British Poetry Titles: Authors S to Z

Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / 20

ISBN 9781848610361 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The central poem in Wendy Saloman's new collection, and from which it takes its title, is the narrative of a woman's journey through various crises in Jewish history, from biblical times to modern Israel and Palestine. The protagonist, Rachel, is 'moving through time/as fire over water/as ash on ice'. 'Rivers and Revenants', the other main poem in the book, is again concerned with roots only this time the voyage is of a more personal nature: the author draws upon her own experiences of a visit to Lithuania in order to discover her grandfather's farmstead. In both these poems, and elsewhere in her work, there is conveyed the ever present drama between otherness and unity.

Published 2025. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619722

This is the author's fourth collection and the poems in it are, she says, the most personal she has ever written. They also make up what she says will be her final collection. As with her previous collections, the poems engage with the language she uses as her medium – and it is her third or fourth language, depending on how one calculates – in the manner of an observer on the outside looking in, rather than one inhabiting that language. It all goes to prove that native speakers do not have it all their own way when writing poetry in English. As the first 2 lines in the book say: "Lip-locked, / place-ridden."

Published 2021. Paperback, 105pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617711

Alexandra Sashe is a poet whose work is filled with a kind of religious ecstasy, influenced by the poetry of Paul Celan and, spiritually, by the mystical thinkers of the Eastern Church. Her background in four different languages infuses the entire book, leading to surprising but evocative discoveries as she stretches the resources of English, her second language, making it do things that are not always natural to it, but which need to be expressed in this way: poetry often attempts to express the unsayable, to explore the inner reaches of experience through language, and Alexandra Sashe’s work goes further along this uneven path than most of her contemporaries.

Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615502

Alexandra Sashe is a Russian poet who now lives in Vienna, and writes in English, her fourth language. This is her second Shearsman collection, following 2014’s Antibodies. A poet whose work is infused with a kind of religious ecstasy, her work has its roots in the work of Paul Celan and the mystical thinkers of the Eastern Church.

Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848612839

For the author, this body of work constitutes, in a certain sense, her own body — for a creative work, and a literary creation par excellence, may well be regarded as the creator's anamnesis. Each poem speaks of this or that symptom, brings to light what is hidden, exorcises what as yet resists light… And, as for the traces consigned to the dark, the author presumes they also fulfil their part adding to the chiaroscuro of her portrait. In short, art never ceases to shape the artist and – to hold him a mirror. However, this body, once accomplished and thus exteriorised, is shed as skin.

 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 2012. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612563 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The China Shop Pictures ranges widely in time, space and subject matter, encompassing Jacobite wine glasses, pedagogical horses, a Japanese invention for walking on water, and a medley of viewpoints both famous and anonymous—from Virgil and Gérard de Nerval to a woman who's in love with "the monkey they left on the moon" and a man who complains (unfairly) to a sales assistant that the umbrella he's bought has a design fault.

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 2014. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613454 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



With a sparse, haunting, often playful lyricism, the makers of empty dreams emerge like figures in the reels of an old, almost abandoned film. Their stories, often set in different countries which we may or may not know, tell of loss and estrangement, of betrayal and reconciliation, and of a search for the possibilities of renewal along the way.

Published 2016. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614703 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The prose poems in Identity Papers seek to construct a living bridge between the self and its shadow, between the self and other, and between present and past. They do so with a vulnerable faith, working with Heidegger’s dictum that all things must be allowed their time in darkness. Along the way, their narrators meet a series of disturbing, irresistible strangers. Identity Papers follows on from Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014). It is the second volume in a trilogy of prose poem collections.

Published 2018. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615724 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"The delight of Ian Seed’s brilliantly droll poems is that they are not entirely droll. They look and sound normal, like brief prose anecdotes told in a bar but the apparent normality is edged with disorientation, menace and anxiety. We slip over the edge in an instant and look to recover our balance but can’t quite. The world has gone, leaving behind a comical void. And that, we understand, is the nature of the world. The voice is controlled, in fact it’s perfect. It’s just that nothing else is." —George Szirtes

Published 2020. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848617230 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The prose poems in The Underground Cabaret form the final volume of a quartet, following on from New York Hotel, Identity Papers and Makers of Empty Dreams . 

"In The Underground Cabaret , Ian Seed is at his unsettling and uncanny best. In each of these tightly constructed pieces, Seed gives us people who are helpless in the face of absurdity, who miss each other or form only transient connections and who suffer alienation and loneliness in eerie and surreal encounters which emerge out of the seemingly ordinary and mundane. 'Just when I thought I’d turned everything inside out,' says one character; just when we think Seed has turned the world upside down as far as it will go, he turns it further, holds it tighter." —Andrew McMillan

Published 2005. 171pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9780907562627 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Every word in this book by John Seed is drawn from Henry Mayhew's writings on London, published in the Morning Chronicle from 1849 to 1850, then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, London Labour and the London Poor between December 1850 and February 1852, and then again in the four-volume work of the same title.

Published 2007. Paperback, 160pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781905700523 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The second volume of John Seed's exploration of Mayhew, recasting the voices from the original text in a Reznikoffian manner, freeing them from the confines of the narrative and thus letting us hear the voices in a new context.

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 2015. Paperback, 86pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613935 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Smoke Rising is a documentary poem. Very much in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony , it utilises oral sources to capture the speech – and perhaps the experience — of those who suffered the London Blitz. However, its elective affinities are also to Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished Arcades Project : “to carry the principle of montage into history… to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components… to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.”

Published 2018. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615816 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

melancholy occurrence  is the latest in a series of texts through which John Seed investigates the appropriation and reconfiguring of historical materials. Previous volumes in the series include Pictures from Mayhew (Shearsman, 2005) about which Allen Fisher said: ‘The substance of this work is astonishing, vivid, felt with a considerable and sensitive intelligence.’ Its successor, That Barrikins, (Shearsman, 2007) was commended by Iain Sinclair for its ‘reverse archaeology’: ‘His close ear, and neurotic sensitivity to the way a line breaks, reveals how, in the desperate grind of the city, confession aspires to the condition of song.’ And David Caddy commented on the most recent, Brandon Pithouse (Smokestack, 2016): ‘The singular fragments, juxtaposed and in disjunction, accumulate to produce a deeply moving montage of statistics and documentary experience. The rhythms and cadence of the vernacular emerge in both pain and humour…’ ( Tears in the Fence , 2016).

Published 2009. Paperback, 328pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848610033 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Music's Duel gathers work from across the Gavin Selerie's career, combining major sequences or extracts with a range of less available material, some previously unpublished. Placed together for the first time, these texts form an extended record of self and world, their focus twisting to reflect thought and language process. From a complex weave the book yields clarity and beauty, as in the treatment of landscape, death and desire. It is possible to see a development from heady, romantic pastoral to more satirical, closely-wrought urban texts, although continuities of concern and technique are evident. Distinguished by metaphysical wit and wordplay, Selerie's poetry excites both ear and eye. Genres and devices are torqued so as to enable the lyric tradition to operate within a fragmented sound and social context.

Published 2017. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615533 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

'The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come. The first poem announces 1917, the start of the Russian Revolution, and from there follows its aftermath, interspersed with passages from the Book of Revelations. Employing first-hand accounts and factual information, we are taken on a selected tour of 20th-century Russia with a few interconnected diversions on the way.' —Geraldine Monk

‘It is not only the scope and ambition of Semmens’s work that is striking. At each step we are given a poetry which examines the exact pathology of revolution itself, conveyed in a series of highly charged monologues’ —Kelvin Corcoran

Published 2020. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617209 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Aidan Semmens’s fifth collection of poems moves from the range of the world to the deeply personal, always placing the detail in historical context. Employing a variety of poetic techniques, he moves from the moral ambiguities of empire to the run-in to Brexit; from a reworking, forty years on, of the poem for which he was awarded the Cambridge University Chancellor’s Medal, to the breakdown of language suffered by his mother after an ultimately fatal stroke. 

Published 2004. A5 chapbook, centre-stapled, 16pp. Out of print.

ISBN 9780907562467

Robert Sheppard is well-known as a critic and a poet of a decidedly experimental bent—as exemplified by his enormous long poem Twentieth-Century Blues , many parts of which have been made available over the past decade or so. The Anti-Orpheus is a later composition which fuses his poetic and his academic concerns with poetics into one text, the whole full of humour, and of insight.

Published 2009. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610187 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. [...] As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories—real, fantastic, or both—are only our stories so far.

Published 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611351 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

These new poems use tense couplets and other 'centrifugal' forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act: "You'll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes."

Published 2017. Paperback, 122pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615656 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. For his last project before his disappearance around 2010, Van Valckenborch supposedly asked one poet from each of the EU states to write him a poem. Of course, he wrote them himself … Each poem was then supposedly translated into Flemish (or occasionally French) via robot (online) translators and the resultant poem ‘finalised’ by Van Valckenborch before presentation on this website. The poems that follow are best thought of as collaborations between Van Valckenborch and the 25 imaginary poets and the robot translator. (As the EU expanded so did the Union: there are now 27 ‘members’.)

      We have, as usual, been accused of making these translations ourselves, or even of making the poets up (many of them might take exception, a few might be rather tickled by that suggestion). Firstly our expertise does not extend to all the languages encountered. Secondly, our professional pride as translators would have prohibited the use of electronic translation devices and we have only been forced to enter into a secondary relationship with this medium by Van Valckenborch’s engagement with it, which we rather regret. —Annemie and Martin Krol-Dupuis (Brussels).

Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £14.95 / $23

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 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20-

ISBN 9781905700356 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

This is Colin Simms' third Shearsman collection. A noted naturalist and expert on birds of prey, he collects here his poems on the subject of gyrfalcons, magnificent raptor birds that he has studied in Britain, North America, Iceland and Siberia. The book also contains some of his field drawings of the birds.

Edited by Barry Schwabsky

Published 2016. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615106 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits , Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge , alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content . On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: ‘It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries’.

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 2019. Paperback, 109pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616431 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In her fourth collection Janet Sutherland explores the farm where she grew up; a 90-acre dairy farm in Wiltshire, rented by her parents, where they milked 50 cows and reared heifers on the nearby water meadows. The collection examines the farm as home from early beginnings to the farm auction at the end of their working lives. It is a poetry of landscape and water, of birds, beasts and other creatures, of life lived cheek by jowl with death, of memory and forgetfulness; all of it rooted in place. There’s an engaging inventiveness of form: a disused water mill reveals poems in its old bricks, the drowner revels in his craft, the work of the farm is observed with rigour and lyricism, investigating the uses of memory and landscape as routes to understanding. The final sections zoom outwards, challenging us to look at earth itself as a home farm.

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 2014. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613539 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem (and therefore must include some hate). The poem is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human mouth." — Irving Weinman

Edited & introduced by Mark Scroggins.

Published 2019. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Swinburne's first collection, Poems and Ballads (1866), generated a storm of critical and public controversy, being attacked for licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and the author was forced to transfer his works to another house. The present selection of Swinburne’s verse focuses precisely on what the first reviewers of the 1866 book found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ varieties. The anonymous review for the London Review called the poems ‘depraved and morbid in the last degree’; Robert Buchanan in the Athenaeum pronounced Swinburne ‘unclean for the sake of uncleanness’; and John Morley, in the most thorough and eloquent of the attacks (in the Saturday Review ), called the poems ‘nameless shameless abominations’, Swinburne’s ‘a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière’, and Swinburne himself ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’. Contemporary readers are less likely to condemn a poet for hinting at or even outrightly depicting sex, but Swinburne’s treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock. 

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, £12.95 / $20

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, £12.95 / $20

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 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610903 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

Internal Rhyme is a sequence in four parts which continues the author’s preoccupation with time and process as compositional elements. The book also explores how meaning can change when viewed from different perspectives as each poem in the book can be read vertically as well as horizontally. The subjects and themes are diverse and include poems responding to Blake, Klimt and Twombly alongside refigurings of the theoretical works of Alain Badiou.

Published 2011. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848611917. [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

This is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography.

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 2009. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611214 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

In this generous assembling of work from the past ten years, the Anglo-American poet Robert Vas Dias explores meanings and resonances inherent in art and the suggestive implications of objects which both make up the quotidian and help to define us. This is a poetry of 'domestic tranquillity' as well as chaos, of the absurd and the numinous, of the serious and comedic. Vas Dias is the author of eight poetry collections in the USA and UK, and has edited or co-edited four literary journals — two in the USA and two in the UK. His poetry and criticism have appeared in about 100 magazines and journals, as well as in a dozen anthologies. His previous collection was Leaping Down to Earth , 2008, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick. He is a tutor with The Poetry School in London and editor-publisher of Permanent Press.

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 2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700998 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

Accompanying Gilgamesh is Alan Wall's new collection of shorter poems and sequence, the centrepiece of which is the London section, in which the author inhabits the clothes of a number of old masters who have lived in London or its environs — Alexander Pope, of course, but also Thomas More, Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Burton, Rosenberg, Pound and others. Then, 'Lenses' deals with Alexander Topcliffe, the early astronomer, and the unlucky Marsyas also makes an appearance — the cast of characters is extensive, and each is presented with the skill of a novelist, mixed with the precision of the poet.

Published 2007. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700981 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

This volume features two long pieces — the title work — a version & partial transposition of the Gilgamesh epic—and the mixed work in verse and prose, Jacob , originally published in the 1990s and long unavailable. In both works history, myth and the present collide. Jacob was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize when first published.

Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611337 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]



Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. As a medical practitioner he broods about his patients; as a writer he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor. One thing at least remains constant — moonlight. The end of the western intellectual tradition, like Placebo himself, is insomniac. 

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 June 2024. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619173. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 LAUREL PRIZE. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 ASLE-UKI PRIZE.

Mounts Pond is a small urban pond on Blackheath, in south-east London, named for its dark earth. It is one of four ponds on the heath and the only one which comes and goes with seasonal weather. Records suggest it has been there for centuries. The pond is named after the small mound which rises like a tumulus beside it, the only rising on this levelled ground. It is a place famous for rebellions, political speeches, assemblies and sermons, with Wat Tyler and Michael An Gof of the Cornish rebellion both part of its history. 

          The pond swells and wanes with the season, is a barometer of the climate, and also a neighbourhood shared with the rhythms of crows and starlings, humans and plants. The pond is fragile and sometimes vandalised, occasionally rubbish strewn, a quilting point on the heath that speaks to depletion and survival, yet open to endlessly attuning, shifting, sometimes spectacular light, and mimic proposals. 

          Mimic Pond is part of a practice of ongoing documenting, which is my living here in this neighbourhood. ‘Born otherwise’ in Ponge’s words, the pond wells up and vanishes in these poems, and elsewhere in notebooks, photographs and a wider making. (Carol Watts)

Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616196 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The title sequence in John Welch’s new collection evokes early life experiences, some traumatic – material that had previously featured in his prose memoir Dreaming Arrival (Shearsman 2008). Whether suggesting the light ancient coinage can shed on contemporary politics or moving through and reflecting on urban landscapes, there is throughout the book a recurring preoccupation with the ambiguities involved in the business of being a poet and above all the sheer oddness of us as a species inveigled into language and unable to get out of it.

Published July 2024. Paperback, 74pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619326

Returns is John Welch's fourteenth collection since his first full-length volume appeared in 1984. This is writing that reflects on the strangeness of continuing to make poems, ‘Like a ball / thrown from an empty hand.’ There is the recurring sense of ‘an absence, embellished in the text’ carrying on ‘Until / It was the page that silenced him’. Along with this there is the expression of an intermittent feeling of ambivalence regarding the business of being a poet, the ‘life of it’. Other work in the collection is declarative and of a more direct address.

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 2017. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615373 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A new collection exploring the fine line between abundance and apocalypse.

"For some reason, slightly unfathomable, I am reminded of a forest we visited on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido where the annual winter ice festival is held. The forest is sprayed for days by the local fire department, but not before flowers and colored lights have been hung within the branches, so when the whole forest turns to crystalline ice, the lights burn from within, the whole crystal forest glows, and when you walk there, flowers look out from the ice, arrested in full bloom. It is all so unexpected, and so extravagantly beautiful–something essential in such crystallization, and with fire in its core. Well, this vision returned to me reading your manuscript." —Eleanor Wilner

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.

Shearsman Classics No. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.

Published 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611023 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was born at Allington Castle in Kent. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and served King Henry VIII in various capacities both at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1535, but was imprisoned in the Tower a year later following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, but also perhaps because of suspicion that he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn — a woman he had known for many years and with whom he had been linked at one time. He was released the same year, although he was to fall afoul of authority on at least two further occasions, only to be pardoned. He is remembered today as one of the most important poets in the English language, and as the man who brought the sonnet into English, with spectacular imitations and re-creations of Petrarch. His work is broader than that, however, and he showed himself to be a fine elegist and satirist, as well as a lyric poet of the very first order.

Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611153 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

I always seem to begin with the photographs". The photos in questions were taken in Iran and date from the 1930s to the 1960s. They chronicle the rise and fall of an Iranian patriarch, the lion of the title, and they haunt the imagination of his son, the narrator. We take a poetic and spiritual journey with the photographs, each of which yields a sequence of texts in poetry and prose. Lion is a narrative of sorts, but it is necessarily disruptive and disjunctive — ideas and literary structures are questioned, even the fixed boundaries of language itself are challenged. Lion is a meditation on the role of kinship in the development of cultural identity and the importance of rites of passage as cultural artifacts in the modern world. Ultimately, Lion is about the impact of the loss of identity amongst the Iranian diaspora, and the creation of myths of origin. The photographs create an imagined hinterland on the edge of reality, which is every bit as vivid as any material place. It is from this created world that narrator draws his energy, the Iran of disaporic memory, the Iran of the photographs, the Iran of the Mind.

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).



Published 2015. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614567 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astronomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. The Messier Objects are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation.