Atar Hadari Gethsemane
Published 2023. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618619 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A collection of monologue poems by characters from the New Testament, viewed from the perspective of their Jewish background. Thinking his way back into situations depicted in the stories of the New Testament and what their Jewish legal and social context probably will have been, Atar Hadari places the voices of different characters, finding the tension between what the reality would have been and how such a voice would sound in today’s world. Echoes of today’s religious thought and language intertwined with the details of the past locate occasionally biting humour in these poems. These are the Jewish voices which often escape the gospel narrative. They do not mock the Apostles – they were human beings who were also there. They saw things which, as the android tells the bounty hunter at the end of Blade Runner, you would not believe.
Khaled Hakim Letters from the Takeaway, & other distances
Published 2019. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616370 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
For a brief period in the 1990s Khaled Hakim published sparingly and performed semi-improvisatory routines. This collection gathers all the work previously published. As the first—and for some time afterwards the only—black or Asian experimental poet in the UK, the work remains freakishly singular as he forged an occasional poetry that mixes narrative, theory, and stand-up.
‘Khaled Hakim is the great lost British experimental writer of the last quarter century. I believe that his importance … lies in the fact that he brings a powerful and original set of ingredients to the most important kind of contemporary poetry. His film-making background and engagement with the work of Stan Brakhage changed the speed and the angle of his L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-polarized poetry. He was the only UK poet to work with David Antin’s conversational poetics. His Brummie-styled phonetic writing drew parallels with the similarly individual universes of Tom Leonard and bill bissett, and his class and colour were—and still are, of course—important. The conversations that his writing and being sparked in the 1990s have never really been followed through in British poetry.’ — Tim Atkins, from the Foreword to this volume
Khaled Nurul Hakim To the Hitchhiking Dead
Published 2022. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618534 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
To the Hitchhiking Dead is a book-length sequence culled from notebooks made between 1986–1988 when hitchhiking in Europe and England or otherwise doing nothing. An unknown poet – even to himself – who didn’t know he was seeking and fleeing lost love, and assured he was the only Asian freak on the roads in nail varnish and pearls. Those notebook sketches were towards an epical rhapsody that never got written. By the time I came to be published in the ’90s my poetry was framed in a post-Language discursivity: hard, vituperative, directed to actual audience-readers (epistles, performances). No-one would know that poet was made of such Romantic ravings. In 2019 I revisited the dozen notebooks to piece it together.
Returning to recover the project after 35 years sees a rapprochement between the two poet-selves. I am writing into the fragments of the past and the notebooks are writing into my occluded present. I’ve kept the scribal trace of each by retaining orthographic styles: I spelled conventionally before 1990 or so, and afterward determined on the course of unconventionalized spelling that has become signature to my work; so contemporary sections have deformed spelling but the original notebook writing is undeformed. — Khaled Nurul Hakim
Catherine Hales hazard or fall
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611139 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"I think the necessity of poetry is to irritate, to evoke the uncomfortable response. Scraps of language from different places and registers—radio, tv, conversations, lawyer-speak, etc.—coalesce and collide, creating meaning from their juxtaposition, meaning that is not subject to control or definition but (among other things including just being what it is) questions the rules by which we are obliged to live, like grammar, syntax, meaning. Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision—utopias tend to end in concentration camps and piles of skulls. Putting the poem into something resembling conventional form is thus supremely ironic. It's like putting the genie back into the lamp." —Catherine Hales
John Hall Couldn't You?
Published 2007. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700516 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Couldn’t You? brings together most of John Hall's poems for the page written since the publication of Else Here
in 1999 – and writing for the page here assumes black ink on white rectangular paper, but with the permissions that come with poems to engage that visual space of meaning with different tactics, ranging from the minimal and laconic forms of 'Gloss' and 'Harder than Ease' to the loquacious blocks of 'Here and There'.
John Hall As a said place
Published 2017. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615038 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
blink / and the outline is lost
As a said place
gathers together poems written since 2011. The book is shaped around ‘I’m on the Train’, a sequence prompted by and on a repeated train journey from home to work through parts of Devon and Cornwall. It returns to the spirit of John Hall’s early book, Days. In each case the poems arise from the contingencies of the everyday and respond to the language demands that these seem to make. Before and after this sequence are clusters of individual poems … [a]ll the poems share a sense that poetry, among its other qualities, is also a mode – or a set of modes – of thinking: the saying of the world continues to matter, as does its unsaying, and that this by no means brings ease: the broken lines that constitute poetry negotiate ambivalent relations with the continuities of speech, with syntax, with the carefulness of thought.
John Hall Essays on Performance Writing, Poetics and Poetry, Vol. 1: On Performance Writing, with pedagogical sketches
Published 2013. Paperback, 252pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613171 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 1993, say, the term Performance Writing, if used at all, suggested simply writing for performance. By 2011, when the author of this collection became the first Professor of Performance Writing, it had attained a much wider — indeed international — currency in discussions of contemporary writing, and had entered the curriculum of a range of courses well beyond its intense first conceptual and pedagogic development at the adventurous Dartington College of Arts. The task — and indeed the task of many of these essays — had been to fill out the terms for an approach to writing that looked beyond and beside literature for its sources, references and material practices. These other frames included: the rapid changes taking place within the technologies for producing, circulating and receiving text; a 'turn to writing' within other cultural practices, especially perhaps its integral presence within visual and sonic culture; the increasing textuality of the shared environment (words in public places, for example); and finally, philosophical preoccupations with the idea of performativity and its entailment with language.
John Hall Essays on Performance Writing, Poetics and Poetry, Vol. 2: Writings towards Writing and Reading
Published 2013. Paperback, 278pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613188 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This companion to the volume above brings together most of the essays—taking a deliberately broad view of that term so as to include, for example, two single-page visual essays and one sonnet — on the reading and writing of poetry by the poet and teacher, John Hall. The collection is in two parts. The first, starting with the often cited 'Writing and Not Writing', takes on, in the spirit of poetics, current issues for the category of poetry, considered both formally and contextually, and with particular interest in reading as a practice in which poems are actions and events rather than capturable things. The longer second part develops these thoughts through readings of specific, mostly contemporary, poems: the poets whose work is read are not intended to represent a proposed new canon. They have all, though, contributed significantly to a growing body of work in recent decades that brings together the social and bodily pleasures (and displeasures) of poetry with the ethical demands of truthfulness. They include Andrea Brady, Kelvin Corcoran, Allen Fisher, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, Peter Hughes, John James, Nicholas Johnson, R.F. Langley, Karen Mac Cormack, Peter Middleton, Geraldine Monk, Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, F.T. Prince, J.H. Prynne, John Riley, Peter Riley and John Wieners.
Alan Halsey Rampant Inertia
Published 2014. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613560 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Rampant Inertia
Alan Halsey, identified by Tony Lopez as a 'normally secret and invisible language spy', is found going about his familiar business, dismantling the rhetoric of Austerity while tracking scientific and other uncertainties, rereading Burton in the light of the Arab Spring, miming Our Mutual Friend, transcribing a racehorse's gossip, mapping the bricked-up public toilets of Sheffield, tapping Lewis and Clark's conversation in the Lost Trail Pass or fitfully failing to translate Aretino's erotica. Is 'Baa baa black sheep' a political poem? He thinks so. Rampant Inertia
completes a trilogy of books, following Term as in
Aftermath
(Ahadada 2009) and Even if only out of
(Veer 2011) although it may be the third in a tetralogy. Selections from Halsey's earlier work appeared in Five Years Out
(Galloping Dog 1989), Wittgenstein's Devil
(Stride 2000), Marginalien
(Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely
(Salt 2006).
Alan Halsey Selected Poems 1988-2016
Published 2017. Paperback, 260pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615397 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Selected Poems 1988-2016
focuses on Alan Halsey’s longer poems from the period and brings together the previously scattered sequences Ars Poetica, Tracks & Tracts of the Lizopard, A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts
and Latin for Today: The Sequel. It includes some revised and expanded texts such as the John Dee libretto Loagaeth alongside poems written since Rampant Inertia, published by Shearsman in 2014.
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).
Lucy Hamilton Stalker
Published 2012. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612242 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The insidious peril that haunts these pages appears in various guises against a backdrop of France, Germany, Greece, the USA and the UK. Stalker
is a collection of prose poems in which the narrator attempts to make sense of everyday experience, turning to Rilke, Van Gogh, Steinbeck and others in her quest for understanding.
Lucy Hamilton Of Heads and Hearts
Published 2018. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615717 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“There is nobody writing prose poetry in any way close to Lucy Hamilton’s. Of Heads & Hearts
is an intricate and rich collection that riffs on the interconnectedness of human relationship with the deft movements of a musical score. Here is a poet writing at the height of her talent using precise and controlled language to build toward a cumulative collage of characters, threads and associations all in conversation with one another. Of Heads & Hearts becomes more and more rewarding with each re-reading, most notably the utter ache at the heart of the ‘Requiem for the Engineer’ sequence.”
―Kaddy Benyon
Lucy Hamilton Viewer / Viewed
Published October 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618879 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
“When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it’s related to images – the ekphrastic relationship – I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there’s a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton’s
Viewer / Viewed, the answer is a resounding Yes.
First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems. “The tug of juxtaposition”: the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process – for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process – results in the poems’ extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding.” —Robert Vas Dias
Robert Hampson & Ken Edwards (eds.) CLASP: late-modernist poetry in London in the 1970s
Published 2016. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / £20
ISBN 9781848614604 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
CLASP
is an exercise in collective remembering – with, as Lawrence Upton’s essay suggests, a consciousness of memory work as also a process of selecting, forgetting and inventing. The original plan had been to focus on the 1970s, the decade during which [Ken Edwards and I] had co-edited Alembic
with Peter Barry. Some of those we approached felt they could not usefully remember enough of their poetry activities in this period; some were reluctant to return to the past. Also, as the project developed, it became clear that the original plan wouldn’t work: the history did not fit neatly into the limits of the decade. We would have to start earlier to understand the roots of 1970s London poetry, and we would have to stray into the 1980s to see how some of the debates and actions of the 1970s played out. —Robert Hampson, from the Introduction
Robert Hampson Seaport
Published 2008. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 88pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610293 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Seaport
deals with many aspects of the history and development of Liverpool, drawing on a wide range of documentary sources, and culminating with a vivid account of what the national press called the 'Toxteth Riots' of 1981. This event is seen in the context of the repressive policing methods of the day, especially as directed at black youths …[and] … in the historical context of Liverpool's notorious role in the slave trade, and of subsequent patterns of racial discrimination …
(from Peter Barry's Introduction to this volume)
Lesley Harrison Disappearance — north sea poems
Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8 x 8ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616981 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Disappearance
is Lesley Harrison’s first full-length collection, bringing together new work which examines the coastline and our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the waters that surround us.
Around the northern North Sea rim, the coastal margin is constantly being made and unmade by vast weather systems and currents that begin thousands of miles away. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory, these poems make real our sense of living at the edge of an older, sub-polar world, and the ongoing human process of negotiation with, of giving meaning and scale to, this unstable and ultimately unknowable space.
Lee Harwood New Collected Poems
Published January 2023. Paperback, 724pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.50 / US$45.
ISBN 9781848618558 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Lee Harwood’s work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice, speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from complex cut ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.
From his earliest pamphlet title illegible
(1965) to his last collection The Orchid Boat
(2014), New Collected Poems
assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in pamphlet or book form in broadly chronological order, fashioned upon the ordering of Harwood’s own 2004 Collected Poems. Some excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected material from the end of his career completes this rich body of work.
Lee Harwood Collected Poems
Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 521pp. £19.95 / $30. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9780907562405 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A major event, this volume was the first career-spanning collection of Lee Harwood's work, and its publication was timed to coincide with the author's 65th birthday in 2004. Most of Lee Harwood's work is currently out of print, including the large-scale Selected Poems (crossing the frozen river) published by Paladin in the late 1980s, and this Collected
makes all of it available once again, including some hard-to-find material and some recent uncollected work.
Lee Harwood Selected Poems
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700936 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2004, Shearsman published Lee Harwood's Collected
Poems, which proved what many of us had known for many years: that Harwood is one of our living masters. Four years on, and we now offer a smaller selection of his work, which will serve as an introduction for new readers, covering the period from 1965 to 2007. While the lion's share of the poems are drawn from the Collected, a few new poems are also featured.
Lee Harwood & Kelvin Corcoran Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood
Published 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, Price £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610019 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
To accompany Lee Harwood's new Selected Poems, we offer also this book-length collection of interviews with Harwood by his long-time friend and admirer, Kelvin Corcoran — himself also a Shearsman author. An invaluable opportunity to "hear" Harwood talking about poetry and about his own work.
Lee Harwood HMS Little Fox
The Shearsman Library 11
Published 2018. Paperback, 100pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615939 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This was Lee Harwood’s first major collection after his remarkable sequence of Fulcrum volumes (The White Room, Landscapes and The Sinking Colony) had established him as one of the most interesting younger poets in the England. HMS Little Fox
shows Harwood striking out in new directions, some of which were not be further developed, but it also shows evidence of his mature style. Although available in the author’s Collected
(Shearsman, 2004), this volume faithfully reproduces the original edition, with its postcard images, Egyptian sigils, and also one poem that the author decided to exclude from his Collected.
Michael Haslam Mid Life
Published 2007. Paperback, 208pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700394 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Mid Life
is subtitled Poetry 1980-2000, and is a revised and reconsidered Collected Poems covering the period 1980-1994 in terms of composition, and several further years of revision. The contents of this volume, in earlier versions, originally appeared as A Whole Bauble
from Carcanet Press in 1995. Now much revised, this volume sums up the author's compositional "mid-life".
Michael Haslam Ickerbrow Trig
Published 2020. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616974 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Ickerbrow Trig , the book, is simply a collection of poems written since A Cure for Woodness . As for the book's title, it’s simply the remnant of a bonnet-bee and an exhausted pun. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map, though Ickerbrow is better known to followers of the Ordnance Survey as High Brown Knoll. (Michael Haslam)
“In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England” —David Wheatley, The Literary Review , on Scaplings (included in this volume).
Ralph Hawkins The MOON, The Chief Hairdresser (highlights)
Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 110pp. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562429 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first full-length collection since the early 1990s by this highly original English poet. The volume includes the 'Pushkin' poems, previously only available in pamphlet form, as well as some 80 pages of previously uncollected work.
Ralph Hawkins Gone to Marzipan
Published 2009. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610217 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Ralph Hawkins' poems always give the impression of turning up late and being drunk when they do arrive. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of 'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing a new 'shell self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of rules and values." —Andrew Duncan
Ralph Hawkins It Looks Like an Island But Sails Away
Published 2015. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614208. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Ralph Hawkins’ poems minimise the gap of ‘constructive effort’ between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the “mediated” pleasure of the poem. […] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of “direct experiences” from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins’ method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. […] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps.” —Andrew Duncan
Ralph Hawkins Tell me no more and tell me
Published 2021. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18. Second Edition.
ISBN 9781848617766 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
First published 40 years ago by Grosseteste, this was Ralph Hawkins' first major collection.
Ralph Hawkins’ poetry is yeasty and written where the meanings are made rather than assigned. Its impulse is towards the immediate, apparently unsynthesised event where thinking occurs moment by moment. The aesthetic bears some resemblance to close mic techniques, we are drawn near to the experience and all distractions are removed for the intricacies of pure resonance. It produces a poetry as tricky as consciousness itself and its rewards are some considerable distance from the prefabricated commonplace expression of lyrical epiphany. Here is a poetry that is expansive, often humorous and always anarchic. In Tell me no more and tell me Ralph Hawkins’ refusal to whistle along with the sanctioned doggerel of English poetry and its returns is startlingly evident, as it has been throughout four decades of creativity.
Ralph Hawkins A Fancy Breeze Gets Up
Published 2022. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618312 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A Fancy Breeze Gets Up collects together the poetry written by Ralph Hawkins since 2015 and the publication of It Looks Like An Island But Sails Away. In 1978 in his first book, English Literature, and before the concept of trigger warnings arose, Ralph Hawkins announced that he quite liked The Waste Land, it’s ‘like holding a gun at an ordinary/everyday person.’ His own poetry has maintained a variously combative Modernist verve since then, and whilst no one has been threatened or shot because of it, it is a risky, occasionally disquieting and humorous poetry which challenges and rattles the possibilities of poetry itself. A Fancy Breeze Gets Up exhibits these qualities abundantly in three different ways in the three parts of the book.
David Herd Walk Song
Published 2022. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618428 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Written between 2015 and 2020, the poems of Walk Song build through a series of sequences which look to animate solidarities and the languages of rights. Taking their bearings from the Refugee Tales project, and always grounded in the collective walk, these are poems of friendship and movement, of landscape and politics, of action and hope. Addressing the environments we have made, the border and its hostilities, Walk Song sets out to picture settings in which the language might be opened, step by step.
Robert Herrick Hesperides
Shearsman Classics No. 27.
[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Published 2018. 9x6ins, 436pp, £19.95 / $30. ISBN 9781848616295
A reproduction of Herrick's only publication during his lifetime, seen through the press by the author himself in 1648. The book contains more than a thousand poems by one of the great lyric poets of the Caroline era, many of whose poems were set to music by William Lawes and other luminaries of the London musical scene. This edition reproduces the original spelling, in all its quirkiness, and copies the layout, albeit in a larger page-size.
Robert Herrick Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 2. Edited by Tony Frazer.
Published 2007. 8.5x5.5ins, 120pp, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781905700493 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was perhaps the greatest poet to have worked in Devon. Born in London, the son of a goldsmith, he studied at Cambridge and later fell in with the London poets who had gathered around the magnetic figure of Ben Jonson. In order to make a living—since he had not pursued the family trade—he entered the Church and in 1627 was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, whom he accompanied on an unsuccessful military expedition in 1627. In 1629 he was appointed to the living of Dean Prior, a village on the edge of Dartmoor, about half way between Exeter and Plymouth. He was to remain there for the rest of his life, with the exception of the Cromwellian period from 1647–1660, during which he was expelled for his royalist sympathies and, no doubt, also doctrinal disagreements.
Lynne Hjelmgaard The Ring
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611474 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Ring
is a book-length sequence of poems where the protagonist, a new young widow, moves from the strangeness of city to city, (from Copenhagen to London to Rome to Paris) trying to come to terms with her loss while looking forward to a possible new life. The title poem concludes the volume where the widow suggestively lets go of some of her past by taking off her ring.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho If I Do Not Reply
Published May 2024. Paperback, 112pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848619128
“A unique poetic testament of life in and out of Hong Kong between 2019 and 2022, spanning the Covid epidemic, and unrelentingly outspoken and courageous in defence of human freedoms facing systemic repression. Yet subject matter isn’t all. Gifted in every aspect of her poetic craft. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is witty, clever, passionate – and acutely observant of the inner life. Although written with a Hong Kong sensibility, these poems transcend contemporality and location. They map our times: all our times.” — Richard Berengarten
Paul Holman The Memory of the Drift (revised & expanded edition)
Published 2020. Paperback, 142pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617346 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This greatly expanded volume combines a revised version of the 2007 text of The Memory of the Drift, Books I-IV
(also published by Shearsman Books — see below) with a fifth book, 'A New Walking Age', plus out-takes and abandoned, but related pieces, and prefaces the whole with a long related work, 'Airborne or Still'.
The book's title, which refers both to Charles Olson and the Situationist International, gave evidence of its sympathies and intended range at the outset. The Memory of the Drift
began as a text written out of, and concerned with, a counterculture that was inevitably defined in largely negative terms (there has, after all, been so much to refuse) — it has become increasingly dominated by a perception of the practice of writing as an operation performed within a greater magical current.
Paul Holman The Memory of the Drift — Books I-IV
Published 2007. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700295.
TITLE WITHDRAWN FOR NEW EDITION (ABOVE). SOME COPIES STILL IN STOCK.
This volume combines a revised text of the first part of The Memory of the Drift (written 1993-1999, and originally published in 2001) with the three interlocking, previously uncollected, books in which its argument is extended: In the Common Era, Dog Mercury and Vicinal .
Jeremy Hooker Upstate – A North American Journal
Published 2007. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
An American journal — recorded while on an academic exchange in the North-East of the USA — by a leading English poet, whose collected poems, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965–2005
appeared from Enitharmon in 2006. Something of a companion volume to the same author's Welsh Journal
(2001), which is still available from Seren.
Jeremy Hooker Openings. A European Journal
Published 2014. Paperback, 292pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613041 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Openings
is a sequel to Jeremy Hooker's earlier Welsh Journal
and Upstate: A North American Journal, permitting us a peak over the shoulder of a fine English poet at work, and on the move.
Jeremy Hooker Ancestral Lines
Published 2016. Paperback, 74pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615083 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ancestral Lines
is a sequence of poems about ‘the river of desire’ that flows through the lives of a family. In these poems Jeremy Hooker recalls his parents and grandparents, and an elusive great grandfather. He both honours the mystery of personal identity, and celebrates the oneness of life through the ‘lines’ of generations. The sequence conveys a strong sense of places in the south of England, but in a special sense: it is grounded upon experience of ‘the places that live in people’, places that are a ‘medium of sharing’. A concern with both the gifts and limits of ‘seeing’ in the sequence takes its bearings from his father’s landscape paintings. [...] The figures that appear in the poems are not ghosts; the poet evokes them as real, loved and loving people. According to his way of seeing, each integral being is only partially knowable, yet also flesh of his flesh.
Jeremy Hooker Diary of a Stroke
Published 2016. Paperback, 190pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615090 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Diary of a Stroke
is a poet’s journal with a difference. After suffering a stroke in July 1999, Jeremy Hooker kept a diary of his experience in hospital and of the subsequent period of recuperation at home, which ended with his return to work shortly after January 1, 2000. As in his other published journals, he observed the life around him, with notations of the living moment giving rise to reflection. Closeness to death gave his thinking about questions of ultimate meaning a special urgency. As time passed, he found the diary becoming a memoir of his early years. The past was coming back to him in ‘scenes’, which were ‘quick with sensation and laden with memory’. As a consequence, he was able to write about people dear to him – especially his parents and brothers – who had played a formative part in his life. At the same time as he was learning to walk again, and describing his immediate Somerset environment, he was remembering and vividly describing growing up in rural southern England during and after the Second World War.
Jeremy Hooker Diary of a Stroke
Published 2019. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616721 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here .]
Word and Stone is questioning poetry which explores the ground between language that seeks meaning, and the obduracy of matter, and between life and what seems dead. Its concern is with a sense of the sacred, and the possibility of renewing words such as ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ in a materialist culture. But it celebrates the material world too, drawing upon nature and history in Hooker’s native Hampshire and his adoptive South Wales. It contains a number of elegies, paying tribute to friends, and to poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Gascoyne, and Christopher Middleton, and the Americans James Schuyler and Charles Reznikoff.
Word and Stone is concerned overall with ‘quickness’: how words may animate stone, and intimate the life of the dead.
Jeremy Hooker Selected Poems 1965–2018
Published 2020. Paperback, 278pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617070 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
This volume draws on over 50 years of poetry written by a poet who stands a little askew to the dominant modes in Britain: an Englishman in Wales, and an English poet with a decided admiration for the work of both George Oppen and David Jones, two very different Modernist exemplars, whose work often seems to be admired rather than engaged with in this archipelago. Jeremy Hooker is a literary explorer, and a poet with a powerful sense of place, whose joy in landscape and his surroundings shines through his body of work.
"I am a lyric poet who seeks to free himself from the limitations of a narrow subjectivity." — Jeremy Hooker
Jeremy Hooker Art of Seeing
— Essays on Poetry, Landscape Painting & Photography
Published 2020. Paperback, 274pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617087 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘Art of seeing’, as Jeremy Hooker exercises it in these essays written over some thirty years, consists of acts of attention to a range of poets and visual artists. Aiming above all to be ‘a careful, attentive, reader’. Hooker seeks to illuminate subjects that have been neglected or undervalued relative to mainstream fashions, such as the poetry of David Jones, George Oppen and Christopher Middleton, Welsh women poets, and neo-romantic painters such as Winifred Nicholson. His guiding principle, in the words of Coleridge, is to awaken ‘the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom’. Landscape recurs as a theme of poets and artists with a passion for ‘localism, clarity and care for particulars’. While Hooker’s aim as a critic is to explore his subjects’ art and their visions of reality, Art of Seeing, which also contains reflections on his own poetry, constitutes ‘a chapter of aesthetic and spiritual autobiography’.
Jeremy Hooker The Release
Published 2022. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617995 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Since Welsh Journal (2001), I have periodically adopted a form of writing that juxtaposes prose and poetry. The Release is a work of this kind, in which diary entries and poems are combined and interact. Roughly speaking, the diary records experience that generates the poems, or, to use another metaphor, the poems disclose their roots in the prose. Between June 2019 and August 2020, I spent four long periods in hospital, initially in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, and latterly in the Renal Unit at The Heath in Cardiff. The diary records my experience as a patient and reflects aspects of the life of the hospital; the poems respond to what I felt and saw in the ward, but also go beyond being a record of everyday reality. Like my Diary of a Stroke and other journals, The Release is a poet’s journal. In ways that the book describes, the periods of hospitalisation proved to be intensely creative. This was partly due to having so much time to write and read and think, together with the ever-present sense of mortality. (Jeremy Hooker)
Jeremy Hooker Addiction: A Love Story
Published April 2024. Paperback, 244pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848619456
Addiction is the story of a double struggle. It is about the effort of Jeremy Hooker and his wife, Mieke, to combat the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death. Based largely on the poet's journal, it contains poems written as acts of survival. The book concludes with a sequence of elegiac poems.
Gerard Manley Hopkins The Wreck of the Deutschland
Shearsman Classics series, No. 23.
Published 2017. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615428 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume contains the complete text of the great Hopkins poem, together with Nigel Foxell's introduction and his copious notes, touching on nearly every line in the poem. An indispensable reader's guide to one of the great poems in the language.
‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ deserves and requires close and subtle attention from the imagination and intellect of critics. A new generation of readers will be grateful to Nigel Foxell, poet, novelist and scholar, for the diligence and love he has brought to bear on this formidable task.
Peter Hughes Nistanimera
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700288 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new collection from this Cambridge-based poet and painter, his first new collection in several years.
Peter Hughes The Summer of Agios Dimitrios
Published 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610644 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Summer of Agios Dimitrios
started out as a poetical journal kept on the west coast of the Mani peninsula in Greece as the summer of 2007 turned into its autumn.
Peter Hughes Selected Poems
Published 2013. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612716 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Peter Hughes, born in 1956, has been writing for 30 years, and this volume sums up his career to date. Already the author of two-and-a-half Shearsman collections, and editor of a Shearsman anthology devoted to poets from his own chapbook press, Oystercatcher, this volume will cement his reputation as one of the UK's most interesting, and unclassifiable poets.
Peter Hughes & Simon Marsh The Pistol Tree Poems
Published 2011. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611719 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"As good as the movies." —John Hall
Peter Hughes A Berlin Entrainment
Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616677 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
After a decade concentrating on his distinctive versions of Italian classics, Peter Hughes moves on to this collection of poetry crystallising out of extended stays in Cambridge and Berlin.
Of Peter’s previous work Kelvin Corcoran has written: ‘I turn the new pages and am in bliss with the pertinence and grace of the living language’.
John Hall commented: ‘Read it, in the expectation of any number of lyrical pleasures, for the ear, for the play of line against continuous movement, for its celebration of remembered pleasures, for its good will and for its wit. By this last, I mean a mind in evidence in the poems that can constantly surprise itself in the turns of speech, that can dance in the syllables and still have world and experience in its sights.’
Peter Hughes The Modulus of Rupture
Published July 2023. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618787 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Comments on previous work by Peter Hughes:
‘a poet who stands at the very forefront of twenty-first-century lyricism’ —Ian Brinton, P.N. Review
‘Peter Hughes personalises and modernises the Romantic lyric mode of address, blending it into the stratum of practical everyday living with its hassles and clutter, and the conversational speaking voice. He plays with the inheritance of the European love poem as a renewal of it, sometimes seeming to undermine it and then folding it back into his purpose. This is a poet working very much in his own way, and breaking the rules of just about all current schools.’ —Peter Riley
Peter Hughes (ed.) Sea Pie: An Anthology of Oystercatcher Poetry
Published 2012. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612310 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Oystercatcher Press has published over 50 pamphlets of contemporary poetry in its short existence. It won the inaugural Michael Marks Award 'for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form'. Chair of judges Ian McMillan praised the press for 'taking risks with older and newer writers from outside the perceived centre of British poetry'.
This anthology now provides the first opportunity to sample all the poets represented by Oystercatcher Press in one book. It confirms the judgement, made by Ian Brinton in World Literature Today, that Oystercatcher Press offers 'some of the most exciting and vivid poetry available in England today'.
W.D. Jackson Boccaccio in Florence and other poems
Published 2009. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610682 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2002 and 2005, Menard Press published Then and Now – Words in the Dark and From Now to Then, as the first two books of a three-part work-in-progress. Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems
is a selection from the on-going third instalment, Opus 3. It is also intended as a book in itself with a structure differing from Opus 3
as a whole. Whereas the latter, when completed, will be arranged thematically in three parts, dealing with the emotional/physical, ethical and spiritual life respectively, the order of the poems in the selection is more or less chronological—from Boccaccio and the Dance of Death to the present day. This arrangement offers the reader a historical preview of the three fundamental components or concerns of human life on which Opus 3
is based, while exemplifying the various sorts of poetry and prose to be found in it.
John James Sarments — New & Selected Poems
Published 2018. Paperback, 184pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
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
juli Jana ra-t
Published 2014. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613676 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The figure of ra-t slithers through these pages like the Zelig of London Town—an ocular witness at every juncture of its history. His split name makes him a fractured and contradictory creature. Always recognizable he is also hesitant and obscure, not unlike this text which at every turn employs discontinuity and slippage as formal strategies whilst being as familiar as nursery rhyme. Ra-t is a survivor, but you won’t find him—he is today and gone! —Jeff Hilson
David Hackbridge Johnson Après Rops
Published August 2023. Chapbook, 28pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618398 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
Félicien Rops (1833–1898) was a Belgian artist, primarily a print-maker. He was a friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Péladan. His work – symbolist and decadent in tone – retains its shock value over a century later. In a sequence of poems inspired by Rops’ etchings and peppered with ill-translated fragments plundered from old exhibition catalogues, Hackbridge Johnson wrenches the daring reprobate into the 21st century where he is surely needed to puncture the hypocrisies of a discredited age.
Norman Jope The Rest of the World
Published 2021. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617896 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Rest of the World is Norman Jope’s sixth full-length collection and his second from Shearsman, after Dreams of the Caucasus (2010). ʹGeo-delirumʹ – as the title of one of the pieces puts it – is perhaps the guiding theme of this collection. Following on from Dreams of the Caucasus, Jope’s prose poems occupy an interconnected – and increasingly digitalised – world in which traditional notions of the ʹpoetry of placeʹ continue to be at stake. Evidence gained from virtual explorations – Google Street View in particular – informs much of the work, enabling the author to ʹtravelʹ to locations as diverse as Sicily, Mississippi and Norway with no more than a series of mouse-clicks. By contrast, other pieces draw upon his first-hand experience of Hungary, Plymouth and elsewhere from his early years onwards as well as on his extensive reading and research. The world is envisaged as a treasure-trove of information that can be accessed, by all available means, in the pursuit of whatever knowledge a finite human life allows.
ʹBefore I dieʹ, he writes in the title piece of the collection, ʹI will visit the rest of the worldʹ… as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.
Norman Jope Dreams of the Caucasus
Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611290 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy … although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's dream—and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering rendition of that dream celebrates.
Norman Jope, Paul Scott Derrick & Catherine E. Byfield (eds.) The Companion to Richard Berengarten
Published 2016. Paperback, 460pp, 9x6ins, £24.95 / $39.95
ISBN 9781848614475 [Download a PDF of the Introduction to this book here.]
This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the author's Selected Writings
series, guides readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years — not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival — and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers.
Andrew Jordan The Trusty Servant
Published 2022. Paperback, 70pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848618442 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
I chanced to see Old English verse in paragraphs like prose, obsolete characters redolent of atmospheres we are no longer encouraged to admit. An ancient tradition, reaching beyond us into new forms, frames what we might hand over or betray.
‘The status of the Underground as an ‘imagined village’ where everybody knows each other has brought about stability – and compromised the forward dynamic written into its charter. This describes, at least vaguely, the role of the malcontent. No-one is more malcontent than Jordan. . . . To speak seriously of ‘hegemony’ challenges the warm identification between writer and reader which is the attraction of poetry for so many readers. It launches a critique of participation.’
—Andrew Duncan, A Poetry Boom 1990–2010
Must we conform to the current state of poesy, and thus trade in cosy arrangements, or might we say instead that now the truth of poetry is vital and endangered? When the answer to that question is in doubt, the time has come to find a Trusty Servant.
Andrew Jordan Hegemonick
Published 2012. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612204 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Memory and rehearsal. The cognitive processes upon which we have learned to depend, they keep us in our context, which is where we are screwed. She said, "Use your imagination to set yourself free, be inspired to think the unthinkable." And I did. But there are so many things that contain us.
Hegemonick
is a 'free history' of the war against children, something unearthed; it is a delusional narrative, an ode to oblivion; a hymn to the goddess, the once and future porn queen; a therapeutic journal, partially rewritten; a decoy (but not a plan).
Andrew Jordan Ha-ha
Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700127 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems explore the remnants of a system of ancient narrative trackways that criss-cross the landscapes of south and south west England. These flows of energy underpin the hermetics of enclosure. They are explored here for the first time. This book might be a strategy—a self help manual for the ontologically dispossessed—or just an encouragement to trespass in the newly enclosed purlieu of the self. Tell it how you want, emblematic landscapes—and how we perceive them—can mirror identity and relationship, creating a cultural space within which both can become tenable.
Alice Kavounas Ornament of Asia
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610613 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Ornament of Asia, Alice Kavounas engages us with daring personal stories, as well as quotidian moments, expressed in vivid, precise language.
Following on from The Invited
(Sinclair-Stevenson), with its "brilliant lyrical style" (Alan Brownjohn), Alice Kavounas has deepened and widened her range. She writes from an unusual perspective: a New Yorker whose father escaped from his idyllic birthplace in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire to build a new life in America.
Alice Kavounas Thin Ice
Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613157 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Thin Ice takes the reader on an odyssey of the imagination, with poems whose sources range from a childhood in Maine, to New York City of the Vietnam era, to our paranoid post-9/11 world. There is a measure of relief in the quotidian pleasures of our beleaguered natural environment, whether from a terrace on a Greek island, or the poet's garden in Cornwall. Thin Ice follows Alice Kavounas' earlier collections, Ornament of Asia , and The Invited.
Alice Kavounas Abandoned Gardens — New & Selected Poems
Published 2017. Paperback, 152pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615366 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Here is a poet well-travelled in worlds both exterior and interior. Abandoned Gardens
is a powerful and essential distillation from this poet’s three collections, plus a substantial volume of new work. Locales range from the poet’s native America, to her family roots in Greece, and to the UK. Letting go of places and people is a key theme. Unflinching, engaged, observant, authentic, these poems consider the ways in which exile and displacement, caused by the ruthlessness of historical events, impact on our lives. Nothing could be more relevant at the present moment. This, and other subjects, are scrupulously delineated in poems that hold their nerve, whose focus is unsparing, insightful and immediate. Alongside an often rueful clarity there is much wit, fluidity of language, restrained lyricism, and a skilful and varied use of form." — Penelope Shuttle
Alice Kavounas One Step at a Time
Published October 2023. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618947 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
“Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog’s ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of an African finch, or in finding herself a holidaying bystander in 1968, witnessing tanks en route to the invasion of former Czechoslovakia. This acutely-assembled collection is rich in such telling intersections, and her narrative energy is flawless. She follows threads of thought and memory and imagination with exact insight and compassion. She reminds us that unless we give honour and attention to the past, we are lost. Her poems are rich in those qualities that we require of poems, so that we may better comprehend and celebrate our human lives.” —Penelope Shuttle
David Kennedy (ed.) Necessary Steps
Published 2007. Paperback, 192pp, 9x6ins £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700639
A collection of essays, several of which previously appeared in David Kennnedy’s magazine The Paper, revolving around poetry, walking, elegy and the spiritual. Contributors are Andrea Brady, Ian Davidson & Zoë Skoulding, John Hall, Sarah Law, Jennifer Moxley, Stuart Mugridge, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Malcolm Phillips, Peter Riley, Michael Symmons Roberts, Josh Robinson, Jane Routh, Penelope Shuttle, Lawrence Upton and Stephen Vincent.
David Kennedy The Apple and the Mountain
Published 2015. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614260 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In as much as you can read poetry and look at paintings you will find serious delight in David Kennedy’s poems about Cézanne. The sort of concentration required here however is not an endorsed, mainstream activity. It does not sell beans or financial products; it is simply about seeing. … To look at the paintings and read these poems simultaneously is a deep and rare pleasure." — Kelvin Corcoran
Aaron Kent Angels the Size of Houses
Published 2021. Paperback, 72pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617667 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Every poem is a dizzy word-dazzle, a dance of images, expressing a real life of work, babies, love and loss. Some are shaped by word-music. Some scatter the page and the mind, stretching poetry to its limits, and leave me wondering. No bad thing." —Gillian Clarke
"Here, in this beautiful book, is the poetry of the possible. With words that are 'heaven sent and glitter prone', Aaron takes us on a journey that is as vital as it is extravagant, urging us into the fantastic, and turning our everyday scenes into glittering vistas. It is a collection to be dipped into again and again, one that leaps with language, and lends its readers fresh
eyes." —Theophilus Kwek
Bridget Khursheed The Last Days of Petrol
Published 2022. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617933 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
My interest is in ecopoetry and the teetering intersections between landscape (or the shape of things), nature and population. The new collection, The Last Days of Petrol, centres on how we cannot imagine that the world as we know is about to change in personal, political or global terms. Summed up in a couple of quotes: one from George Eliot – “A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death.” And one that is included in the collection itself from Hugh MacDiarmid – “It is a frenzied and chaotic age, Like a growth of weeds on the site of a demolished building.” We continue to search for our homes and perhaps that will transform our relationship to earth. (Bridget Khursheed)
Kenny Knight Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend
Published 2022. Paperback, 86pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618145 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘When I write I take things from everywhere / like a magpie and twist them.’
The lyrical verve, wit and tenderness of Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend
are signature qualities of Kenny Knight’s poetry. He writes about lived experiences noticeably free of the self-important theorising in plentiful supply elsewhere in the House of Poesy. This does not indicate any sort of abandonment of artifice, that necessity in poetry like this is of a different kind. The artistry here is absorbed in the exchanges of human voices and graced with a magpie poetics, ‘while the wind blows off the Atlantic/like one of Bob Dylan’s songs.’
Kenny Knight A Long Weekend on the Sofa
Published 2016. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615014 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Kenny Knight’s second collection offers more explorations of his Plymouth childhood and the absurdities, as well as the joys, of his adult years. He is still amazed by the fact that Lobsang Rampa was a plumber from Plympton, by the roster of bands he saw at the fabled Van Dike Club, and by the vibrancy of the more recent local literary scene. The author’s keen eye and gentle, deadpan sense of humour make these poems as memorable as those in The Honicknowle Book of the Dead.
Kenny Knight The Honicknowle Book of the Dead
Published 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610170 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Connoisseurs of the arcane will no doubt wonder what it is about Plymouth and Buddhism: first Lobsang Rampa, a.k.a. Cyril Henry Hoskins, self-styled bodily host to a reincarnated Tibetan lama, and now Kenny Knight's frequent invocations of the Dalai Lama—occasionally accompanied by Ruth Padel—in a new Book of the Dead. While Nirvana might be hard to reach in this suburban district of Plymouth, the highlight of which is a misplaced 19th century fort, Honicknowle nonetheless reaches the status of myth in this debut collection of poems. The Honicknowle Book of the Dead
is where memory, movies, television and 1960s' rock bands merge into a surreal narrative; it is where Lorna Doone and Louis Aragon share pages with Hank Marvin and Elvis Presley, where the local poetry scene announces its presence, and where—in an alternate universe—Ted Heath led Britain into the Common Market, Ted Heath, the band-leader, that is. For memory is confusion, and being young is confusing, and poetry is rarely anything but confusion. Welcome to extraordinary world of Kenny Knight.
Zbigniew Kotowicz Fernando Pessoa —
Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Published 2008. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins £10.95 / $18
ISBN 978-1-905700-31-8 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
With drawings and a cover painting by Aldous Eveleigh.
First published by The Menard Press in 1996, Zbigniew Kotowicz's long essay on Pessoa was the first book-length assessment of Pessoa's work in English. Twelve years later it remains an important work, and will help Anglophone readers come to grips with the astonishing work of this archetypal modernist master.
philip kuhn at maimonides table
Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610200 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
at maimonides table
is constructed out of a complex series of unstable texts woven through four inter-locking books. Although there is no easily defined path through this work there is perhaps a half-remembered clew, in book two, which takes as its starting point the well known Talmudic story of the four who entered the "garden"—a parable which can also be read for the dangers confronting those who seek PaRaDiSe. Here is an exploration of an im/possible ethics of messianic faith promising earthly redemption through those four exegetical portals of Talmudic reading. But such messianic longing also sits uneasily when cast in the shadows of a history steeped in so much pain & suffering.
Whilst this long book-length poem appears to confront specifically Jewish themes it can also be read and thought-through in non-denominational ways, not least because at its core lie questions concerning how we (individually and collectively) might still learn to become ourselves in peaceful relationship with others.
R.F. Langley Journals
Published 2006. 9x6ins, 144pp. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700004 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
R.F. Langley's Collected Poems
(Carcanet Press, 2000) was one of the poetic highlights of recent times, showing a sometimes sceptical public that a contemporary poet could still engage with the shades of Modernism and produce fascinating and original work. Throughout his life, the author has been maintaining a journal, which is part diary, part autobiography and part commonplace book; some extracts from these fascinating volumes have been appearing in P N Review
since 2002. This book offers a number of selections, ranging in time from 1970 to 2005, which will give admirers of his poetry a clearer idea of the author's other writings, which run in parallel with his poetry and sometimes provide the underpinnings for it.
Peter Larkin Leaves of Field
Published 2006. 8x5ins, 116pp. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562979 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Leaves of Field
contains three long sequences: the title poem, plus 'Open Woods' and 'Moving Woods', which together represent Peter Larkin's most recent forays into the eco-poetic field that he has made very much his own. This is a poetry that is both radical and luminous, blending scientific discourse with more expected poetic approaches. To write about nature in the contemporary world it is no longer possible to admire it from afar. In these poems nature is examined at an almost microscopic level, seen from within.
Peter Larkin Lessways Least Scarce Among — Poems 2002–2009
Published 2012. Paperback, 192pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612426 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"For Larkin, landscape is not so much a thing as a process, a kind of prosody marked by opening (which the prose poem enacts through clearings of verse) and by colonizing, to a rhythm not necessarily human. It is a process whose articulations colonize the poet-forester's abandoned grammars." —Jonathan Skinner
Peter Larkin Give Forest Its next Portent
Published 2014. Paperback, 194pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613843 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Larkin’s is the most radically decentered poetry of ecological apprehension and conscience that we have in English, and if it is also among the most estrangingly beautiful, that is no accident. Larkin’s verse rides its Modernist inheritances through and past what we now think of as postmodernism, fetching up on some farther, stranger shore.” —G. C. Waldrep
Peter Larkin Introgression Latewood
Published 2017. Paperback, 206pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615588 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Larkin’s writing maps out and conceptually creates a scarce, minimally legible layer, and does so as a form of adoration or communion – the presence of scarcity makes its opposite, creative plenitude, come as close as possible." —Edmund Hardy
Peter Larkin Tress Before Abstinent Ground
Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616752 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trees become myriad versions (instalments) of themselves without verging onto an unsensing multiplicity as they traverse partially resistant or patient terrains: so these poems explore contrasting tree-states, as sticks or joints, filters of directional light or self-submerged hedges, which are all manners of contraction, extension, mediation, shareable expression.
“Larkin’s ‘theological poetics’ assumes a world in which we could be said to be ‘short of nothing’, however ‘scarcely’ this is apprehended.”
—Simon Collings
Peter Larkin Encroach to Resume
Published 2021. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617568 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
These poems entwine round such matters as how roots move as they grow or how feet plant themselves, why a forest admits lanes and lines but obstructs them into shelter, how a tree might relate to all it isn’t, what the hidden domains of nature can mean in and for trees, or the way in which trees cast the skies themselves into flight. The two last poems envisage a body language for trees, or how a dead upright tree remains a living nub of forest.
“Setting up an ecological orientation against habitual ways of reading and perceiving language, Larkin’s poems offer scientifically descriptive close investigations of trees whilst implying an allegorical dimension. They do so by means of a range of registers that only gain their scarce value in relation to one another.” —Katharina Maria Kalinowski
Peter Larkin If Trees Allay an Earth Retrialling
Published 2023. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618954 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Larkin’s way of pulling language up by the roots – literally, as we have frequently to go back to the root meanings of words to understand his unorthodox grammar – does not make it easy for the reader, but he is a rewarding and deeply original poet.” —Isobel Armstrong
“No poet has ever given so much to trees – his thought, his attention, his invention – which lets him then, in turn, give these trees to us, and in ways that highlight the complexities of their architectures and their contexts, their interactions with the myriad communities in which they participate. This new collection branches out toward grasses, seeds, electricity … all propelled by a wonderful tanglework of sound that reflects the environmental networks in which trees play such a crucial role. This book is a sheer gift – of trees and to trees, and above all, to readers who love them.” —Cole Swensen
Peter Larkin Scarcely Carry All Vast Woods
Published 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619739
These poems explore further and future ways of plants and trees, and won’t duck from being permeated at the same time by irradiating horizons or tensile symbols which perform a vital role in any multi-dimensional inter-relations.
‘This is not a poetry about trees, but about trees as a means of thinking, the material through which we can and do think, a world, its ontology, its epistemology too.The tree as discourse. The tree as perceiver of what the tree needs to know.’ —Stephen Collis
Sarah Law Ascension Notes
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610781 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This collection makes a place for space and light. Language ascends and reflects back on itself in short lyrical poems and longer fragmented sequences. A woman, at a table, writing; Woolf's phrase echoes through these lines. Meditations on creativity and spirituality are as open-ended as the forms they take: the conclusion reached is one of the necessity of 'making the sign of the poet' in an always shifting and strangely illuminated human world.
Sarah Law Perihelion
Published 2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 116pp. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562825 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Prepare for some adventures in
Perihelion . These poems evoke shifting states of mind and heart, from childhood terrors to the wisdom of the mystic, with all the twists of love, doubt and insight which come in between. There are monsters in this collection (but are they generated by science-fiction or the psyche?); there is grace, there is art, and there is longing. In her writing, Sarah Law traces the dynamics of relationship and of solitude, pushing lyric poetry to a playful complexity, but allowing the poignancy of our human condition to flow through each poem. Perihelion is Sarah Law's third collection.
D.H. Lawrence: Look! We Have Come Through!
Shearsman Classics No. 11. Introduced by Jeremy Hooker.
Published 2011. Paperback, 126pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611566 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Lawrence ... describes the poems [in this first collection of his unrhymed poems] as "intended as an essential story, or history, or confession", the critical experience occurring in the period of, "roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life"—that is, from the age of 25 to 30. His Argument emphasizes the dramatic nature of the sequence. He speaks of "the protagonist" and of "the conflict of love and hate [that] goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness". Foreword and Argument complement each other: Look! is both a personal confession and a drama. In both respects, it is closely related to the three novels which belong to the same period, 1912–1917. (From Jeremy Hooker's Introduction)
D.H. Lawrence Birds, Beasts and Flowers
Shearsman Classics No. 12. Introduced by Jeremy Hooker
Published 2011. Paperback, 180pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611573 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
(1923) was the volume that Lawrence himself described as his best collection of poetry. Composed in various locations during his exile—in Italy, France, Germany and the United States—this long collection occupies a crucial place in the development of his poetry and is that rarest of creations: a masterpiece of modernist nature writing. This version offers the full text of the first British edition (which included the poems from Tortoises, excluded from the US edition). The prose prefaces, composed for a later re-issue are also included.
D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature
Shearsman Classics No. 13. Introduced by Jon Thompson.
Published 2011. Paperback, 196pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611580 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Studies in Classic American Literature
[...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the relationship between the Old World and the New, a new theory of the self, a theory of textuality (and a fearless demonstration of a radical, self-styled form of psycho-social criticism), a theory of art, a history of America, a critique of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest covert autobiographies in world literature (all the writers in the book represent either versions of Lawrence's self or versions of himself he felt he had to liberate). And, of course, it is a bravura interpretation of "classic" American texts, one of the most innovative and penetrating critical performances of modern times. —from Jon Thompson's Introduction.
Ágnes Lehóczky Swimming Pool
Published 2017. Paperback, 130pp, 8.25 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615427 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Here the text or the poem is a swimming pool, a pool in which language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or phenomenological spaces; fluid places for being, thinking or even swimming in the world. It is polyglot within English, let alone in relation to all the other tongues that are almost audible and to the maps of Europe that move to and fro somewhere beneath the text.
Ágnes Lehóczky Carillonneur
Published 2014. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613461 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poems in this collection take a new psychogeographical approach in order to explore urban landscape – both known and new districts of Sheffield and Budapest. Writing from the viewpoint of a outsider employing the palimpsestic texture of the prose poem, offers a new, so called 'nomadic poetics' which crosses not only languages and borders of physical places but the boundaries of origins and identities, suggesting that human psyche, collective memory and disparate selves overlap each other's psycho-topographic maps. Collaging both the factual and the invented – both diachronic and synchronic – layers of history and cultural heritage of cities, recycling the neglected and the forgotten, these poems continue to experiment with the poetics of almost-prose narratives re-mapping locations of a hybrid mind from amnesia and imagination.
Ira Lightman Duetcetera
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610118 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Duetcetera
is about voices taking each other for granted, saying "etc etc" and not listening, nevertheless turning out to duet. It contains double- and multi-columned poems, where each column can be read in its own right (or left), and also read across the columns. Most of the poems (and translations) were written separately from each other, but happen to fit together. The poems play separately in different rhythms and moods yet sound with and against each other.
Gerry Loose Printed on Water — New & Selected Poems
Published 2007. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700073 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A timely retrospective of a Glasgow poet, whose work should be better known outside Scotland. A mixture of ecology, politics, and meditation make these poems very much of our time. The book selects from 30 years of work.
Gerry Loose that person himself
Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610385 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A fox hears voices. A dogfox of indeterminate gender careers round desert USA, Hiroshima & Nagasaki in stolen cars & on foot. A barkingdog talks out loud & sings. A demotic fox listens & listens. A coyotefox lies. A coyote speaks truth. A kitfox reads the signs & tunes the car radio. Kitsune eats & drinks. They are all that person himself,
who is also summoner of kingfishers, bringer of acorns, old compound eye, the one geese kiss & the drinker of aftershock. that person himself
wanders in atom-bomb test sites, mooches in nuclear weapon fallout, from bar to deer park, from festival to razed landscape.
Gerry Loose An Oakwoods Almanac
Published 2015. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614352 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
With photographs by Morven Gregor.
Deliberately and quietly, Gerry Loose has spent years walking the woodlands to observe the poetry of clouds and winds; to cheer the dance of gnats and moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens and ravens.
An Almanac of two different woodlands, one in the Scottish west Highlands and one on Finland’s Baltic coast, it celebrates those woodlands and their human lives. With shipping and fishing reports of monks and witches landed, sea eagles and night walking, the voice of the stars and weather forecasts: the beauty and profundity of oakwoods are revealed in a shifting, precise prose.
Rooted in place through habitation and close observation; an exploration of Sunart and Saari through its languages: Gaelic, Finnish, English, birdsong and world news; heaping language onto landscape and excavating what’s been before, An Oakwoods
Almanac
reinvents a classic form.
Gerry Loose without title
Published 2024. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618664
"without title : it’s a modest name for a book, but also a refusal of the very idea of human ownership of land (was there ever a sillier phrase than ‘title deed’?). There’s an extraordinary clarity of sound in this work, rooted in Loose’s recollections of the troubadours in Montpellier and culminating in an airy sequence called ‘airs’ which sings along with literal birdsong. From Occitania and Japan to the woods and shores of Bute, Loose sees common ground everywhere: noticing familiar plants in strange places, finding friendship across a language-barrier, understanding the soil and the living and mineral beings that make it and are made from it. These poems often look back, but they’re filled with a forward-thinking optimism. The (un-)title sequence is written ‘for the symbiocene’, a time when humans and the natural world will find sustainable and mutually-beneficial ways to co-exist. It’s an endlessly strange and baroque celebration of exchange and equivalence and transformation, very funny as well as beautiful (‘it is the law / that bees / are fish’), putting us in our place and the fungus in fungibility." —Peter Manson
Helen Lopez Shift Perception
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610736 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Helen Lopez is a painter and poet who lives in Anglesey. This collection is her first book, but she has a long track-record as a painter with one-person exhibitions in England and Wales, and representation in a number of group exhibitions in Ireland, Belgium and the USA.
"Shift Perception
dares you to do precisely that: to change perceptual and linguistic gear. But you'll find you know more about its processes than you expect. And you won't have read anything like it before. This collection relentlessly reminds us exactly how powerful a tool language can be, in any number of different hands; I haven't read poetry as provocative or as exciting as this in a long while." —Alice Entwistle
Tony Lopez Only More So
Published 2012. Paperback, 260pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848611887 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In this twenty-first century poem, Tony Lopez samples and seamlessly combines writings from many fields of science and culture, composing by means of intuitive and discreet intervention something quite unique. In a review of Darwin (one 10% section of Only More So ) Ron Silliman described this writing as "the most exquisitely constructed prose I've ever read—more lush than Proust"; he wrote that it “just might be the most beautiful poetry collection ever written". Only More So engages the darkest aspects of human nature, extinction and genocide; it may also be the first Constructivist poem composed on the pleasure principle.
Tony Lopez False Memory
Published 2012. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. 2nd edition.
ISBN 9781848611948 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"[…] by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year [was] Tony Lopez's False Memory , a series of sonnet sequences collaging and remixing the white noise of 1990s Britain into a disorienting, sometimes hilarious, often sinister, and always satirical challenge."
—Robert Potts, The Guardian , 6 December 2003.
Tony Lopez (ed.) High on the Downs —
A Festschrift for Harry Guest
Published 2012. Paperback, 138pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612235 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. He read Modern Languages at Cambridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in Japan and England. With his wife, Lynn Guest, a historical novelist, he now lives in Exeter. His Collected Poems, A Puzzling Harvest, was published by Anvil in 2002. Subsequent collections include Some Time
(Anvil) and Comparisons & Conversions
(Shearsman). He is also the author of three novels and a number of translations from French and German. This festschrift
volume is published to coincide with his 80th birthday and features tributes from friends, colleagues and fellow poets and translators.
Tony Lopez & Anthony Caleshu (eds.) Poetry and Public Language
Published 2007. Paperback, 320pp, 9x6ins £17.95 / $28
ISBN 9781905700646 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A collection of essays and papers delivered at the University of Plymouth’s eponymous conference in April 2007. Contributors include Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Allen Fisher, Richard Kerridge, Peter Middleton, Robert Hampson, William Rowe, Andrea Brady, Robert Sheppard, Ian Davidson, Carrie Etter, Scott Thurston, Ian Davidson, Philip Terry and several others.
Tom Lowenstein The Bridge at Uji
Published 2022. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617971 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Uji is now a suburb to the south of Kyoto and its bridge over the river was first constructed in the 10th century. At one end sits a modern representation of Murasaki who introduced the bridge into the last chapters of her novel, translated by Arthur Waley as The Tale of Genji.
I sat by the bridge for half a day some years back watching the water flow in one direction while foot passengers and traffic moved across at right angles.
On return to London, the physicality of the bridge returned qua metaphor, both as expressed by that particular bridge passage and as suggested by all modes of transition—though these might shift. In the poems that follow that metaphorical gesture repeats and may be interpreted idiosyncratically by separate readers.
Tom Lowenstein The Structure of Days Out
Published 2021. Paperback, 340pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25.
ISBN 9781848617681 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tom Lowenstein taught English in London and at Northwestern University between 1965 and 1974 . He first went to Tikigaq in 1973 and returned there to work with Asatchaq and other elders from 1975 to 1980. He studied Sanskrit at the University of Washington in the 1980s and now lives in London. He works part time online as an English tutor and continues to write poetry.
This book, written over a number of years, offers an account of work in 20th century Tikigaq, focusing on issues of culture change and the lives of both old and young Native American people. It is the fourth in a series of books about this part of Alaska following The Things that were Said of Them
(University of California Press 1992), Ancient Land: Sacred Whale
(Bloomsbury 1993) and Ultimate Americans
(University of Alaska Press 2008).
Tom Lowenstein From Culbone Wood — In Xanadu
Published 2013. Paperback, 238pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612297 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In the voice of an eighteenth century poet who the previous afternoon had written 'Kubla Khan', this long prose meditation takes the reader through an English pastoral landscape to the Central Asian steppe, the palaces and gardens of the Khan who ruled north China in the 13th century, and then back to rural Somerset. While Coleridge is implied, the garrulous and solipsistic persona who talks through these journals, essays and fantasias is an a-historical figure who lives largely in, and for imagination.
"A major work of the imagination. In no previous genre. Creates its own genre." —R.F. Langley
Tom Lowenstein Conversation with Murasaki
Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610651 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In contrast to the long, trans-cultural narratives of Ancestors and Species, Tom Lowenstein's new poetry is pared down in this volume to the briefest of utterances.
A long expensive journey. The landscape
grown stranger. A space at the end
where there's no more to interpret.
Tom Lowenstein Ancestors and Species. New & Selected Ethnographic Poetry
Published 2005. Paperback, 9x6ins, 152pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562740 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tom Lowenstein's work as poet and as ethnographer (specialising, above all, in the Inuit of Alaska) has always been interpenetrative, the poetic work deeply informed by the scholarly. This volume selects poetry from his whole career to date, concentrating on the faultline where his ethnographic concerns meet his poetic concerns. Ancestors and Species
makes it clear that Tom Lowenstein is one of Britain's most remarkable poetic voices, fascinating and impossible to categorise.
Rupert Loydell (ed.) From Hepworth's Garden Out
Published 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611245
From Rupert Loydell's first visit to this small Cornish harbour town—an event recorded in one of the poems included in this book—he, along with many others, has been fascinated by the combination of sea, light, people and painting that constitute St. Ives. These themes, along with tourism & trade, myth and the nature of creativity itself, are the subject of this anthology, which has at its heart the sculptor Barbara Hepworth's garden and studio, now run by the Tate as a small museum. It is a secluded and magical place, however full of visitors, and it is from this small green oasis and its stone and metal inhabitants that this book starts its winding journey. Having explored Hepworth's garden and studied individual works of art, there follow introductions to painters such as Peter Lanyon, Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson, the poet W.S. Graham, and finally a view of 'the whole of the town'.
Rupert Loydell Boombox
Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610583 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848610583 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"There's something about [these] poems ... that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. [H]e can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena."—Brando's Hat
Rupert M Loydell An Experiment in Navigation
Published 2008. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700943 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Rupert Loydell's second Shearsman collection is another large compendium of his many-faceted experimental writing.
'Loydell renders with equal deftness the plainsong of direct statement and melodious phrasal waves of speech. While he acknowledges that it is ". . . easier to map out fictions and wallow in distant clouds that deal with linear time", Loydell gives terra firma its full due. His work displays engagement with the figurative "folded pocket map".' (Sheila E. Murphy)
Rupert M. Loydell A Conference of Voices
Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 137pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562566 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The latest collection by this energetic poet-artist-editor-publisher, whose poetic voice is one that has to be reckoned with in the new century. Rupert Loydell is editor of Stride and publisher of Stride Books. Conference
includes two full collections: one, the title collection, which concentrates on his more lyrical voice, and the second, Multiple Exposure, which is devoted to a more experimental turn of work.
Rupert M. Loydell Wildlife
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611528 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In these mercurial poems, real and imaginary events combine with overheard, quoted and misquoted voices to produce a slippery and unreliable series of opinionated poems. What appear at first to be heartfelt confessions reveal themselves to be exercises in ventriloquism, argumentative fictions that seek to subvert and surprise the reader. This poetry is a different kind of beast to what you might have expected.
Rupert M Loydell Ballads of the Alone
Published 2013. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613102 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These five sequences of linguistically-driven word patterns, draw on the visual and written work of named photographers to explore ideas of seeing, language and being. Each line sits on an another line, subtly asserting its right to be there as a thing in itself, yet also asking the reader why these phrases are placed where they are and just how they all link together. The relentless rhythmic noise of these poems—perhaps the equivalent of heavy metal—can detract from this process, whilst the coherence of form only emphasises the differences contained in this disturbing and elliptical work; but those who persevere will find a rewarding and original poetry, full of experiental moments as well as diverse music and perceptive thought. These are ballads for the 21st century: tough, fragmented and unsure of themselves, yet given to insight and swagger.
Rupert M. Loydell Encouraging Signs
Published 2013. Paperback, 212pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612990 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Since Rupert Loydell first began publishing his adventurous and wide-ranging Stride
magazine, not to mention his influential and critically lauded Stride Publications list, he has endlessly discussed poetry, art and music. These ongoing dialogues, whether by letter and email, in pubs, record shops or university seminar rooms, have always informed his own practice and cultural understanding. A selection of these, first published in a number of magazines and journals, are now gathered here together in chronological order. From a field in Cheshire to a quick response internet interview, via Manchester Exchange Theatre and a Fulham basement, these engaging and lively pieces chart a zigzag course through composition, poetics, publishing, inspiration and experiment. Encouraging Signs
is a poetics journal and a critical work, with a fascinating element of autobiography.
Rupert M Loydell The Return of the Man Who Has Everything
Published 2015. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614192 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In The Return of the Man Who Has Everything, Rupert Loydell continues to explore post-confessional narrative in his poems, as he has previously done in Wildlife
and the Smartarse
anthology. The Man Who Has Everything is an unlikely anti-hero, adrift in a world of instant gratification, momentary experiences and instant answers, in contrast to the music, art, books and conversation he prefers. Melancholic, witty and sometimes absurd, these new poems offer stories and observations, asides and assumptions, as they try to clear a way through the chaos that surrounds us and make sense of contemporary life.
Rupert M Loydell Dear Mary
Published 2017. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615199 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Dear Mary
poet and painter Rupert Loydell writes about art and life and how they intersect. Fascinated by both renaissance and contemporary painting, he re-invents moments of annunciation in today's world, and revels in the colours and sunshine of Italy. This is a world of wonder and surprise, where aliens abduct the Virgin Mary, 20th century rock singers find themselves collaged together and singing about her, infinite greys (and grays) blur together between other greys, Francis Bacon paints angels, and even the weather forecast predicts the future.
Rupert M Loydell The Age of Destruction and Lies
Published June 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618893 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this new book of poems Rupert Loydell writes about the world he now finds himself living in, questioning the damage caused by time, memory, lockdown, aging, politics, lies, neglect and disinformation. Whether grappling with social history, corrupt data, road-building, Grenfell Tower, urban graffiti, faith and fine art, or ‘the fickleness of language’, these damaged prayers and disbelieving explorations are ‘configured for maximum twitch’. And despite the resigned conclusion that ‘we are only ever likely to have a clear backwards view’, and even though ‘it is totally absurd to expect answers that might help explain our world’, Loydell clings to the way that ‘memory is all about being able to change the past’ and notes that ‘the future is here right now’.
Rupert M Loydell & Sarah Cave A Confusion of Marys
Published 2020. Paperback, 72pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616967 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In A Confusion of Marys
Rupert Loydell and Sarah Cave explore, write back to and re-imagine the story of the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, in terms of sequential writing, re-versioning, accumulation, variation and ekphrasis. Many paintings, photographs, videos and sculptures depicting the annunciation were used as research and inspiration, including works by Fra Angelico, Andy Warhol, Francis Picabia, Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte. The work is part of an ongoing exploration of this material and associated themes such as colour, contemporary art, spiritual/alien intervention and intrusion into the human realm, symbolism and the nature of belief and submission. Previous publications centred on these topics include Rupert Loydell's Dear Mary
(Shearsman, 2017) and the collaborative works Joyful Mysteries #1-5
and Impossible Songs
(Analogue Flashback, 2017).
