2024 Titles — in alphabetical order

Translated from Spanish by Kathleen Snodgrass

Published March 2024. Paperback, 172pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. Bilingual edition.

ISBN 9781848619302

“Luis Miguel Aguilar’s work is a conversation, between the past and the present, between the educated and the lay person, between useless details and essentials, between erudite data and the vital impulse. It is not a spur of the moment conversation, but one that arises from the serenity of an extended, long-term approach, tying up loose ends and giving rise to complete, complex and exalted theories.” —Juan Manuel Gómez 

“There are poets who are born mature, broad-browed and clear of vision. Luis Miguel Aguilar is one of them. Each book is a gift full of surprises, riddles and enigmas that invite the reader to reread, drop by drop, to savour them: there is an erudite, cultured, referential voice; then there is a more melodic, simple voice that recites ballads and popular songs; and finally there is the intimate monologue, which deals with the familiar terroir and tries to decipher the meaning of life, with all its furies and its sorrows.” —Arturo Dávila

Published April 2024. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618916

In her second collection Kate Ashton examines woman’s estate from the warring perspectives of creativity and procreativity. Born into her biological destiny, woman is harnessed at adolescence to procreative necessity; she may refuse, she must choose. But what if the unconscious leads inexorably towards another equally all-consuming fate, as artist?

The overwhelming gravitas, beauty and mystery of motherhood is presented in all its extraordinary, paradoxical reality. Here is an often jarringly intense examination of emotive and moral integrity, refuting soft focus. Dawning awareness of a distinctly matrix-centred spiritual reality; one that can find no foothold, no expression within any hierarchical system.

A majestic alternative worldview: primeval, anarchic, ambivalent, self-referential

and innately free of masculine conceptualisation. One in which acts of artistic creation and procreation may either brutally oppose or embrace each other, but which always involve a tender agony of love.

Published March 2024. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619197

“Indelible and deeply resonant, Linda Black’s Interior demonstrates a poet at the peak of their powers. This collection constitutes a wondrous neo-Cartesian studio evoking an ars poetica that emphasizes language as both trace and palimpsest. Here, Black explores the intersections of writing, desire and creativity in marvellously fragmented and Frankensteinian ways. In haunting poems, the poet-artist is resurrected as defamiliarizing and uncanny: ‘I rest / my hand outside / myself & draw’. Interior gives priority to improvisation and bricolage, and a questioning semiotics, as it lightly and powerfully sketches the body’s relationship to the world. Black employs compelling dualisms to engage with both the breakdown and articulacy of an utterly contemporary language fully attuned to the ineffable: ‘In my heart my two loves merge. This is all I can tell you.’” —Cassandra Atherton

Published March 2024. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619166

‘Sarah Cave’s collection is, by turns, sinuous, troubling and sensuous. Its central conceit – that Jesus’s sister Yona is cursed to live until his return at the Apocalypse – is certainly ambitious, but is handled with real tenderness and humanity. Indeed, Cave interrogates the registers of queer desire, of faith and of bodies without ever losing sight of what Donne calls “Love’s mysteries”.’ —Rachel Mann

‘Witty and sensual, The Book of Yona invites us into intimacies of the feminine, queer and sacred with a holy jouissance. With verbal elasticity and playful fusions of time and geography, Sarah Cave traces a via negativa through secret truths that were there all along in the half-light of cedar branches, the archives, the anchorage… read and be drawn into companionship, divine encounter, love.’ —Phoebe Power 

Published October 2024. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619340.

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2024 features poetry by Josephine Balmer, Daragh Breen, Steve Brock, Carmen Bugan, Anna D’Alton, Amy Evans Bauer, Mischa Foster-Poole, Lucy Hamilton, Ellen Harrold, Huw Gwynn Jones, Jazmine Linklater, Sujatha Menon, John Muckle, Tom Phillips, Paula Sankelo, Ian Seed, Aidan Semmens, Simon Smith and Rimas Uzgiris; plus translations of Marco Catalão by Chris Miller, ​ Giedrė Kazlauskaitė by Rimas Uzgiris, Concha Méndez by Harriet Truscott, Ennio Moltedo by Marguerite Feitlowitz and Miguel Otero Silva by Chris Holdaway.

Published September 2024. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619487

"Golden Satellite Debris is my 13th book. I don’t feel particularly superstitious about that. I do still feel as if a book of mine coming into the world is still an unprecedented surprise. I feel a mix of hope and failure. The title points towards a sense of the wonder and glory of life on this planet, the Golden (with a hint of the sun setting no doubt), but also a sense of life as an aftermath, Debris, a sort of arbitrary and accidental outcome of equations and collisions only some of which we are aware of. I see the earth as a Satellite, a contingent object moving in space, but on a smaller scale also the human and the poem, spinning around some unknown centre, whether we call that truth, being, love or death." —Martin Corless-Smith

Published October 2024. Paperback, 142pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619388

“Crowther writes about this world, this country and this era with such accuracy and honesty you find yourself wrapped up in the mystic and otherly vision without question. For me the work sits with the Modernists in its uncompromising ambition, commitment to experiment and dignity of focus, but her voice is consistently contemporary, poised and original. There is always a fascinating psychological turn, an insight unearthed via science or history or theology. A Selected should always be a ‘greatest hits’ of sorts, but it’s rare to read a curation of such powerful coherence, drawing poems from the last fifteen years into a gathering momentum. Curious, beautiful and melancholy; a celebration of her work so far and the best starting point for new readers.” —Luke Kennard

Edited by Carrie Etter
Published October 2024. Paperback, 142pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619470



"The thike, Claire Crowther’s imaginary creation, ‘broods, plays, and is “othered” by an uncaring society’. The poetry that appeals to Crowther, and for which she acts as such an eloquent advocate, often does the same. The essays of Sense and Nonsense are passionate acts of elective affinity, precise and careful homages to kindred spirits from Lorine Niedecker and Veronica Forrest-Thomson to Denise Riley and R. F. Langley. Carrie Etter’s forensic interviews send us back to Crowther’s own poetry, and remind us that she is entirely at ease in such company. Generous and gladsome, a gift of a book." — David Wheatley

Translated from Spanish by Adam Feinstein. With an introduction by Daisy Zamora.

Published May 2024. Paperback, 216pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24. Bilingual edition.

ISBN 9781848618756

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912–2002) was one of Nicaragua's great 20th century poets. In this lyrical epic, the inevitable Homeric background for the tale of wandering sailor underpins the contemporary Nicaraguan reality of The Great Lake (Lake Nicaragua – the "sweet sea" of the title), rather than the Aegean. The language is deceptively colloquial, plain even, as befits the real people of his narrative, but he reveals the richness of life on the Lake and makes of the sailors and their families as epic a tale as any that went before. This is the first complete translation of the book.

Published September 2024. Paperback, 336pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $28

ISBN 9781848619418

The very idea of beautiful feelings makes people laugh, but surely we prefer beautiful feelings to other feelings and sensitive poets to insensitive ones. Few poets proclaim their insensitivity. All the same the phrase points to a possible lack of balance. If the focal point is sensitivity then that might restrict the world of the poem to a small zone close to the poet’s skin, with everything collective, objective, political, abstract, technical, etc., disappearing from view. Even if we accept that poetry is now subjective and egocentric, we can ask if this is an ideology, and look for external forces supporting it, for the currents of poetry which breach its rules, and for historical moments which closed off an exit into other possibilities.

The main feature of the 21st C scene is the great number of poets at work. This is a motive for writing about as many poets as possible, eighty in this case. They are only partly hidden by the details we don’t know. The field may have no overall shape but its local fabric looks like a rich differentiation into linguistic micro-climates, brought about by the sheer number of people and their interest in fine distinctions. If we stroll through enough of the new poets, we may find that sensitivity and the need to be original have shaped a landscape of diversity and achievement which excels our capacity to take it in. This is a park designed for collectors of exotic and finely wrought artistic sensations. Where realms of talent are hidden behind realms of talent, an expedition can last for years.

Published April 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619241.

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2024 contains poetry by Rizwan Akhtar, Isobel Armstrong, Jack Barron, Leia K. Bradley, Tom Cowin, Claire Crowther, Katy Evans-Bush, Mark Fiddes, Giles Goodland, Sylee Gore, Ellen Harrold, Jill Jones, Norman Jope, Karin Lessing, Bernadette McCarthy, Katherine Meehan, David Miller, Sophia Nugent-Siegal, Joseph Nutman, Anne Pelletier-Topping, Janet Sutherland, Helen Tookey, Jay-Philippe Vibert, Margaret Ann Wadleigh, Mark Ward & Alex Wong, plus a translation of Vicente Huidobro by Tony Frazer.

Published November 2024. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618411

To read Mark Goodwin’s poems of rock and grass and sky and the body-mind moving through them is to enter deep place: living, uncontainable – an event not a landscape. His poems are a grounding in minute shifts and experiences: visual reflections become aural echoes, sounds lift off the page into the ear, inferences and possibilities of language are opened up. Meaning pivots on the unexpected. Word and line breaks are subtle levers of time and scale. The page is Mark Goodwin’s theatre of transformations. Through the slippage and junctures of language, I find myself out in the open, participant in the tactilities and sights and noises of place. His poems, opening on the page in this locked-down time, gladden the heart.

Published May 2024. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848619128

“A unique poetic testament of life in and out of Hong Kong between 2019 and 2022, spanning the Covid epidemic, and unrelentingly outspoken and courageous in defence of human freedoms facing systemic repression. Yet subject matter isn’t all. Gifted in every aspect of her poetic craft. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is witty, clever, passionate – and acutely observant of the inner life. Although written with a Hong Kong sensibility, these poems transcend contemporality and location. They map our times: all our times.” — Richard Berengarten

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

ISBN 9781848619531

These Preludes are primarily autobiographical poems written in old age. Their principal 'ground' is the south of England, and especially the area between the New Forest and the Solent, where Jeremy Hooker was brought up. They are, therefore, 'poems of place', and direct or oblique expressions of the making of a poet. Some deal with raw experience, but the aim in all is what Hooker (after Henry Vaughan) calls 'quickness' – not a narrow 'self-expression', but the transpersonal reality of the livingness of being in place.

Published April 2024. Paperback, 244pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619456

Addiction is the story of a double struggle. It is about the effort of Jeremy Hooker and his wife, Mieke, to combat the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death. Based largely on the poet's journal, it contains poems written as acts of survival. The book concludes with a sequence of elegiac poems.

Translated from Spanish & French by Eliot Weinberger

Published March 2024. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618190

This volume presents the 4 chapbooks published by Huidobro in 1917–18 and offers, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have El espejo de agua, written in Spanish in 1914–16, ostensibly first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not available until 1918;  Ecuatorial (written in Spanish, although the author also made a French version, Équatoriale, which is believed to be later), Hallali and Tour Eiffel, the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period, Hallali and Tour Eiffel—both marked by textual experimentation—were important for the rising wave of the new Spanish avant-garde. The 4 chapbooks were bookended, so to speak, by the French-language volume Horizon carré and the Spanish-language collection, Poemas árticos (both already issued in this series). This second, expanded edition now offers the French version, Équatoriale, as well as alternative versions of Tour Eiffel in both French and Spanish.

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer

Published July 2024. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848618176

Last Poems, as its title suggests, was Huidobro’s final volume, assembled by Manuela, his elder daughter, from her father’s papers after his untimely death, and published that same year. As might be expected, the collection is an awkward mixture of stray manuscripts, some possibly incomplete poems – or even drafts of poems – and some others that had been published in literary journals during the author’s later years. There are also one or two occasional poems. Amidst this concoction lie some of Huidobro’s finest poems – ‘Return Passage’, ‘Monument to the Sea’ and 'Passenger of His Destiny’, to name but three – all fairly long, elegiac in tone, and a fitting capstone to a wonderful career.

Published March 2024. Paperback, 276pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £15 / $23

ISBN 9781848618657 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

David Jaffin's first collection for 2024. The world's busiest poet strikes yet again.....

Published by Three Highgate Editions, and distributed by Shearsman Books.
Published October 2024. Full-colour hardcover, 24pp, 9.25 x 7.5ins, £16 / $27.50

ISBN 9781739544911.
With a poem by Martha Kapos, an essay by Alistair Hicks, and a translation of Mayakovsky by Irina Johnstone.

This volume offers a number of full-colour reproductions of works by the artist Ken Kiff (1935–2001) together with poems that spring from a similar source of inspiration. Three poems by Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara and Ken Kiff’s close friend Martha Kapos shed light on the way Kiff, like Paul Klee before him, took a line for a walk, and then another line, and then yet another. Kapos’ poem was inspired by 'A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island' by Frank O’Hara, which in turn was written in jealous awe after reading Mayakovsky’s 'An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage'.

Published October 2024. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619258

"Mary Leader’s The Wood That Will Be Used is a tour de force exemplifying what results from a lifetime of labor in the word, a lifetime of one’s poring over rich literary texts, and of one’s developing the habit of one’s offering answering texts; it also manifests a capacious mind shaped by wit, by candor, and by a keen eye. Receiving the matter prepared for her, she has shaped a beautiful structure that will serve her and us for the journey beyond. If Philip Larkin and H.D. were to have been blessed with a literary child, that child would be Mary Leader."—Scott Cairns

Translated from Spanish by Kelsi Vanada

Published August 2024. Paperback, ca. 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619371

The title of Basket of Braids forms a surprising image. Why would anyone store braided hair in a basket? “The women in my family / keep the hair / they cut off / in a basket of braids. // It’s an ancient tradition, / no one can remember / who started it.”

          For Belarusian poet Natalia Litvinova, who immigrated with her family to Buenos Aires at the age of ten, this basket of braids symbolizes the strength of the bonds between the rural Slavic women who came before her—and her own link to her heritage across time and space. 

          Litvinova’s poems evoke memories of the culture and place that shaped her through dense lines rich with imagery. Each poem is a jewel, a talisman, a spell, often lingering on relationships between Litvinova’s ancestors and the land they were tied to, its flora and fauna: “Our lives / are full / of distances / even horses / can’t shorten.”

Appearing for the first time in English translation by Kelsi Vanada, Basket of Braids gives readers an intimate experience of one poet’s memory and heritage, held in language like amber.

Published October 2024. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618664

"without title  : it’s a modest name for a book, but also a refusal of the very idea of human ownership of land (was there ever a sillier phrase than ‘title deed’?). There’s an extraordinary clarity of sound in this work, rooted in Loose’s recollections of the troubadours in Montpellier and culminating in an airy sequence called ‘airs’ which sings along with literal birdsong. From Occitania and Japan to the woods and shores of Bute, Loose sees common ground everywhere: noticing familiar plants in strange places, finding friendship across a language-barrier, understanding the soil and the living and mineral beings that make it and are made from it. These poems often look back, but they’re filled with a forward-thinking optimism. The (un-)title sequence is written ‘for the symbiocene’, a time when humans and the natural world will find sustainable and mutually-beneficial ways to co-exist. It’s an endlessly strange and baroque celebration of exchange and equivalence and transformation, very funny as well as beautiful (‘it is the law / that bees / are fish’), putting us in our place and the fungus in fungibility." —Peter Manson

Edited by Colin Bramwell, with Gerda Stevenson

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

ISBN 9781848619050 LONGLISTED FOR SCOTTISH POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

Aonghas Macneacail (1942–2022) originally intended for this book to signal his return to the literary sphere after a long convalescence. As his health declined, he was clearly comforted by the fact that this work would see the light of day: we talked together frequently about it, until he was unable to do so. He wanted this book to correct the perception of himself as a Gaelic writer, first and foremost. Gaelic was one of his three languages – Scots and English were the others. Before we started working on the book, I visited him to interview him about the project. We both agreed that a book of English-language work might have some public utility, as proof that Scottish writing is polyglot by nature. We thought that correcting the public perception of him as a Gaelic poet entirely would also be to correct perceptions of division in the language situation in Scotland more generally. Now that the process of putting this book together has come to an end, the truth of that feels clearer, to me. Aonghas’s work looks forward to a future where, as he puts it in ‘last night’, ‘my language [will] embrace / its sister tongue’. As with any bilingual poet, the point must be made: his English poetry drew from the same source as his Gaelic work. It is the intertwining of tongues which creates the tenor of the work. Aonghas’s famous poem ‘tha gàidhlig bheò’ (‘gaelic is alive’) ends with the following lines: ‘ach dèan dannsa dèan dannsa / `s e obair th`ann a bhith dannsa’. ‘be dancing be dancing / it is work to be dancing’. Of course the dance will require a partner. English was a partner-language to Aonghas’s Gaelic. Scots was another. This linguistic hybridity defines him, as much as it defines the general tenor of Scottish literature today. —from Colin Bramwell's introduction

Published November 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619289

In the Postface to his 114 Songs of 1922, Charles Ives wrote: “Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, ‘in the leaf’ and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.” Oddly enough, some of the songs in this book have been sung, but most remain silent on the page awaiting a willing reader who’s ready to take the title at face value. These are songs in which “nothing happens/& it is good” if you want it to be. —Billy Mills 

Translated from Spanish by Andrew Dempsey & Álvaro García

Published July 2024. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619500

Las cosas del campo is about the people and the landscape of Andalusia in the middle of the last century, still recognisable despite so many changes in the past seventy years. More specifically, it is about the landscape around the family home of the poet near the country town of Antequera in the province of Malaga; about the house, the Casería del Conde, and the people who lived and worked there. It has come to represent a whole epoch of rural Andalusia and is full of magical descriptions of the land and its people, their character and ways of life.

Published October 2024. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619272



This cranic, or skull, of ordinaries is a landscape well-known to poet Eliza O'Toole who has long tramped the Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border with her dog Fin, nose-down tail-up, urging her on. In the muddy paint-water of John Constable and the rambling madness of John Clare, O'Toole takes her own step lightly into a calendar year of a landscape displaced. Chronicling the cycle of seasons, book-ended by (poisonous) aconites, these poems are decisive moments in time that mark life-death-decay, as a series of alternative, textual landscape paintings. At times raw, O'Toole points toward the corrosion of landscape rendered in words or oils by a masculine eye and the ironic subsequent degradation of this pastoral idyll by ongoing very real eco-losses and agri-changes. Yet, in elevating the landscape unto itself, a complex undergrowth of magnetic field work emerges and from that, the lithe 'isness' of place which never fully subscribes to human cartographics and which, in its fundament, will long outlast us.

Published February 2024. Paperback, 478pp, 9 x 6 ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619227

Toby began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master’s Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. 

       The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young’s Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity’s Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions.

Published February 2024. Paperback, 480pp, 9 x 5ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619234

Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of my efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 I found I had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while I continued with fiction, I also found I was writing poetry, and since then I have managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, also contains the collections Human Nature (New Directions), Darklight and Death Sentences (both from Shearman), and See / Saw, published here for the first time.  (Toby Olson)

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

ISBN 9781848619067

In his fourth collection from Shearsman Books, Alasdair Paterson ranges as widely as ever – from the bewilderments of a Scottish childhood to the mixed messages of later life, from gnarly nature notes to an A-Z of lines salvaged from lost Russian novels. The spirit of Mercury – bringer of messages, patron of tricksters, keeper and crosser of boundaries – hovers invisibly and a tad unreliably overhead.

Published September 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619625

"The poem as incremental paradise. Precisely what we find here in the six chambers of this music – the human writing, singing in the discrepancy between language and the world. A discrepancy erased in the power of the poem, its song and rhythm, silences punctuating sound, lifting the lids of the coffins in which we, Mallarmé’s dying poets, live. Traces of Guido and Catullus, instances of the dead, come, at behest of one dead fly, to give anima to us who, but for poetry, would only die. While, in that, mystifications are rigorously deflated on every page, a skepticism that, however, does not deny techné, whether science or form. For what is certainty but avowal of finely-wrought form? So let it be avowed: there are many finely-wrought forms here, in this chamber music. Listen and know: poetry is alive and doing what it does well." —Larry Price

Published April 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619449

Simon Perril’s new collection gathers two discrete works:

‘45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser’ turns to the Swiss modernist as guide to the inner workings of educational workplaces, and the lived experience of them. Alchemy, according to Jung, was a quest for individuation. Inhabiting Walser’s pioneering absurdist work exploring a school for servants, Perril finds alarming parallels between the transformative ‘suffering’ of metals in their journey to a higher state, and contemporary workplace rhetorics of self-development and transformation. 

‘Sun Deck Set Cogitation’ collapses the boundaries between reading and writing by playing with two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first is a forensically detailed moment by moment account of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil; the second his account of a 1941 voyage escaping occupied France alongside fellow refugee André Breton. As Perril explains, ‘I inhabited Lévi-Strauss’s text like it was a ship’s deck I was walking across or around.’ The poet takes impetus from an early epiphany Lévi-Strauss had looking at the formal intricacy and structural play of dandelion seed heads that give rise to other forms. His poetic ‘treatment’ of the source texts scatter and recombine word-seeds in surprising combinations: blowing on a seed-head and spreading palimpsestic filaments.

Published September 2024. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619463

“Some poets live deep back, quietly, in far places, still. I love the poetry of my friend, John Phillips. He is a master of the compressed, cut lyric.” —Kent Johnson

“John Phillips writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work. At his best, Phillips is absolutely dazzling.” —Ron Silliman, on Language Is

Published October 2024. Paperback, 486pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $35

ISBN 9781848619562

"A life’s work of steady, compassionate, precise observation animates these deceptively simple poems, rooted in their landscape and making a sense of home over and over again in each one. A virtuoso of stress and line endings, Elaine Randell has the ability to turn the events of each day into a kind of thought-music, while the sequences of prose narrative vignettes provide glimpses of the difficult lives of the sorts of troubled people she has come into contact in her professional work, sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, sometimes hopeless, sometimes almost comic. It’s all about the truth of things." — Ian Patterson

Edited with an Introduction by Grevel Lindop.
Published July 2024. Paperback, 308pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619159



Jeremy Reed’s output has been prodigious. Since 1975 he has published more than forty books of poems, besides countless pamphlets and fugitive pieces, and many novels, biographies and books on cultural history. The full range of his poetry will never be truly known, for he often writes in public places, and if someone expresses interest may give them the poem. By the time this selection appears his tally will have grown further, because he writes continuously. His poems are his diary, his autobiography, his therapy, his addiction. Reed has moved from publisher to publisher, often writing for several at the same time, and his style has evolved continuously over more than four decades. Formalist, symbolist, language poet, nature-poet, modernist, post-modernist, performance poet: Reed has been all these and more.

Edited by Robert Sheppard

Publication May 2024. Paperback, 152pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619180

Mary Robinson (née Darby) was born in 1758 in Bristol, and was a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and actress. Tutored by both Garrick and Sheridan, she had a short but dazzling career on the London stage, where she was spotted by the young Prince Regent and became his mistress. The resultant scandal was hot gossip and salacious news, brought to a new reading public by the institution of the daily paper, for which, ironically, Robinson would later write. Although she had always written, her main literary career dates from a serious accident in 1783, which left her permanently disabled. In the 1790s, she produced most of her best work, with an ever-accelerating productivity, in verse and fiction, until her death in 1800 (she wrote 70 poems in that last year). Once associated with fashionable Della Cruscan poetry, in the final years of her life she was in contact with S.T. Coleridge and William Godwin, representatives of vanguards in both politics and literature. After her death, her work suffered from an almost-complete obscurity, aided and abetted by Victorian revulsion at her scandalous past. This position has now changed, and there has been considerable interest in her life, her writing, and the connection between the two in recent years.  

Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley

Published August 2024. Paperback, ca. 200pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619364

Tien Mai, the poet-narrator of Daniel Samoilovich’s book-length sequence, Awaking Demons, is a self-exiled Vietnamese princeling grumpily eking out a hotel life in 1930s Switzerland. ‘Here/ where even the butterflies are different’ is a source of amusement and amazement to him as he details the behaviour of the hotel servants and the other guests, and the strange local customs. But more often his mind turns to the woman he has left behind: ‘The distance between us is greater/than the empire of night’, and to the consolations of Eastern art, especially the poets of the Tang dynasty, Wang Wei, Du Mu and Li Po. Like them, he stands at his lectern with his brushes, composing in meticulous calligraphy, in perfect ideograms, poems of nature, philosophy, memory and love, though against the backdrop of the Swiss lakes rather than the Yangtze river. Tien Mai is a rounded and subtle creation – querulous, humorous, cynical, profound, whimsical, romantic – and rather a wonderful lyric poet.

Published January 2024. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619135

“I go to Ian Seed’s poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There’s a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live ‘joyously and seriously’ against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops – it deserves legions of readers.”  —Luke Kennard

"Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafes, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding ‘obsession’, ‘unspeakable desire’, erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity’s transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, ‘I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story’ and reminds us, ‘It takes a stranger to see the beauty’. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a ‘poet soul’. A translator of Jacob’s poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet’s soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." —Cassandra Atherton

Published July 2024. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619517

This posthumous collection by Gavin Selerie brings together all the uncollected poems from the last phase of his life – fewer than might have expected perhaps, as he was also busy in the final part of his life with the composition of a memoir of his visit to the USA in the late 1960s. That memoir, Edges of Memory, will be published in due course.

As Robert Hampson’s obituary details, Gavin’s work tended towards long forms, based on extensive research, although shorter works did crop up throughout his life, as evidenced by the large volume of Collected Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2019). These last poetic forays are shorter poems, although inevitably they also include a long-ish sequence centred on the author’s favourite London haunt of Cricklewood.

Published August 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619357

At one level, the poems in British Standards are transpositions of Romantic era sonnets that pay homage to the exuberance and variety of that tradition, whether through examples of well-known poets, from Wordsworth to Clare, or through those of lesser-known practitioners, Mary Robinson to Hartley Coleridge. At another level, these transpositions chart the recent national banana-skin slippage from the hubris of Brexit to the mismanagement of Covid (including the privations and solitudes of lockdown). At both levels, they are satirical and funny, whether British Standard dogging sites are introduced as the sole Brexit benefit, or ‘our’ hapless prime minister stumbles from indiscretion to disgrace. Between the levels, they vibrate with implication, rock with savage laughter. 

Published August 2024. Paperback, 216pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619524

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves Robert Sheppard has made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and his own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but offers them to fellow poets, critics, and even to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own.

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

ISBN 9781848619395 LONGLISTED FOR SCOTTISH POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

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 September 2024. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619494

European Hymns is the fourth collection by Andrew Taylor to be published by Shearsman Books. Over four sections, the book traces the calendar year throughout the seasons. Beginning with the optimism that spring brings, the book offers up the arrival of the nightingales in rural France (an ongoing interest of Taylor’s) then navigates through summer trips to cities, takes in periods of reflection amongst the closing down of a summer house, the sudden shift to Autumn and the inevitable descent into winter.

This is Taylor’s most wide-ranging collection to-date, in turns observ-ational and detailed. The poems also deal with the changes in the natural world, while others offer snapshots of moments in time, with Taylor often re-employing his minimalist practice to useful effect.

Published March 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619210

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one’s ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what’s happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers – the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." —Martha Ronk

Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published March 2024. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619333

From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya’s first birthday to the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnók and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.

Published June 2024. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619173

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 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 January 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619142

Petra White is a singular voice in Australian poetry. She is known for a style that doesn’t fit neatly into any of its categories, a free-verse of startling energy and surprise. That Galloping Horse is her sixth collection, and the first to introduce her to UK readers. Written at first in Melbourne and then while resident in London, Berlin and Belfast between 2017 and 2023, these poems are haunted by places, but they also reach into the spiritual and the imaginary. Thirteen elegies take personal grief as their starting point and travel widely, mediating anguish through delight in language and the physical world. Rich in their variety and tones, these elegies are inhabited by the Ukraine War, the nature of modern work, domestic life in the reality of planetary demise, marriage and familial love. Alongside them, short mysterious lyrics build layers of irony and raw narratives traverse the Nullarbor Highway and the atomic cloud of Maralinga.

Published March 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619432

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)

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

ISBN 9781848619401

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.