Shearsman Library

The Shearsman Library 5

Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615892 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Avebury first appeared as a slim volume in 1972, from Anvil Press, and remains something of an outlier in the author’s work. A sequence of poems triggered by the remarkable standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire – older than Stonehenge, which is not too far away, but part of the same evidently sacred landscape. 

The Shearsman Library 12

Published 2018. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615953 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In 1977 and 1981, Martin Booth — then a poet and small-press publisher, but today better-known as a novelist — published two collections of work about Knotting, the Bedfordshire village where he then lived: The Knotting Sequence and The Cnot Dialogues . The books were published in fine, limited-run editions by The Elizabeth Press in New Rochelle, New York, and few copies travelled across the Atlantic. Indeed, the second of the two books was one of the final books to be published by Elizabeth and received only limited distribution. Here we have spliced the two books together, otherwise unchanged.

The Shearsman Library 14

Published 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95. Second Edition.
ISBN 9781848616349 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. —Kelvin Corcoran

The Shearsman Library 10

Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615960 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Harry Guest’s remarkable sequence of Elegies were first published as a chapbook in 1980 by Pig Press in Durham, and were later collected in Lost and Found a large collection of the author’s work in 1983. here we take the chance to return the poems to their original chapbook environment, convinced that the world still needs work like this. Still available in the author’s Anvil collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest , they benefit from being able to breathe more easily in their original form…

The Shearsman Library 15

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

ISBN 9781848617018 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949-2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer: "calm, intelligent, long-lined verse letters that engagingly bring us to a world where the ‘sea-dusks are sea-dusks flowing far inland’", as Nigel Wheale pout it when reviewing the first edition for the London Review of Books .

The Shearsman Library 11

Published 2018. Paperback, 100pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615939 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This was Lee Harwood’s first major collection after his remarkable sequence of Fulcrum volumes ( The White Room, Landscapes and The Sinking Colony ) had established him as one of the most interesting younger poets in the England. HMS Little Fox shows Harwood striking out in new directions, some of which were not be further developed, but it also shows evidence of his mature style. Although available in the author’s Collected (Shearsman, 2004), this volume faithfully reproduces the original edition, with its postcard images, Egyptian sigils, and also one poem that the author decided to exclude from his Collected .

The Shearsman Library 16

Published July 2021. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848617766 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

First published 40 years ago by Grosseteste, this was Ralph Hawkins' first major collection.

Ralph Hawkins’ poetry is yeasty and written where the meanings are made rather than assigned. Its impulse is towards the immediate, apparently unsynthesised event where thinking occurs moment by moment. The aesthetic bears some resemblance to close mic techniques, we are drawn near to the experience and all distractions are removed for the intricacies of pure resonance. It produces a poetry as tricky as consciousness itself and its rewards are some considerable distance from the prefabricated commonplace expression of lyrical epiphany. Here is a poetry that is expansive, often humorous and always anarchic. In Tell me no more and tell me Ralph Hawkins’ refusal to whistle along with the sanctioned doggerel of English poetry and its returns is startlingly evident, as it has been throughout four decades of creativity.

The Shearsman Library 3

Published 2018. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615861 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Serpentine was first published by Oasis Books in 1985 in a deliberately low-tech edition. Alas, it made little headway and the somewhat shoddy production almost certainly militated against its adoption by bookshops. It thus became Middleton’s “lost book”, although parts have been reprinted elsewhere. Subtitled (at least in the author’s correspondence, if not in the published edition) “prose pieces on the nature of evil”, the book shows Middleton at his playful, experimental best.

The Shearsman Library 7

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

ISBN 9781848615946 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley’s first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has reappeared in other guises, in Paravane and also in Shearsman’s own Myne (2006), the entire book has not been republished and its structure — mixing prose and poetry freely — is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived. This edition gives the work a little more air than in the original — avoiding run-on texts — but is otherwise unchanged.

The Shearsman Library 6

Published 2018. Paperback, 68pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615908 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Isthmus was Jeremy Reed’s first collection, produced in a finely-printed edition by Asa Benveniste’s Trigram Press in 1980. Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author struggling with a gamut of new influences — some of them provided by Benveniste – and trying to find his way in a brane new world of poetry. The book has an American theme, and shows much American influence, albeit undigested in places, but Reed’s individuality brings it all together.

The Shearsman Library 4

Published 2018. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615885 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Manners of an Astronaut was Gig Ryan’s second collection, from 1984, and confirmed the striking impression she had made with her first book. It has been unavailable for some time although parts have reappeared in her Selected Poems (Bloodaxe in the UK, Giramondo in Australia, as New & Selected ). As Martin Johnston said in a blurb for the first edition: “it marks … something new in Australian poetry: a deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative’ in verse of hallucinatory vividness and continual wry wit, lacerating without self-pity, demanding without pretentiousness or condescension. No one will find it comfortable reading. Ryan’s craftsmanship is impeccable, her vision bullshit-proof: both qualities to be greeted with loud hosannas.”

Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island.

"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.” 

—Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork

Shearsman Library Vol. 19
Published August 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18. Second Edition.
ISBN 9781848618961 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest of the poems collected in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems (itself now out of print), which is itself difficult, and expensive, to obtain for readers outside the USA.

“Gustaf Sobin’s poems are not, in any superficial sense, ‘painterly’, but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin’s attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin’s world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious.” —Charles Tomlinson

The Shearsman Library 1

Published 2018. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615854 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 19798, spliced together with Tarn’s Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was poor, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney’s first collection, vanished from view. Also, a valuable expansion of Tarn’s own anthro-poetics, gained little or no attention, whether in Alaska or in the lower states. The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche.

The Shearsman Library 2

Published 2018. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18. Second, Expanded Edition.

ISBN 9781848615878 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

At the Western Gates was first published in 1984 by the splendidly-named Tooth of Time Press in New Mexico, and contained five longish sequences that are central to Tarn’s work in the 1980s. In this new edition, a sixth sequence from the same period, 'Birdscapes with Seaside', has been added.

The Shearsman Library 8

Published 2018. Paperback, 68pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18. Second, Expanded Edition.

ISBN 9781848615915 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This volume was originally a chapbook, first published in Mississippi in 1985, and demonstrates in shorter poems how Tarn’s work was developing in the '80s. It contains some remarkable work that stands up today, as fresh as the year in which the book was first published. 

     In this second edition, the original contents are joined by three other long sequences from the same period to turn it into a full-length collection.

The Shearsman Library 9

Published 2018. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. Second Edition.

ISBN 9781848615922 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

When Nathaniel Tarn emigrated to the USA in the early 1970s, and took up a position teaching at Rutgers in New Jersey, he quickly confirmed his new identity as an American poet by publishing two major volumes: Lyrics from the Bride of God , a book-length work, with New Directions, which is still in print, and this collection, which was published on the opposite coast by Black Sparrow Press. Both books staked out his territory in a startling manner, and laid the foundations for a burgeoning oeuvre.

Shearsman Library Vol. 17
Published June 2023. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18. Second Edition.
ISBN 9781848619036 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought then to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is now revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

Shearsman Library Vol. 18
Published 2023. Paperback, 112pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20. Second Edition.
ISBN 9781848619043 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published by Random House, New York, in 1971, and by Cape in London in 1972, with the material collected in it dating back to 1969. A major staging post in the author’s career, it pre-dates Lyrics for the Bride of God and The House of Leaves, Tarn’s other two major publications from the 1970s, and (apart from Bride of God) was the last major UK publication of his work. The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and ‘Choices’ were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the ‘October’ sequence, which ends with the moving and tragic “in memoriam” poem ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’.