Harriet Tarlo Gathering Grounds, 2011-2018
With images by Judith Tucker
Published 2019. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £16.95 / $27.50
ISBN 9781848616691 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems were all written as part of collaborative place-based projects with the artist Judith Tucker. They emerge from what could be described as fieldwork, poetry based on walking through, and engaging with, place, with Judith, and, increasingly, with people who live in and visit the areas concerned. Some research into the areas concerned has also taken place and contributed to the work. Up until this moment, they have been pieces in flux. Shorter related poems or fragments have been exhibited with drawings and paintings and many of these longer pieces have been read at openings and poetry readings. Here they can be seen as a body of work. Although the earliest of these poems was originally written in 2011 and the latest in 2019, they have been edited and re-visited throughout the whole period, and indeed the places are also re-visited. (Harriet Tarlo)
Harriet Tarlo Field
Published 2016. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615113 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Field
is a collection of poems based on the close observation of a single field, glimpsed from a railway line near Penistone (South Yorkshire), which has been edited down to 60 short lyrical poems tracing seasonal and ecological changes as well as the relationship of people to place.
Harriet Tarlo Poems 2004-2014
Published May 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
Harriet Tarlo Poems 1990-2003
Published 2004. Paperback, 154pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562450 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume of poems spans over a decade of writing and includes all of the author's short poems and shorter sequences considered worthy of collection. It is a book in three parts, each section following a roughly chronological trajectory from 1990–2003. Read in order, the three sections overlap in time and space, while allowing the reader to follow the development of the writing. The first two parts of the book include short poems, most under a page in length, and cover two discrete areas of writing. 'Writing outside' consists of short poems engaged with language and landscape, while 'Voices' brings other perspectives into the work and is concerned with speech patterns and sounds. The third section of the book shows the poet's development of the sequence form in which shorter units of writing are strung together, allowing for longer patterns of sound and language. The latter two sections incorporate found or "heard" fragments of speech, indicated by the use of italics.
Harriet Tarlo (ed.) The Ground Aslant — An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry
Published 2011. Paperback, 180pp, 9.25x7.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610811 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that "landscape writing" need not be confined to literary tourism, or the verbal equivalent of chocolate-box imagery, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. The Ground Aslant is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing, and presents the work of Tony Baker, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Thomas A. Clark, Ian Davidson, Mark Dickinson, Mark Goodwin, Nicholas Johnson, Peter Larkin, Helen Macdonald, Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley, Peter Riley, Colin Simms, Zoe Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts.
Andrew Taylor Radio Mast Horizon
Published 2013. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612624 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848612624 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This collection, the author's first full-length book, gathers poems written over the past decade. The poems, some gathered from previous pamphlets, are concerned with place, love, identity and mortality. Nature is never far away and neither are the watchful eyes of the cities of Liverpool and New York, their tidal rivers and connections.
Andrew Taylor March
Published 2017. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615052 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Building on his debut collection Radio Mast Horizon
(Shearsman Books, 2013) Andrew Taylor takes the reader on a journey through landscapes and places such as the Welsh hills, the West Coast Mainline and the north docks of Liverpool.
Travel is a recurring theme throughout these poems, alongside music and the seasons and the shifts they bring. From having coffee in quiet city-centre cafés to travelling around complete rail networks, Taylor invites the reader into a world that is both personal and universal.
Andrew Taylor Not There — Here
Published 2021. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617872 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Continuing the themes of travel explored in his previous Shearsman collections, Radio Mast Horizon (2013) and March (2017), Andrew Taylor takes the reader from England into pre & post-Brexit Europe, negotiating the arrival of the nightingale, European breakfasts, fast trains into Paris, and the ‘beautiful drift’ of weaving grasses. The reader is treated to the minimalist notion of moments in time alongside the traversing of travelators in Montparnasse and the intricacies of the 280-character form.
Luke Thompson Singing about melon
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.
Nathan Thompson the arboretum towards the beginning
Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610149 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Nathan Thompson mixes process and poetics with a dry wit, to produce texts that hold the reader's hand through landscapes of the tangential (with occasional diversions back to the straight and narrow). This first collection juxtaposes prose poems with more traditional verse idioms, to create a whole that can be read either as a kind of disjunct musical narrative or as a collection of free-standing associative post-lyrics.
Nathan Thompson The Visitor's Guest
Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611818 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"These poems ask about the nature of avowal and disavowal. Is a poem a love poem because it says so, or by way of an agon of interior discord? Is to merely state something ever equivalent to its understanding? Does the path of the poem take us beyond uncertainty or to its heart?" —Louis Armand
Isobel Thrilling The Language Creatures
Published 2007. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700219 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Isobel Thrilling was born in Suffolk, and brought up in a mining village in the north-east of England; she read English at Hull University and spent many years as Head of Service for Teaching English as a Second Language in a London borough. She first started writing after eye-operations that saved her sight. She is married, with a son, a daughter and two grandchildren. She has been widely published in magazines and newspapers, and her work has been included in many anthologies from publishers such as O.U.P, Longman, Hodder Headline and Macmillan. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Television, ITV; and BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has won many prizes including those at Bridport, Stroud and York. One of her poems has been set to music by the pianist and composer Philip Martin. Several have been used by a calligrapher living in California. This is her fourth collection.
Scott Thurston Hold
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.
Scott Thurston Momentum
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.
Scott Thurston Internal Rhyme
Published 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Scott Thurston Talking Poetics
Published 2011. Paperback, 160pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
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.
Scott Thurston Turning: Selected Poems 1995–2020
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
Chris Torrance Selected Early Poems
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
Siriol Troup Beneath the Rime
Published 2009. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610309 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Beneath the Rime
is Siriol Troup's second collection of poems, following Drowning up the Blue End
which was published in 2004. Rooted in real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Beneath the Rime
explore memory, art and language, asking above all what it is to be human. This new collection finds her adopting voices — human and animal, colloquial and historical — in her search for a 'proper viewing distance' where life's messy fragments fuse together, enabling us to understand our position — and negotiate our survival — in a troubling world where 'our tracks once told us where we were' but which now seems, at times, no more than a 'shudder on the horizon'.
Siriol Troup No Names Have Been Changed
Published 2017. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615441 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"No Names Have Been Changed, Siriol Troup’s third collection, offers strong, strange visions. Her poems, assured and varied in technique, are equally at home in ancient cities or on today’s derelict coasts. She is a shrewd observer of times and trends: the Afghan coat, the incense-burner… In her lines, Meissen plates are set aside by violence; knives flash through Venice. But her poems are also strong in sympathy, for the old lady requesting gin and tonic on her deathbed, for the tenderness between a man and his ‘beautiful collared dog’. Troup’s long knowledge of languages leads to a final gift to her readers: the wit, freshness and variety of her translations and re-imaginings." —Alison Brackenbury
Gael Turnbull There are words… Collected Poems
Published 2006. Paperback, 496pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $32
ISBN 9780907562804 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Gael Turnbull — poet, doctor, performer and morris-dancer — was for many years a transatlantic poetic nexus in the UK, both through his own work, and through his pioneering Migrant Press, founded in 1957, an early outlet for figures such as Roy Fisher and Edward Dorn. This Collected
gathers almost all of Gael Turnbull's published poetry as well as a selection of uncollected and unpublished works.
Gael Turnbull More Words — Gael Turnbull on Poets and Poetry
Edited by Jill Turnbull & Hamish Whyte
Published 2012. Paperback, 204pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610934 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
This volume brings together a number of hard-to-find reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a central figure in the interaction between American and British poetry in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and also publisher of the excellent small press, Migrant. Shearsman published his Collected Poems, There are words… in 2006, and this companion volume fills out the picture of an influential figure in British letters, with a number of pieces on poets such as Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher, as well as nods in the direction of Olson and Creeley from the other side of the Atlantic. The book is introduced by the poet's widow, Jill Turnbull, who has also made the final selection of pieces to be included, in consultation with Hamish Whyte, Turnbull's long-time publisher in Edinburgh.
Robert Vas Dias Still • Life
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.
Robert Vas Dias Arrivals & Departures
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.
Robert Vas Dias & Julia Farrer Black Book
Published 2016. Paperback, 64pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £12.95
ISBN 9781848614895
Black Book: An Assemblage of the Fragmentary
is the first major collaboration between a poet and artist reacting to the worst humanitarian crisis since the second world war. In hard-hitting texts by Robert Vas Dias and vivid abstract images by Julia Farrer, Black Book takes as its point of departure the worldwide intolerance suffered by ‘the Other,’ reflecting their belief that “art is an individual commitment to the times we live in”. Robert Hampson writes: “Black Book
is an ethical response to a range of contemporary atrocities and acts of inhumanity… [confronting] us with what has become our common world since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’.” The book is experimental, exhibiting a variety of poetic and visual approaches, including texts composed by chance procedures, all illustrative of the state of fragmentation: what is left after bombardment, desecration, drownings, broken families.
Molly Vogel Florilegium
Published 2020. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617025 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Molly Vogel’s first collection of poems, Florilegium
is an exploration of life written in ‘the language of
flowers’. The poems regard flowers as both symbols and means of communication; in a broader sense,
they deem the natural world essential to our understanding of words, ourselves, and the divine. Like
Coleridge’s rook in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, the flower is a sign that connects those
disparately placed, both geographically and emotionally. Florilegium
finds its blooms in Scotland as well
as California; in free verse as well as stricter form; in books as well as dreams; on streets and at shrines
as well as in wild gardens. Fittingly, the poems are varied and vividly colourful, inviting and surprising.
They precede a long-form glossary, a meditation growing out from the poems’ words but also from the
entire history of literature and thought around flowers. Though intertwined with the poems, the
glossary is a collection in itself: in equal parts literary criticism, philosophical treatise, and prose poem.
Alan Wall Alexander Pope at Twickenham
Published 2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Alan Wall Gilgamesh
Published 2007. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Alan Wall Doctor Placebo
Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Alan Wall Raven
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).
Alan Wall Endtimes
Published 2013. Paperback, 86pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612754 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
All ages shape their own apocalyptic visions, a way of understanding the perils and revelations that perennially surround us. Endtimes
explores such visions over the last two thousand years, since John of Patmos first looked out of his window and saw FINIS written in vapour trails on the blue Aegean sky. From Roman tyrants to the persecuted Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, this sequence explores the dark side of our history, and the glories such darkness continues to provoke in art and literature. Between a dusty cellar in Patmos in the first century of the Common Era, and the streets of New York in 9/11, the distance can sometimes be measured in seconds rather than millennia.
Carol Watts Kelptown
Published 2020. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617339 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This is poetry at the edge of the land, but also at the edge of our horizon. Kelptown is Kemptown, so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities, lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore, knowing that the waters are rising, but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives, and shows us how we can learn to live, alongside fellow species, which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given ‘DeExtinction Poems’ and ‘Notes on a Burning World’. But is also a poetry that knows it must ‘make a home/ on friable shores, built from inundate truths’. These beautiful lines are from the book’s title sequence, where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: ‘How do I live, tenant among your long fronds’. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts’ imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade, through what can seem like the end times, these are poems that open us to new relations with the world."
—David Herd
Carol Watts When Blue Light Falls
Published 2018. Paperback, 86pp. 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615267 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"As ‘blue comes on’ in these elegies, a unique genre emerges, a lyrical epic that speculates on a world imagined through the physics of blue light, ‘cyanometrics’, the blue waves of the spectrum, shorter and faster moving when split from the norm of white light. In this new, formative referential world of blue, perception changes. As Carol Watts thinks blue, and makes strange cognitive experience, the long-held European myth of the power of vision as a knowledge-making faculty dissolves, along with the confident centrality of the perceiving subject. There is no ‘I’ in this work, the first person is eliminated. In this new space/time of her enigmatic lyrics a spare, cryptic language evolves. Just as blue comes to us through the earth’s atmosphere, scattered by molecules, the words on the page are like particles, suspended by a minimal syntax. So we discover new relations. With its charge of blue, the four parts of the poem move from speculation to threnody and even to prophecy as the earth’s atmosphere that hosts light gradually takes on ecological terror. This terror penetrates to inner and to civic lives, to networks of finance and to myths of gender. This is a major philosophical poem of our generation." — Isobel Armstrong
John Welch The Eastern Boroughs
Published 2004. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562436 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
The author's fifth major collection, following And Ada Ann, Out Walking, Blood and Dreams and Greeting Want, containing work written over the past six years. A number of the poems in The Eastern Boroughs express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing. This volume was subsequently collected in the author's Collected Poems
(see below).
John Welch Collected Poems
Published 2008. Paperback, 456pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $30
ISBN 9781905700578 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Published at the same time as the author's memoir Dreaming Arrival
this volume offers a retrospective of over 30 years' work, including as-yet-uncollected work. This Collected
— another in a series of large-scale retrospectives from Shearsman Books — demonstrates what a number of people have already recognised — that John Welch's apparently quiet art is a powerfully communicative one.
John Welch Dreaming Arrival
Published 2008. Paperback, 236pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700561 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, Dreaming Arrival
presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question Dreaming Arrival looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself.
John Welch Visiting Exile
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610767 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
In this new collection John Welch returns to his longstanding preoccupation with the inner city and its diversities, fuelled in part by his own past experience as a teacher working in multicultural education. 'Out Walking' (which was the title of his first collection back in the 1980s) the poet's trajectory across the city is informed by London's imperialist past, by the 7/7 bombings, and by a sense of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in a deeply felt involvement with the Other.
A recurring presence in the poetry is 'All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go', a sculpture by the London-based Lebanese artist Souheil Sleiman comprising hundreds of fragments of broken mirror woven together to represent a group of tower blocks, taken here to represent, among other things, the self-regard and inherent fragility of 'the City' in its recent incarnation.
John Welch Its Halting Measure
Published 2013. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612433 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"Clearly Welch, for all his minimalism, has not shied away from grand preoccupations on a local or global scale. For me, it is the quiet intelligence, provoking re-reading, that will bring me to Visiting Exile again; say, the irresistible pushing the adverb from a more to a less expected position — 'There's a god surely who sits in the air' ('Untold Wealth'). The god sits surely… Surely there's a god… Did you spot that god, surely it is one, there among the pigeons? The birds swoop through the poems. No gods are secured." —Vahni Capildeo, in Blackbox Manifold.
John Welch In Folly's Shade
Published 2018. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Nigel Wheale Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems
Published 2004. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562757 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
A summing-up of the poetic career of scholar Nigel Wheale, covering over thirty years of his work. Hitherto, all of the author's poetry has appeared in small-press and generally hard-to-find volumes and 'Raw Skies' is the largest collection of his poetry to have been published.
Ruth Wiggins The Lost Book of Barkynge
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.
John Wilkinson Colours Nailed to the Mast
Published 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619432 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Colours Nailed to the Mast
is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may be obvious. More so than some of what I seem to recall here, sharing the dream quality that has most intrigued me – a conviction my dreams have been annexed by another consciousness with a history and range of knowledge I cannot claim. (John Wilkinson)
John Wilkinson Fugue State
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
JL Williams Condition of Fire
Published 2011. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611450 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
"Now I will tell my stories of bodies that change…" —Ovid, Metamorphoses
Ovid wrote his famous stories of change just before he was banished from his beloved Rome and after travelling and observing many diverse and vibrant landscapes. He may well have visited and was knowledgeable of the Aeolian Isles where volcanoes cast molten lava into turquoise seas, whipped by the winds of the god who made his home there.
It was to these rapturous, Edenic and violently creative islands that JL Williams ventured to write the poems in this collection; poems inspired both directly by Ovid's tales and informing the new story that emerges from the old — a post-apocalyptic vision of the earth where metamorphoses engender rebirth out of the ashen wasteland that man has made of the world. Ovid expressed the truth that to change is to survive, and this message erupts out of the poems in Condition of Fire, whose language and images strive to communicate in new ways the essential elements of myth, creation and the burning breath of being.
JL Williams Locust and Marlin
Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613287 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]
Locust and Marlin
considers how, in lives bright and brief as a candle's burn, we tell our stories and locate the places where we live and love. Where is the origin, our point in space from which we view the world? How much control do we have over who we are and what impact we have on the territory we inhabit? In a world whose boundaries and pathways are increasingly difficult to define, how do we find our way home?
JL Williams After Economy
Published 2017. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
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
JL Williams Origin
Published 2022. Paperback, 82pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618053 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is the story of a baby coming into the world, and of her first year in that world altered beyond recognition by a virus born into our lives at nearly the same time. It is a song of breath, and of light. It is a collection of love poems, and a cry flung into the universe echoing the cry of all babies, a cry of loss and of nearly unbearable love. It is a book not just for pregnant women, or new mums and dads, but for all people who have entered through that small crack into the light of this life, and for all who have parents and have grappled with the joys and challenges of those most intimate of relationships. It is a song of light, and of breath. It is a story of where we come from.
Sir Thomas Wyatt Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.
Published 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Michael Zand Lion — the iran poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Michael Zand The Wire & other poems
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).
Michael Zand The Messier Objects
Published 2015. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
