British Poetry Titles: Authors S to Z

 Published 2016. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614871 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]

 A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas – whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille) – is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as archipelagic, maritime, aloof.  His own account of the voyage is lost. Lesley Saunder fills in the gaps

Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616424 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Flying School is a book of beautifully crafted poems about the contrivances by which we attempt to enrich or repair our lives. One dominant image is flight and, more specifically, parachutes – reflecting an aspiration to come to terms with our hardest challenges, including the reality of death. The book ends with a series of heartbreaking elegies for the poet’s father, unflinching in their grief-stricken gaze.

      In this highly various collection, plain-spoken storytelling jostles against more oblique or lyrical voices, while sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and ‘triplets’ (mixing traditional and consonantal rhyme) offer the pleasures of accomplished form. The common factor is a vividly observed aliveness, often inflected with wit. Saxton has conjured a teeming imaginative world that never fails to convince, entertain or move.

Published by Gratton Street Irregulars; distributed by Shearsman Books.

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613737 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

John Seed is the author of eight collections of verse, including: Divided into One (Poetical Histories, 2003), New and Collected Poems and Pictures from Mayhew (both Shearsman, 2005), That Barrikins: Pictures from Mayhew II (Shearsman, 2007), and Manchester : August 16th & 17th 1819 (Intercapillary Editions, 2013).

Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9780907562504 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Otters and Martens was Simms' first major British collection in some years, and — at the time — his largest-ever book. The volume unites all of his poems that concern or revolve around otters and martens, poems in which his concerns as a poet fuse with those of the naturalist that he also is. For lovers of poetry and mustelidae alike.

Published 2005. Paperback 9.25 x 7.5ins, 208pp. £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9780907562931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This volume is a second retrospective edition of the work of Colin Simms, covering his North American poems and showcasing his six long poems on Amerindian themes: Rushmore Inhabitation, No Northwestern Passage, Parflèche, Missouri River Songs, A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course and Carcajou . While these poems still demonstrate the author's remarkable use of language they also show his engagement with open-field poetics, an aptly American format for the wide open spaces of the Great Plains and the all-encompassing narrative that he spins for the reader. To these long poems are added more than 50 shorter poems on connected themes, drawn from throughout the poet's career.

Published 2021. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848617629 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

M. Stasiak grew up in Newfoundland, and now lives and works in London. Her work has been published in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Brittle Star, Interpreter’s House, Envoi, Urthona, Iota, Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and Shearsman . This is her first chapbook.

Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617162 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In The Slowing Ride Stone reclaims his role of cerebral journeyman, an inveterate trawler of history, both recent and far distant, moving back and forth between epochs and events, between personalities, cultures and landscapes, leaving behind delicate silken threads of suggestion, salvaging what remains of the humanistic in delineating the replicating tragedies and punishments endured by the fallen and the uncomprehending, those who unknowingly share a non-linear time. Like its predecessors The Slowing Ride reintroduces that rare species, an English born European poet ‘conjuring extraordinary visions of beauty and despair, joy and horror, revelation and nostalgia’.

Published 2024. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619425

‘Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shores of our self-destruction, read him before the tide comes in…’ wrote the poet Hugo Williams after reading his debut collection Glaciation in 2007, which went on to win the international Glen Dimplex Award for a first collection of poetry in 2008. Now some seventeen years later and four collections on, the tide has certainly come in and we note from our precarious vantage point in Western Europe, is rising month on month. Immortal Wreckage is Will Stone’s fifth collection and the poems collected here were nourished from the profoundly unsettling years that began with the Covid pandemic, and those in its wake which have sired a global societal disequilibrium which shows no sign of constriction. The poems of Immortal Wreckage attempt to gain purchase at least inwardly on this unprecedented dystopian extravaganza, the poet’s raptor like eye passing like a lighthouse beam in the darkness with regular insistence, illuminating if only briefly the vainglorious landscape of new ruins we have built, overseen by political coteries of rapscallions and charismatic psychopaths masquerading as honest brokers of progress or reform, this immortal wreckage which we have bequeathed to the children, our descendants.

Published 2024. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619395


Firebird explores the fires of destruction and rebirth, both literal and spiritual. Each poem invites the reader to consider ‘the necessity of mystery’, where grief and joy, death and rebirth, stagnation and transformation exist alongside one another, ‘exactly as they are’. 

        In two sections of ekphrastic poems, Em Strang engages with visual art by American painter and erstwhile nun, Meinrad Craighead, and Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio. The poems speak specifically to Craighead’s 2004 Bosque Fire series – images made in the wake of a devastating fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived – and to a number of Caravaggio’s religious paintings made between 1595 and 1609.

        Firebird is an invitation into a unitive perspective, where the source of all creation ‘is a presence that protects us from nothing, even while it sustains us in all things’ and where ‘even if we burn to death, the fire is trustworthy’ (James Finley). These are poems of radical love and courage in the face of ongoing fire.

Published 2023. Paperback, 266pp, 9 x 6 ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848618824 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In her fifth book Janet Sutherland explores journals written by her great-great-grandfather, George Davies, as he travelled to Serbia with his Queen’s Messenger friend, Mr Gutch, in 1846 and 1847. She writes her own journals during a trip to Hungary and Serbia in 2018 and after her cancer diagnosis and treatment during the first Covid lockdowns of 2020. Poems, journals, letters, messenger regulations and other testimony, both imaginary and actual, question, answer and echo each other in a radical collage. All the writers are grappling with uncertainties. Sutherland is intrigued by what these testimonies reveal and hide. Part history, part poetry, part travelogue – these journals, poems and other writings interweave the then and now, the observed and imagined. What do we know about these messages and their messengers? What secrets and possibilities might these words carry? What can they tell us about ourselves?

Published 2015. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613591 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]

“Harriet Tarlo is at the forefront of a group of poets who take writing about topography and nature seriously; she finds new ways to express in challenging and exciting language ideas and images that could be beyond language but aren’t, in her very safe and skilful hands.” —Ian McMillan

Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8 x 8ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617353 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: ‘Silenzio’. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through Luke Thompson’s first collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says. 

      Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquist’s dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all deployed in this exploration of sense and silence through themes of bodily identity, grief, the divine and other species.

Published 2006. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9780907562832 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here. ]

Hold is Scott Thurston's first book-length collection, and covers ten years of work, which have for some time now needed collecting. This is work which owes a lot to the tradition of innovative and experimental poetry in Britain and the USA, but which also sends out feelers in other directions. A radical but communicative poetry.

Published 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700325 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

Scott Thurston's second Shearsman collection consists of three long sequences of poems, and represents a significant development from his first collection, Hold . Momentum aims to recuperate what may be had of a lyric tradition refracted through a post-Language sensibility; generating, amongst other things, responses to Proust, Shelley and the experience of dancing. Change and time are intrinsic to the book’s accumulative structure and the way in which the line-breaks argue with syntax attempts to show the process, the movement, of thinking in language in time — not a stream of consciousness, but rather more like a weir, a wave, or a rubble-filled alleyway.

Published 2023. Paperback, 154pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618770 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Thurston’s poems always danced, as the early writings here demonstrate, in line and spacing, long before dance as a practice became his poetic focus and his ethical metaphor for other modes of action and introspection. They always measured a world to be moved into, fine lines across fine distinctions. His texts become cues for performance, in performance, but just as important is the insistent voice of the poem as it becomes increasingly the voice of the poet: restless, relentless, carrying us with it. This is all for us: ‘in dancing your own rite you don’t/ do it for yourself.’ This is crystallized in the culminating triumph of the lockdown sonnet sequence, ‘A Hard Grief’; it reaches out from our shared resignation and hope. We’re all ‘searching/ for the shapes that shadowed the meaning/ until the flow showed up’, and Thurston is our invaluable lead.” —Robert Sheppard

Edited by Ian Brinton, and with a Preface by Phil Maillard.
Published 2023. Paperback, 130pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619098 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

One evening in 1961, in the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Surrey, 20-year-old Chris Torrance – solicitor’s clerk with novelistic ambitions – encountered a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians. For Torrance, this was “the most important day of my life”. Dazzled, he was soon joining in their activities: wild weekends in the country, his first scary public readings, and, from 1963, co-editing the poetry and jazz magazine Origins/Diversions. In literary terms, Torrance’s greatest influence from the group was Bill Wyatt, who introduced him to “useful short forms” like haiku, and to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. Wyatt, later a prolific poet, translator, naturalist, and the first Zen monk ordained in Britain, remained a life-long friend and ally.

          […] In the spring of 1965 Torrance gave up his seven-year career in solicitors’ offices, and joined the local Parks Department as a labourer. As the title Green Orange Purple Red implies, he wanted a more sensual take on the world via his writing – a Keatsian ambition. About then he found a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry, and embarked on a lifelong ‘love affair’ with those writers and that energy. In particular, the enormous presence of Charles Olson, seemed to confirm that – in terms of big ambition and local detail – Torrance was on the right track with his writing.

          Validation came in July 1966, with ‘The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision’. Torrance was cutting the grass outside the Laundry, when his vocation was revealed to him: ‘I’m going to be a poet’. It wasn’t a ‘vision’; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed (“I accepted it completely”). As The Voice diminished into the clatter of machinery and the chatter of the laundry girls, the path ahead lay clear. —Phil Maillard

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613652 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here .]

Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American born and now resident in London, has published ten collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of which are London Cityscape Sijo and other poems (Perdika, 2012), and Still · Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice (Shearsman, 2010). This chapbook brings together a series of uncollected prose poems.

Published 2012. Chapbook, 30pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612464 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this is a single long sequence of poems. Since collected in Endtimes (see below).

Published 2023. Paperback, 142pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618633 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In her debut collection, Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe. Barking was one of the most significant abbeys in Britain and a centre of learning for women, it offered space to the devout, the bookish, and those who simply did not fit anywhere else. These poems introduce some remarkable characters: poets, visionaries, washerwomen and queens, and range from the sacred feminine to the protofeminist. Whether one reads The Lost Book of Barkynge as a series of monologues or as a sequence evoking time and place, what emerges is an excavation of forgotten stories. Here the lost voices of the women of Barking are restored in poems that voice the power and poignancy of their lives –

So our words      let them reach      then flicker into brightness.

Published 2023. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618985 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Fugue State is John Wilkinson's fifteenth book of poems, and the most fiery. In it, the world is thicker than ever, crowded with all sorts of things, from futures to the exhumed bodies of 80 girls. His muse is a fly, try to catch it. His sentences zigzag. His unique fashion of figuration risks cutting ties with 'verisimilitude.' Opposing everything that blocks, hardens, locks, and pursues a single, choke-hold course, he takes his stand on the edge of chaos, not instituted law. Thus would he champion the precept of refreshment, not least the natural cycle of living things. More, he curses 'he misbegetting Gods [who] fuck in beach-huts of a cement Lethe.' Data-streams, a "horizon of ones and zeros," self-driving cars, drones, crypto-currency, robots – these are for him aspects of the concretization of modern culture. Fighting its sway, he is as steely as he is mercurial. Force is good if it's on the side of 'the vital artery.' In the last decade Wilkinson has become a master of the longish poem — here, for instance, 'East Lake' and 'Xipe Totec.' Of poets now writing in English, he is the freest and most elusive-on-principle, the most capable of pulling out a language blade and using it." —Calvin Bedient

Published 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619395

In 2011 Duncan Wu moved into the forests of northern Virginia in a place largely unchanged since the Civil War. Here, he learnt, indigenous people had once lived in considerable numbers but at some point after the War all had disappeared. Contemporary documents held in local archives provided no explanation although they confirmed all indigenous settlements had gone from the area by 1778. He would learn a good deal more by walking through the wilds of northern Virginia with his dog Dakota, who would guide him to the places that witnessed the end of Powhatan and his people.

Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612495 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this shows the further development in Michael Zand's work since his debut volume, Lion (2010).