-known cumbrian sculptor / painter lorna graves and a moving tribute to the incredible tuvan singer sainkho namchylak. he explores mans impact on the lake district and there is also an excoriating poem on water privatisation. he gives us a week of prose-poetry fairytales from the czech republic and a further cycle on scarring. bastilles englan
is a forceful multivoiced psychiatric hospital break-out based on the authors own history. there are further long poems on dance, on coventry, on america under bill clinton and on the state of europe over the past decade (steal this loneliness). the book finishes with the title poem which is an intense transgender love story.
David Caddy The Bunny Poems
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The Bunny Poems
give us a 'localised sensation' of twentieth-century rural existence. They re-connect us with the land as a deep, mirroring presence; the double-edged properties of plants; creature-sense; and the animal face each human carries. At the same time, the poems are an acute acknowledgement of absence; in speech, understanding and relationship." —Sarah Hopkins
David Caddy So Here We Are
Published 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.
David Caddy Interiors, and Other Poems
Published 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618718 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Interiors and Other Poems takes the reader down divergent pathways, along the river Stour through the Blackmore Vale weaving threads of identities, history, and the natural world. The poems dive deep into psychic and neurological divergent selves beneath an accrued social, cultural, and environmental history of the area. The personae are both grounded and estranged, living, and breathing as fictive constructs, and drawing upon the earth and its deep ecology. Living things evoke living things.
Anthony Caleshu The Victor Poems
Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614314 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Who is Victor? Like Browning's Waring he eludes the grasp of his friends and admirers, but remains a vital presence in their lives. Anthony Caleshu's superb long poem conjugates our needs and our guilts, our misfortunes and our longings, by narrating an epic quest through polar regions in an aphoristic idiom that dazzles and shimmers like an arctic horizon. Victor lurks somewhere, perhaps up ahead, perhaps behind. 'What's so great about Victor?' the journeying band of brothers are occasionally asked. You must read this poem to find out." —Mark Ford
Anthony Caleshu A Dynamic Exchange Between Us
Published 2019. Paperback, 74pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616318 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Caleshu’s new collection is magnificent. There’s something uniquely pleasurable and painful about the blinding insights in every prose poem. It’s like someone looking you in the eye and, unusually, feeling compelled to hold their gaze. What really moves me here is the way we hedge our disappointment, play our joy against our self-awareness. So much love and fear and grace and frustration: it’s at once uncomfortable and deeply life-affirming. It’s maybe a rare quality in contemporary poetry, but what makes this work so authentically alive, so urgent and poignant is that very ambivalence, delivered with a restless intellect and wit and turn of phrase that keeps you coming back.”
—Luke Kennard
Anthony Caleshu Xenia, etc
Published 2023. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618671 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the phenomena of xenia – Greek for ‘hospitality’, later adopted by the Romans as a category of ‘still-life’ painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.
Anthony Caleshu & Rory Waterman (eds.) Poetry & Covid-19
Published 2021. Paperback, 156pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617599 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The publication of this anthology comes a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. In the summer of 2020, we invited nineteen UK poets to partner with poets from around the world, to work collaboratively on poems responding to the virus. The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world’s permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere. Their diversities of aesthetics and poetics, of Covid experiences – at a distance and/or embodied, anecdotal and/or dramatic – are further significant to their inclusion and their work.
The pairs of contributors are: Sinéad Morrissey and Jan Wagner (trans. Iain Galbraith); Carol Leeming and Rakhshan Rizwan; George Szirtes and Alvin Pang; Vahni Capildeo and Vivek Narayanan; Rory Waterman and Togara Muzanenhamo; Rachael Allen and Ilya Kaminsky; Zoë Skoulding and Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo; Inua Ellams and Omar Musa; Matthew Welton and Hazel Smith; Vidyan Ravinthiran and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Anthony Caleshu and Mariko Nagai; Selima Hill and Wang Xiaoni (trans. Eleanor Goodman); Declan Ryan and Linda Stern Zisquit; David Herd and Sharmistha Mohant; Luke Kennard and Hwang Yu Won (trans. Jake Levine); André Naffis-Sahely and Stacy Hardy; Harriet Tarlo and Craig Santos Pérez; Jennifer Cooke and Jèssica Pujol Duran; Momtaza Mehri and A. E. Stallings.
Thomas Carew Collected Poems
Shearsman Classics series, No. 22.
Published 2015. Paperback, 200pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614390 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Thomas Carew (1595-1640) was, with Robert Herrick, the finest poet of the “tribe of Ben”, the poets who gathered around Ben Jonson in the taverns of Southwark in the early 17th century. This collected edition is the only complete edition of his poems available.
Alfred Celestine Weightless Word — Selected Poems
Edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh
Published 2017. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615281 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Alfred Celestine was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and came to London in 1977, remaining there until his death in 2009. He published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turner (The Many Press, 1978) and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003). Weightless Word is easily the most comprehensive selection of his poetry to date, revealing his range and power as a poet.
Amit Chaudhuri Ramanujan
Published 2021. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617384 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In these poems, written after the death of his parents, Amit Chaudhuri gives
us both a record of loss and an account of tasting life afresh. Here, past and
future are often conjoined, as are moments, people, and sounds: Ramanujan
the mathematician and Chaudhuri, related as much by Cambridge as they
are to each other by their suffering bodies; absent parents and the daughter
absent during home-cooked meals; a 9th-century Chinese poet and Sybille
Bedford finding a reader in Chaudhuri, who himself addresses a ‘Reader’
located in both past and future; the first day of the year with its ‘cough cough’
rhythm echoed by the ‘tatak tatak’ of the dhak on Durga puja; two mothers,
one American, in Kaddish, the other an Indian maid with a face disfigured by
burns; the ‘human and God touching faces nose to nose’. Moving through
this world – Chaudhuri’s universe – now annotated by bereavement, one
cannot not be infected, again, by the wonder and newness with which he
experiences the world: that, even after living all these lives, ‘I never felt I
knew the place’.
Mary, Lady Chudleigh Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 4. Edited by Julie Sampson
Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610484 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656–1710) was a confidante of John Dryden and a leading figure amongst the women writers of her day. In many ways a proto-feminist, Lady Chudleigh was still a provincial aristocrat and devout Protestant, and her work shows many of the apparent contradictions of the early modern era. This is the only selection of her work available in paperback, and her work deserves to be known for more than a few anthology standards.
Adrian Clarke Eurochants
Published 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610958 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Testing some possibilities and limits of cultural and linguistic exchange, a selection of imitations of Max Jacob follow free improvisations on early Chinese love poems and texts by Persius, Tacitus and Villon. The Eurochants
themselves are less translations of specific texts than plurilingual responses to aspects of the European lyric tradition with its characteristic themes of "despair, frustration, yearning" (Michael Riffaterre) that are by turns respectful and irreverent, attentive and oblique, measuring themselves against established forms—most frequently the sonnet—as they distort and resolve them. Taking their cue from Alain Bosquet's reflections on collective suicide, a set of 'Terminal Preludes' responds to projects for "total war" and planetary depredation with fractured syntax, rhythmic insistence and determinedly impure diction.
Geraldine Clarkson Declare
Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615069 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice — 4th Quarter 2016
Geraldine Clarkson lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, and the Magma Editors’, Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. Declare is her first chapbook.
Geraldine Clarkson No. 25
Published 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
Geraldine Clarkson Medlars
Published 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618688 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A rottenness at the heart of things, mapped onto England—the Midlands, London and other cities—manifests via apocalyptic omens and curses, and things being upside-down; an underworld and stasis. The Medlar, Mespilus germanica , the aromatic and romantic medieval fruit, member of the apple and quince family, is considered inedible until ‘bletted’, i.e. left to go rotten and sweet. The collection touches on themes of xenophobia, Brexit and hypocrisy, and dallies in the English hedgerows, lanes and forests, sometimes with the English poets, seeking out the regenerative chaos and mischief present in nature. There is a fugitive hope of flow and change, breaking out of old patterns; a quest for sweetness.
Mary Coghill Designed to Fade
Published 2006. 120pp, paperback. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700059 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Designed to Fade
is a narrative poem about life in the modern city of London, a journey through a day in London seen through a woman's eyes. The drama begins in the early hours and ends at the same time the following day. Referring to city poetry by other poets and experimenting with poetic form in an attempt to develop a women's poetry of the city, the author has developed an intriguing post-modernist slant to the dramatic unities of time, place and character. As city dweller you will find yourself in here. There are place names, descriptions of commuter journeys and brushes with authority, work and bosses which will evoke an empathy that modern poetry has all too often omitted to express. Designed to Fade
is a stylistic tour-de-force, and a most unusual sequence of poems.
Mary Coleridge Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 10. Edited by Simon Avery.
Published 2010. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle
and early twentieth century and they certainly deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.
Kelvin Corcoran Collected Poems
Published May 2023. Paperback, 766pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.95 / $45.
ISBN 9781848618923 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A major event, this volume covers some 40 years of work.
"Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song… Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." —David Wevill
Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey Into the Interior
Published 2022. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618459
What are the captions using us for?
Halsey's series of diagrams and quatrains for Into the Interior is suggestive of a journey through the rebus-like territory of thought itself. Corcoran doubles the quatrains in answering him back, as if such a dialogue might be how to talk to a friend exploring the enigmatic signs of the journey remembered from long ago and made present again.
Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us
Your Thinking Tracts or Nation s (West House 2001),
A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and
Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).
Kelvin Corcoran The Red and Yellow Book
Published 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616349 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. —Kelvin Corcoran
Kelvin Corcoran Below This Level
Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616844 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Below This Level
recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.
Kelvin Corcoran & Emma Collins Not Much to Say Really
Published 2017. Paperback, 66pp, A5 format, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848615595 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Not Much to Say Really
is an account of extended conversations with four elderly patients in hospital. Standing on the edge of their time they look back over their lives with good humour, tenderness and remarkable candour. At every turn these conversations show the reader that the most personally lived events and experiences are the most powerfully shared in the common lot of mortality. On that score they have much to say.
Kelvin Corcoran (ed.) According to John James
Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616301
Sadly, John James passed away in May 2018, just a month after launching his New & Selected Poems, Sarments (see above with the other April titles) in London. Here friends, admirers and colleagues take their cue from 2 quatrains in James's 'Theory of Poetry', and respond accordingly: Anthony Barnett, Kelvin Corcoran, Chris Cornwell, Lyndon Davies, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby, John Hall, Alan Halsey, Peter Hughes, Romana Huk, Linda Kemp, Mark Leahy, Tony Lopez, Anthony Mellors, Ian Patterson, Simon Perril, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Gavin Selerie, Simon Smith, John Temple, Nick Totton, Karlien van den Beukel, Robert Vas Dias, Geoff Ward, John Wilkinson, Cliff Yates, plus a painting by Bruce McLean on the cover.
Kelvin Corcoran Facing West
Published 2017. Paperback, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615236 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Facing West
achieves true illuminations of the places and uses of myth. Corcoran’s lines balance impressively between sometimes cryptic, aphoristic phrases and an orality encountered in song – and in great poetry. Several poems are almost like screens with a critical or philosophical text behind them; and the verse emerges stranger, and stronger, for the incidents in other books it points us to… The overall edifice in Facing West
allows entrances by prose passages – often, apparently, autobiographical; also talismanic insertions from other tongues, sometimes acronyms and street names. Yet, these often fragmentary structures develop as an experiment in narrative across separate sections, they work as a book. And in the end, nothing feels out of place.
Kelvin Corcoran Sea Table
Published 2015. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614215 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848614215 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Sea Table
Kelvin Corcoran brings it all back home. Not that it was ever very far away, but for twenty years or more he has been writing a lot of poetry concerning Greece and may have gained a reputation as a specialist or travel-writing poet, both of which would be wrong. Greece, both place and stories, was a lens onto our present condition and its depths, and through that focus he developed an essentially lyrical (meaning ‘unashamedly poetry’) field as the basis for a move towards larger forms: monologue and narrative, neither merely transcribed but re-invented every time from a literal rendering of the life and the materials. The four substantial sets in this book bring these extended skills to work on a range of subjects: a personal health crisis and recovery told as an underground descent and the return to intellectual light; a light-hearted musical prance around various poets; a rhapsodic rendering of the story of Glen Gould… And the last, the title-set, “Sea Table”, which re-engages Greece in a substantial and remarkably sustained and eloquent sequence, a multiplied poetical narrative of sea voyage and trading venture coming through difficult and easy seas back to the home it started from, which the present tense and the archaic past inhabit in harmony. —Peter Riley
Kelvin Corcoran For the Greek Spring
Published 2013. Paperback, 136pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612761 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
For the Greek Spring
is a selection of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry about Greece, combining new work with poems from his previous collections. The poet's sustained engagement with Greece is evident at every turn. Corcoran's project is a re-imagining and rethinking of our cultural antecedents, which goes considerably beyond the ready co-option of classical values into the pockets of ambitious politicians and the familiar reaches of the academy. Corcoran has developed an artful ventriloquism in which we're not only uncertain of who may be speaking, but are ultimately persuaded that it doesn't matter. The voice is poetry itself, first and last.
Kelvin Corcoran Hotel Shadow
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611429 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hotel Shadow
continues Kelvin Corcoran's remarkable poetic venture begun with Melanie's Book
in 1996; here, with characteristically rich lyricism, Corcoran explores Greece ancient and modern. Travelling out from the real Hotel Shadow in the low season, the work encompasses: Aristomenes and the ethics of terror; paternal affection; Xenophanes of Colophon; the origins of poetry itself and a subsequent history; family mythology and the vagaries of DIY.
Kelvin Corcoran Backward Turning Sea
Published 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700684 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Corcoran's first collection since his New & Selected Poems
in 2004, Backward Turning Sea
(i.e. the Mediterranean) shows the author deepening his engagement with Greece, both ancient and modern—but it is a place where contemporary politics can intrude, disturbing the reverie. The collection also includes a number of poems vased on the author's fascination with the paintings of the St Ives artist, Roger Hilton.
Kelvin Corcoran New and Selected Poems
Published 2004, 196pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562399 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Kelvin Corcoran's first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, appeared in 1985 and he has published eight subsequent collections with a range of British small presses. This volume presents a complete new collection, Against Purity, together with a previously unpublished shorter sequence, My Life With Byron, plus selections from each of his previous nine volumes of poetry, to give an overview of the work of one of the finest British poets of his generation.
Kelvin Corcoran When Suzy Was
Published 1999. 48pp, paperback. £5.50 / $7.50.
ISBN 9780907562252
The author's eighth collection, containing a number of poems focused on Greece.
Martin Corless-Smith The Melancholy of Anatomy
Published 2021. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617582 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In The Melancholy of Anatomy, his ninth collection of poetry, Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality, and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose, from the metaphysical to the whimsical, from surreal to anecdotal, the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories, sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic, at times nihilistic, at times luminous and dark, this collection asks questions about poetry, memory and what it is to have loved and lived.
Martin Corless-Smith The Fool & The Bee
Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616448 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the "organic" . . . British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints) . . . A stunning, pleasurable book." — Alice Notley
"Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout—we are only made richer by this tender work. The Fool & the Bee
is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination." —Peter Gizzi
Rosemarie Corlett Flightless Bird
Published 2022. Paperback, 72pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618305 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Flightless Bird
is a book of poems that explores the plight and place of flightless birds in our imaginations and in the world. Ostriches, emus, great auks and dodos fill the pages, sharing their chronicles of resilience, fetishization, mockery and extinction. New stories also emerge — of disobedience, irreverent women, eroticism and abundance. It's a book about otherness and belonging — a collection of energetic, contemporary poems that seeks to unsettle old stories.
Philip Crick Episodes
Published 1981. 16pp, centre-stapled. Out of print.
ISBN-10 0907562027
Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine.
Philip Crick Evolving the Idol: The Poetry of Gustaf Sobin
Published 1984. 28pp, centre-stapled. Out of print.
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London.
ISBN 9780903375641
The earliest study of Gustaf Sobin's poetry, partly based on conversations with him by the late author.
Emily Critchley Arrangements
Published 2018. Paperback, 70pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616042 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848616042 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘[Emily Critchley] has incorporated influences from popular culture and from a more street-wise feminist critique. Her poetry … is combative, intellectual and probing but this seems tempered by an upbeat and more popular sense of engagement, which makes her unusual and interesting […] a genuine form of public poetry, which can embrace both pleasure and critique without being either chic posturing or a sell-out to the market, such as it exists within poetry publishing! The thing I most enjoy about Critchley’s poetry is the way in which she manages to suggest an ongoing sense of ‘self-dialogue’ within her writing. Whether she’s talking about love […] or politics or art or academic work, there’s always an inner-dialogue going on, a self-assertiveness questioned in the light of a relationship to the ‘public sphere’.’ —Steve Spence, Stride
Claire Crowther Stretch of Closures
Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The array of characters in this book of lyric poems personify twenty-first century language, found on adverts, shopfronts, train tickets. Stretch of Closures writes down an urban landscape in an alphabet made readable by its citizens. If it is the dead metaphors that define everyday lives, Claire Crowther shakes them up to show not just history but signposts to the future.
Claire Crowther The Clockwork Gift
Published 2009. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610323 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Clockwork Gift
is Claire Crowther's second collection. The poems here continue the lyrical and reflective voice of her first collection, Stretch of Closures, and examine the place of older women in contemporary culture. Claire Crowther combines a control of rhetoric with myth-making skill and these poems include striking new figures such as the yellow-furred thike and its human cousin, or the countrywoman who answers the call of Maleficence. This is also the landscape of looking back; memory is a faculty idolised in our time and shown here to be as fragile as the stuff of grandmother's dresses yet tough enough to bond complex human relationships.
Claire Crowther On Narrowness
Published 2015. Paperback, 70pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613904 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
On Narrowness
is Claire Crowther’s third collection. Her previous collections attracted wide attention; the first was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh first collection prize. She is poet-in-residence at the Royal Mint Museum for 2014-15 and lives in Somerset with her husband, physicist Keith Barnham.
"A poet whose work is fully achieved and anything but conventional."
—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
Claire Crowther Bare George
Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614932 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The design of a coin is an act of succinct aggrandisement. Bare George explores the coinage of power through a far more famous numismatic image: created in 1817 for King George III and his son, the Prince Regent, by celebrity gem designer Benedetto Pistrucci, it pictures a saint, young St George, lancing a dragon. He is undressed. Any Greek warrior of artistic relevance to the nineteenth century would be. The dragon is submitting, as the opposition needs to be shown to do.
Claire Crowther Solar Cruise
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Published 2020. Paperback, 74pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616929 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Solar Cruise
is Claire Crowther’s fourth collection and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2020. Her first collection, Stretch of Closures, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. Solar Cruise
is a love story of a poet and a physicist who is devoted to halting climate change through solar energy. It is a passionately personal but also political work. Claire Crowther’s poetry has always been linguistically playful; here she uses an engaging variety of stylistic devices to deliver perhaps the most important message of our time, that solar energy can save us from extinction.
Claire Crowther A Pair of Three
Published 2022. Paperback, 78pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
Claire Crowther’s fifth collection, A Pair of Three, is her most personal yet, a story of marriage to a widower. It explores a trio, wife, husband and first wife, in a love story that is moving, uplifting, often funny but rarely told. The emotional power of lyric, the narrative of ballad and the drama of modernist poems are all displayed in this distinctive sequence. Claire Crowther’s previous collection, Solar Cruise, was widely praised and awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Andrew Crozier 'Free Verse' as Formal Restraint
Edited and introduced by Ian Brinton, With an afterword by J.H. Prynne.
Published 2015. Paperback, 216pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613966 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne—whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword.
“My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie
case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be ‘musical’, although not in any directly analogical sense.”
Andrew Crozier Thrills and Frills — Selected Prose of Andrew Crozier
Edited by Ian Brinton
Published 2013. Paperback, 214pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613010 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Almost without exception the prose of Andrew Crozier, reviews and articles centred upon the close reading of poetry including fearless debate about the importance of some figures who have either been overlooked by the establishment or given little more than a cursory nod of acknowledgement, has been out of print for far too long. The work, often published in journals or as contributory chapters to other books, has never before been collected together and this seems astonishing. —from Ian Brinton's introduction to this volume.
Martyn Crucefix The Turn We Take
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613683 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Martyn Crucefix’s new poems vividly evoke the landscapes of northern England and—in a sequence of sonnets inspired by the writing of Rosalía de Castro—the north west of Spain. But more than place, they explore the ways in which we inhabit time—how we are harmed and healed by it, how we deny, ignore, sublimate, repeat or reprise it.
I’d want to say it was past seven o’clock
or perhaps by then even seven-fifteen—
I’m sure of it now—a quarter past the hour
was the time we turned and part of what it meant
(‘The map house’)
