Latest Releases

Translated from Spanish by Roberta Quance. Bilingual edition.
Published June 2025. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619203

"Can the poet speak for his fellow citizens while recognising the crisis of the self within himself? And the feeling of being disempowered? In modern times, who has ever asked the poet to set himself up as a spokesperson? Piera tackles this problem by demonstrating a prodigious ability to imagine himself as other in order to talk about himself. The poet, characteristically, lives by and through his characters, be they Cassandra (the unauthorised prophetess) mermaids (more threatened than threatening) or the outcast whom he ironically labels ‘weeds’. The worst fate is to have no voice or to have one that is despised, like Cassandra or the ‘weeds’, unable to do much more than scream. Poetry emerges from such contradictions." —From the prologue by Roberta Ann Quance

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer

Published May 2025. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848618183

This assemblage of uncollected Huidobro texts includes some stray manuscripts — few of these actually survive and have not been collected somewhere in the previous books in this series — and his occasional poems: works in honour of the Soviet Union, of Republican Spain, of fallen France, of his paramour (and later common-law wife) Ximena, plus a vitriolic attack on some Italian (i.e. fascist) aviators working with the Chilean Air Force. Two early works are added, from the period that might be regarded as juvenilia, as they show an early interest in shaped poems — not quite calligrammes, but with some affinity. We have also located one poem which has never been published in book form before, either in Spanish or in English.

Published May 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619883

Black Fens Viral began in summer 2020 when I was recovering from Covid. Lockdown was lifting and I was able to travel to Norfolk on the slow train which goes through the Black Fens of East Anglia. This flat, almost hedgeless and treeless, agricultural landscape of black peat was once marshland, before the drainage of the fens. The first sluice was created by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in 1642 to limit the tidal flow up the Great Ouse, but he did not realise that the peat would shrink after it dried out and be blown away by the wind. We now know that it also adds to global warming through leaking carbon dioxide and means the risk of flooding is more acute than ever.

        I often write about landscapes I love, such as Exmoor or the north Norfolk coast, protected by national parks and nature reserves, but I needed to write about this damaged landscape, where plants are exploited and biodiversity ignored. It corresponded to the damage caused by the pandemic, a result of human incursions into wild places. Writing about the Black Fens also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster. (Frances Presley)

Published May 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619593

". . . there is that second strand, the fitful, halting strand of Irish modernism, a bare technique, picked up by Beckett and carried through by writers such as . . . neo-Classicist poet, Fergal Gaynor. James Joyce would have recognised these contemporary writers instantly, knowing that their modernist efforts to escape from the story-teller material of Ireland should lead to new forms . . ."  (Thomas McCarthy, Irish Examiner)

Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published May 2025. Paperback, 122pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619760

The years between the twin revolutions of 1917 and Tsvetaeva’s departure at the end of April 1922, together with her daughter Alya, for Berlin and then Prague were the most productive of her entire career. In addition to a host of shorter, lyrical items, she wrote the long poems On a Red Steed and Tsar-Maiden, the latter a reworking and reimagining of folklore material in characteristically disconcerting and idiosyncratic style. Thanks to a chance meeting on the train which brought her back from Crimea to Moscow in November 1917, Tsvetaeva became acquainted with Pavel Antokolsky and, through him, with the members of the drama studio run by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, inspiring her to write no fewer than five dramas in verse in the space of two years. There, too, she met the actor Yury Zavadsky, and the diminutive actress with an English surname, Sonechka Holliday, to both of whom she dedicated extended cycles not fully assembled till after her death, as was the cycle of twenty-seven poems addressed to the painter Nikolay Nikolayevich Vysheslavtsvev (1890–1952), headed only by his initials. 

The contrast between this outpouring of verse – an estimated 735 poems just for the period covered by this volume – and the background circumstances of inconceivable hardship, could hardly be more striking. 

WINNER, English PEN Award
Translated from German by various hands. Introduced by Nicola Thomas.

Published April 2025. Paperback, 204pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619074

This is the first major anthology of contemporary German-language poetry in English for more than 40 years. Authors featured are: Yevgeniy Breyger, Sonja vom Brocke, Alexandru Bulucz, Carolin Callies, Ann Cotten, Ulrike Draesner, Oswald Egger, Elke Erb, Daniel Falb, Christian Filips, Dinçer Güçyeter, Martina Hefter, Jayne-Ann Igel, Hendrik Jackson, Thomas Kling, Dagmara Kraus, Birgit Kreipe, Nadja Küchenmeister, Jan Kuhlbrodt, Georg Leß, Friederike Mayröcker, Christoph Meckel, Steffen Popp, Kerstin Preiwuß, Monika Rinck, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Sabine Scho, Daniela Seel, Verena Stauffer, Ulf Stolterfoht, Sebastian Unger, Anja Utler, Peter Waterhouse, and Uljana Wolf.

Translators are: Shane Anderson, Kurt Beals, Paul-Henri Campbell, Aimee Chor, Brian Currid, Andrew Duncan, Joshua Daniel Edwin, Christopher Fenwick, Gerald Fiebig, Iain Galbraith, Robert Gillett, Nicholas Grindell, Catherine Hales, Christian Hawkey, Jayashree Hari Joshi, Alexander Kappe, Karen Leeder, Grace Nissan, Caroline Wilcox Reul, Bradley Schmidt, Jake Schneider, Joel Scott, Sophie Seita, Donna Stonecipher, Nicola Thomas, Amy Visram and Jana Maria Weiß.

Shearsman Library Vol. 22.
Published April 2025. Paperback, 194pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619296

Gustaf Sobin's Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 2010, but left out work which had been collected in special limited editions — and which were outside the main trajectory of his work — as well as work which had been published in magazines but which had then been dropped from his main published collections. This Uncollected volume redresses the balance, and, for good measure, includes an interview with the Mexican poet, Tedi López Mills, which has only previously been published in Spanish. The volume in which that interview appeared, like the rest of the contents of this book, is no longer in print elsewhere.

Published April 2025. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848619814

The title Veer, Oscillate, Rest conveys the energy of these poems as much as the range of their interests, from Trump’s first presidency, to environmental disaster, to Brexit, to the ‘teeming’, lived conjunction of embodiment and consciousness, is chapbook brings together some of Carrie Etter’s best uncollected poems from 2008 to 2023 in a selection that foregrounds her rigour, intelligence, and irrepressible verve.

Published April 2025. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619784

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2025, featuring poetry by Martin Anderson, Claire Crowther, Keri Finlayson, Jane Frank, Amlanjyoti Goswami, David Hadbawnik, Matt Haw, Norman Jope, Alicia Byrne Keane, Linda Kemp, L. Kiew, Fiona Larkin, John Levy, Nicky Melville, John Newson, Anita Ngai, Mark Nowak, Eliza O'Toole, Adam Panichi, John Phillips, Ian Pople, Anna Reckin, Wendy Saloman, Nathan Shepherdson and Janet Sutherland, plus translations of Jürgen Becker (by Martyn Crucefix), Rilke (by John Greening), Evelyn Schlag (by Karen Leeder) and Volha Hapeyeva (by Annie Rutherford).

Shearsman Library Vol. 21
Published April 2025. Paperback, 186pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619838

This to That and Thus contains four separate complete collections, the author’s first four books, thus demonstrating the wellsprings of a remarkable career.

“For a poetry that yields such immediate and immense pleasure, the work of Joseph Donahue remains hard to characterize. Joseph Donahue has spent [four] decades crafting a sensibility that straddles the often-reductive binaries of literary discourse. As sacred as it is profane, as popular as it is avant-garde, and as funny as it is forlorn, Donahue’s poetry puts forward a voice that resists easy categorization. While there are many aesthetic reasons that make Donahue’s poetry difficult to encapsulate, the most pressing obstruction to characterizing his poetry is the little precedence that exists for such an endeavor.” 

—J. Peter Moore, Jacket2

Shearsman Library Vol. 20. Second edition. First UK edition.
Published April 2025. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848619692

What's in Store, first published in Canada in 2008, was Trevor Joyce's first full-length book following the publication of his collected poems, with the first dream of the fire they hunt the cold (Shearsman Books, 2001; 2nd edition 2003). For this volume, the author shaped eight years' worth of work — individual poems, extended sequences, translations from the Irish, Chinese, and other languages — into a continuous book-length structure. These poems find Joyce reaching out towards a jarringly wide range of styles and voices, from the tart lyricism of his re-workings of European folksongs to the ferociously dense collage/inscription of "STILLSMAN." Brought together as a book, the poems take on further meanings: What's in Store is at once a Borgesian guide to the history, customs and scientific discourse of an unknown country, and an Oulipian textual machine, whose workings by turns terrify and exalt.

Translated from Spanish and French by Tony Frazer. Bilingual volume.

Published April 2025. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619937

Huidobro published Poemas árticos in Madrid in 1918, this being the last of a rapid series of publications which established him as a major new talent both in French and in Spanish. Poemas árticos is particularly interesting in that it shows the author taking on board lessons learned from Guillaume Apollinaire—an early friend in Paris—and also Pierre Reverdy; Reverdy and Huidobro soon fell out, seemingly because of a dispute over who was the real originator of Creationism, the movement associated with Huidobro, and of which he was—to be honest—the only full-time member. In any event, this is his longest Spanish-language volume up to this point, and marks a significant breakthrough, bringing as it does the latest French innovations into Spanish for the first time. This second edition features some revisions to the translations, but also reacts the layouts of the poem to accord as far as possible with the 1918 Madrid edition.

Published March 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619739

These poems explore further and future ways of plants and trees, and won’t duck from being permeated at the same time by irradiating horizons or tensile symbols which perform a vital role in any multi-dimensional inter-relations.

‘This is not a poetry about trees, but about trees as a means of thinking, the material through which we can and do think, a world, its ontology, its epistemology too.The tree as discourse. The tree as perceiver of what the tree needs to know.’ —Stephen Collis

Published March 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619708

"With a Stranger's Eyes is in two parts. The first, 'Dutch Girl' is set mainly in the Netherlands, where Jeremy Hooker lived for four years with his wife, Mieke. The second, longer part records responses to history and landscapes primarily in South Wales where Hooker has lived since 2001. It also celebrates a number of Welsh writers, such as David Jones, Idris Davies, and Waldo Williams. The spirit of the poetry reflects the Welsh tradition of praise poetry. It is, however, very much the work of an English poet who recognises that he will always be a stranger in Wales, as he was also in Holland. Strangeness, in fact, is a fact that he recognises as integral to our human condition, which may produce an 'art of seeing' below superficial vision of surfaces into perception of the sacred and the quickness of existence." —Jeremy Hooker

Translated from Dutch by Donald Gardner. Published with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Published February 2025. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619319

Maria Barnas’ witty and subversive poetry can be seen as a quest for an identity that always just eludes her: ‘The floors / are buckling and the windows and doors / show cracks. These are the hinges / of an existence I call my own.’ Nothing is what it seems for her and appearances are indeed just that — appearances. In another poem, she points out that, ‘The corner of an eye can contain many things’, and this could almost be taken as a mission statement. 

       Barnas is an artist and critic as well as a poet. In her poetry she asks how adequate language is to grasp what we see. Is one’s native language a ‘home’? How reliable is it and is it equal to the task of representing reality, above all the reality of our interaction with each other, that is undermined by ambiguity, personal history, as well as the secret passages of Freudianism. This enquiry comes to a peak in her most recent collection, Diamond without r, in which she investigates her Polish roots as well as her adolescent years spent in Swindon. Polish words and scenes are held up to the prism of her lines, and there are also fragments of English, which may comprise flashbacks of her English experience. 

       For the reader this poetry has an unstable character; it expresses an urgency to belong as well as a sense of rejection, a desire sometimes to say two, contradictory things at once. It is at times quizzical, defiant and mocking.

Translated from Russian by Stephen Capus

Published February 2025. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619685  Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa, Ukraine, in 1889, as Anna Gorenko. She adopted her pen-name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and lived most of her life in that city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter-revolutionary activities. 

      Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953—with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War—she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake of the notorious Zhdanov speech, in which she was described as a ‘cross between a nun and a whore’. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. Stephen Capus's formal translations offer a new way of approaching Akhmatova for Anglophone readers.

Published February 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems — of air, of glass, of wind, of west.