Shearsman Books | British Authors A to C
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612457 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this was Seren Adams' first publication and concentrates on the small Somerset town of Radstock, and its history as a mining centre.
Published 2012. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612051 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Voice Thrower is from a batch of long poems begun in the 90's, arising in my ‘anti poetry' phase. The title should speak for itself, except it doesn't, which is the whole point of being a voice thrower. The poem had a twin, The Submissive Bastards , initially sharing the trope of a red sky at dusk, but TVT's sky turned into a horizon at sea, specifically from Portland looking west across Lyme Bay (Portlanders call it West Bay anyway). (Read more by clicking on the cover)
Published 2012. Paperback, 152pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612129 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Martin Anderson was born and grew up in England. Shearsman Books first published his work in the 1980s. Anderson has lived a large part of his life as an expatriate and many of his poetry collections have been published abroad. His poetry is, as a result, not well known in the UK. The poems of Snow , written whilst resident for almost three decades in the Far East, look both to that region for their ostensible subject matter and back to the UK. Snow is a collection in its own right, not simply borrowings from Anderson's earlier collections. Its choice and arrangement of poems suggests a terrain richer and more complex than those of individual poems and collections, and one within which they may be rewardingly re-encountered.
Published 2013. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613119 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Lower Reaches is framed within precise geography, the Lower Hope region of the Thames estuary where the author was born and grew up beside a river on which "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire" floated. Anderson lived for decades in the Far East. His meditation interrogates the formation of national identity and freights with poignant significance the old maxim that so much of British history happened overseas.
A few copies remain for sale. Subsequently collected in Obsequy for Lost Things (see below).
Published 2018. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616165 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A collection of re-written poems that, in their original form, were published in a book in Manila, where the author was then working. Asia is everywhere in these poems, permeating every line.
Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700431 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Michael Ayres' Shearsman collection, following his Odyssey and Salt volumes, this book features shorter works than he has been known for in recent years.
Published 2013. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613126 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein
Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616851 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Imagems 2 contains six statements by a poet who continues to challenge modernism and post-modernism alike. This chapbook complements and elaborates Richard Berengarten’s Imagems 1 (2013). In this sequel, the borders between poetic theory and practice blur, for some of these texts are prose-poems in themselves. While their themes are rooted in the here-now, their 12-point structures call to mind early 20th century manifestos and late 20th century memoranda. Themes include the birth of poetry in sound, breath, and inner speech; the interdependence of the universal and the particular; and language, light and vision. Imagems 3 is on the way.
The Shearsman Library 5
Published 2018. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615892 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"In this courageous book, Richard Berengarten calls on us to recognize—to know again—the archaic responsibilities of the poet, heir of Orpheus, singer of the kosmos, heir of the shamans, healers of the soul. Berengarten's subject is glory, not the glory we associate with kings or prelates, but the glory of the poet, who, in the poem, briefly catches the fleeting, evanescent experience that is simultaneously an experience of fulfillment, of being filled with an awe that only the weavings of language can express. In working out the propositions that pertain to this experience of magnanimity , Berengarten demonstrates his own magnanimous nature, the one always so evident in his own poems." —Norman Finkelstein
Published 2022. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618503 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1,000 years. But a sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time ever in English, is a suite of twenty-four of them. The delicate instrument of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao Yuanming, Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine, who lived more than 1,500 years ago.
Published 2015. Chapbook, 30pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614505 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Watersong begins with the first of the great cholera epidemics of 19th Century England. Focussing on the poet’s home city of Exeter, the poems interlace select details from Exeter’s 1832 cholera outbreak, in which over 400 people died, with imagined narratives of the epidemic, and other related episodes in the city,factual and invented.
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Franks Casket (or Auzon Casket) is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest, donated to the British Museum by a private owner from Auzon, France. Made from whalebone, the front, back, sides and lid of this small chest are decorated with runic inscriptions, some Latin text and images from various religious and mythical traditions. Each rune has an equivalent letter in the Latin alphabet, allowing for Anglo-Saxon and modern English translations. Each rune also has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ (‘fisc’), f signifies ‘wealth’, i ‘ice’, s ‘sun’ and c ‘torch’, yielding a sequence of four images. To write the poems in this collection, I determined the sequence of images yielded by each runic word and then used these images, or variants of them, to write the poems. Using this multilevel technique of ‘translation’, the following poems are an attempt to capture something of the layered histories, from ancient times to present, of the place where I now live: the River Teign and its surrounding area. —Andy Brown
Published 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618718 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Interiors and Other Poems takes the reader down divergent pathways, along the river Stour through the Blackmore Vale weaving threads of identities, history, and the natural world. The poems dive deep into psychic and neurological divergent selves beneath an accrued social, cultural, and environmental history of the area. The personae are both grounded and estranged, living, and breathing as fictive constructs, and drawing upon the earth and its deep ecology. Living things evoke living things.
Published 2023. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618671 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the phenomena of xenia – Greek for ‘hospitality’, later adopted by the Romans as a category of ‘still-life’ painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.
Shearsman Classics series, No. 22.
Published 2015. Paperback, 200pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614390 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Thomas Carew (1595-1640) was, with Robert Herrick, the finest poet of the “tribe of Ben”, the poets who gathered around Ben Jonson in the taverns of Southwark in the early 17th century. This collected edition is the only complete edition of his poems available.
Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615069 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice — 4th Quarter 2016
Geraldine Clarkson lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, and the Magma Editors’, Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. Declare is her first chapbook.
Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"Geraldine Clarkson’s work brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s remark that “a thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility”. Clarkson is one of few poets whose work insists on, and succeeds in, finding new and more ambitious ways to integrate affective experience, emotion, thought and an imaginative expansiveness that is entirely her own. Her rare gift is to produce a poetry that sings, even as it swinges." — Ahren Warner
Published 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618688 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A rottenness at the heart of things, mapped onto England—the Midlands, London and other cities—manifests via apocalyptic omens and curses, and things being upside-down; an underworld and stasis. The Medlar, Mespilus germanica , the aromatic and romantic medieval fruit, member of the apple and quince family, is considered inedible until ‘bletted’, i.e. left to go rotten and sweet. The collection touches on themes of xenophobia, Brexit and hypocrisy, and dallies in the English hedgerows, lanes and forests, sometimes with the English poets, seeking out the regenerative chaos and mischief present in nature. There is a fugitive hope of flow and change, breaking out of old patterns; a quest for sweetness.
Published May 2023. Paperback, 766pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.95 / $45.
ISBN 9781848618923 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A major event, this volume covers some 40 years of work.
"Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song… Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." —David Wevill
Published 2022. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618459
What are the captions using us for?
Halsey's series of diagrams and quatrains for Into the Interior is suggestive of a journey through the rebus-like territory of thought itself. Corcoran doubles the quatrains in answering him back, as if such a dialogue might be how to talk to a friend exploring the enigmatic signs of the journey remembered from long ago and made present again.
Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us
Your Thinking Tracts or Nation s (West House 2001),
A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and
Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).
Published 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
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
Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616844 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Below This Level
recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.
Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616301
Sadly, John James passed away in May 2018, just a month after launching his New & Selected Poems, Sarments (see above with the other April titles) in London. Here friends, admirers and colleagues take their cue from 2 quatrains in James's 'Theory of Poetry', and respond accordingly: Anthony Barnett, Kelvin Corcoran, Chris Cornwell, Lyndon Davies, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby, John Hall, Alan Halsey, Peter Hughes, Romana Huk, Linda Kemp, Mark Leahy, Tony Lopez, Anthony Mellors, Ian Patterson, Simon Perril, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Gavin Selerie, Simon Smith, John Temple, Nick Totton, Karlien van den Beukel, Robert Vas Dias, Geoff Ward, John Wilkinson, Cliff Yates, plus a painting by Bruce McLean on the cover.
Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The array of characters in this book of lyric poems personify twenty-first century language, found on adverts, shopfronts, train tickets. Stretch of Closures writes down an urban landscape in an alphabet made readable by its citizens. If it is the dead metaphors that define everyday lives, Claire Crowther shakes them up to show not just history but signposts to the future.
Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614932 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The design of a coin is an act of succinct aggrandisement. Bare George explores the coinage of power through a far more famous numismatic image: created in 1817 for King George III and his son, the Prince Regent, by celebrity gem designer Benedetto Pistrucci, it pictures a saint, young St George, lancing a dragon. He is undressed. Any Greek warrior of artistic relevance to the nineteenth century would be. The dragon is submitting, as the opposition needs to be shown to do.
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613683 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Martyn Crucefix’s new poems vividly evoke the landscapes of northern England and—in a sequence of sonnets inspired by the writing of Rosalía de Castro—the north west of Spain. But more than place, they explore the ways in which we inhabit time—how we are harmed and healed by it, how we deny, ignore, sublimate, repeat or reprise it.
I’d want to say it was past seven o’clock
or perhaps by then even seven-fifteen—
I’m sure of it now—a quarter past the hour
was the time we turned and part of what it meant
(‘The map house’)
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