Robin Fulton Macpherson Arrivals of Light
Published 2020. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617186 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and editor. Since 1973 his home base has been in Norway and in the decades since he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian.
His A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960-2010
(Marick Press, 2013) was described by Carol Rumens in The Guardian
as "a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond", while Peter M. McDonald, in Rain Taxi, felt certain that "A Northern Habitat
will stand the test of time. It is arguably the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium."
Robin Fulton Macpherson Ancient Light
Published April 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618701 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and editor. Since 1973 his home base has been in Norway and in the decades since he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian. His A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960–2010 (Marick Press, 2013) was described by Carol Rumens in The Guardian as “a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond.” John Glenday, in Northwords Now , referred to the book as “a real treasure of a collection, a weighty, important reminder that Fulton Macpherson is a prominent figure in Scottish poetry… His poetry is enduring as granite. It will weather well”, while Peter M. McDonald, in Rain Taxi , felt certain that “ A Northern Habitat will stand the test of time. It is arguably the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium.”
Ancient Light is his third Shearsman collection, following 2020’s
Arrivals of Light.
Barry MacSweeney Desire Lines: Unselected Poems 1966–2000
Edited by Luke Roberts.
Published 2018. Paperback, 348pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848615793 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Desire Lines: Unselected Poems, 1966-2000
presents work drawn from across MacSweeney’s writing life, and brings almost 350 pages of MacSweeney’s poetry back into print. His prolific 1970s are represented here by eight complete sequences, including the previously unpublished long poems Toad Church
and Pelt Feather Log. Drawing on archival resources and extensive bibliographic resources, Desire Lines
collects the majority of MacSweeney’s poetry not included in Wolf Tongue. These unselected poems showcase the full range of his capabilities: from raw lyrical emotion to modernist fragmentation, from historical narrative to surreal invention and absurd humour. Including five unpublished poems from the 1980s – including the state-of-the-nation bulletin, 'Revulsion' and the tender, heartbroken ‘Soft Hail’ – MacSweeney’s essential contribution to modern poetry can be seen to its full extent. Alongside translations from the French of Guillaume Apollinaire, Desire Lines
includes an introduction and notes on the texts by the editor.
Phil Maillard Sweet Dust & Growling Lambs
Published 2008. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700837 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Looking at this collection, Sweet Dust And Growling Lambs, I think I can perceive a few recurrent themes. The first relates to mythology, in a broad, story-telling kind of fashion. Of recent years, 'myths' have been regarded as universal, because archetypal, repositories of human experience. From there, it's a short step to the idea of 'fusion', of combining elements from different cultures in a single work. This is most familiar in music. In my poem The 'Confession' Of Gerald, for example, the Celtic story of Elidorus and his meeting with the fairy folk is developed by way of a Buddhist teaching story." (Phil Maillard)
D.S. Marriott Hoodoo Voodoo
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6 ins. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9781905700790
D.S. Marriott's second full-length collection, following Incognegro. With an introduction by Romana Huk, in which she says: "D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book . . . by refolding beautiful romantic lines… into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. Hoodoo Voodoo's
last section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes… I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book."
D.S. Marriott The Bloods
Published 2011. Paperback, 138pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611511 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In The Bloods, his third poetry collection, D.S. Marriott's recurrent theme is that of memory and absence: 'bound to what is remembered/ what is absent'. In poems that both embody and inhabit this double obligation, memory and absence prove to be equally central to the mysteries of ordinary language, the politics and philosophy of enslavement, as well as markers—typographic, archival, ethical—respecting the borders of what cannot, finally, be known. Spare, lyrical, and deeply haunting, and yet not without irony or hope, The Bloods
continues Marriott's pursuit of a style and concept of the poem that is strictly his own.
Lila Matsumoto Urn & Drum
Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615687 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems usher you into an intimate cinema where Gertrude Stein kisses Patti Smith. Where a bird steps through the screen and becomes a girl, where a girl moulds a cock and becomes a city, where a city striated with cinema becomes a glacier, where a glacier sits in the red velvet seats and sees herself as a star. In her mind imagined films take flight, cast from salt and swans. Stepping out of the darkness, she trips into blackouts over lines scratched into celluloid. Wrought as and from fragments—coinages, echoes, attitudes, glimpses—these poems collage new ways (or waves) of seeing.
Sophie Mayer Her Various Scalpels
Published 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610408 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
These poems usher you into an intimate cinema where Gertrude Stein kisses Patti Smith. Where a bird steps through the screen and becomes a girl, where a girl moulds a cock and becomes a city, where a city striated with cinema becomes a glacier, where a glacier sits in the red velvet seats and sees herself as a star. In her mind imagined films take flight, cast from salt and swans. Stepping out of the darkness, she trips into blackouts over lines scratched into celluloid. Wrought as and from fragments—coinages, echoes, attitudes, glimpses—these poems collage new ways (or waves) of seeing.
Erica McAlpine The Country Gambler
Published 2016. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614819 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often-vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn — to show, in the manner of a close friend, what the world has to offer, what it sometimes takes away, and what can and should matter most.
Ruth McIlroy The Pot of Earth and the Iron Pot
Published 2022. Paperback, 80pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618282 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ruth McIlroy is a poet of the ‘tilting world’. Her lyrics are charged with immediacy and proceed off-kilter in the revelation of familiar experience as unfamiliar and normality as something quite other. ere is much here, directly and indirectly, of heroic Gaelic song, both ancient and modern, conveying humour, darkness and arresting beauty executed with startling, sure-footed precision. Whether in lamentation, the conjuring of a curse or jogging in the park, in every mode the singer is possessed by the song. I once asked a Gaelic singer from the Isle of Lewis – What are you thinking about when you sing these songs? Oh the song mostly, the song, she said. Ruth McIlroy has this secret and doesn’t so much make it new as show us that it never grew old. At every turn in The Pot of Earth and the Iron Pot song is happening not only in the trees but almost everywhere else too. —Kelvin Corcoran
Anthony Mellors The Lewknor Turn
Published 2013. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613089 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Anthony Mellors' first collection in some years brings together a number of sequences, including the remarkable 'bent out of shape' and 'The Gordon Brown Sonnets', the latter extensively and puckishly annotated.
Anna Mendelssohn I'm Working Here: The Collected Poems
Edited by Sara Crangle
Published 2020. Paperback, 780pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £45.00 / $70
Published 2020. Paperback, 780pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £45.00 / $70
Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies edited by Denise Riley, Iain Sinclair, and Rod Mengham & John Kinsella. Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex.
Closely attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute, probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise (“a poem is not going to give precise directions”); part antipolitical manifesto (“the war is too close / for revolution to be understood”); part lament (“softly the sound of woe / gallops”); part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and possibility, replete with “scoopydoo sounds”, “night[s of] pouring gold”, and “high walk[s] into fantasy”, Mendelssohn’s writing resolutely resists containment or category.
This scholarly edition is the first replete collection of the poems Anna Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation in her lifetime, often writing under the name Grace Lake.
George Messo Entrances
Published 2006. Paperback 8x5ins, 83pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562900 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The author's second collection, Entrances
is a remarkable follow-up to the highly-praised debut collection, From the Pine Observatory. As Peter Didsbury says of it: "It seems to me that Messo is somehow bringing a whole region and set of cultures back into the European sphere. Any book which so beautifully invents for us the Choruh River and eleventh-century Georgia is OK by me."
George Messo Hearing Still
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610224 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Middle East, both real and imagined, forms the background against which George Messo's third collection, Hearing Still, shapes its recurring themes: silence, destruction, resistance, and endurance. The poems are, at times, as sparse as the landscapes they inhabit; fragile breaths quivering at the edge of worlds driven by catastrophe and restored by human dignity. Ranging through Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, to the gravel deserts of Oman, and the desolate coastal plains of the Arabian Gulf, Messo's uniquely strange and illusive vision is at once mysterious and distressing.
George Messo Violades & Appledown
Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612648 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
And here, where forest entrails spill
into winter light, you find me, straying
out from the forest's dark memory…
Itinerant Hebrew poet David Vogel, Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne and surveyor David Thompson are among the lost voices re-presenced in George Messo's enigmatic new book, Violades & Appledown. Messo's vivid reinvention of history and tradition, passes through explorations of fractured time and the timelessness of memory into a powerfully realized present of ever changing perspectives, mindful of its journey out of the past.
Christopher Middleton Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal
Published 2004. Paperback, 151pp, 9x6ins. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562511 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Christopher Middleton was one of the finest British poets of the post-War era and this volume presents the voice of the man behind a remarkable body of work, firstly talking to poet Marius Kociejowski, and then talking to himself – 18 months' worth of journal entries from the late 1990s, in which he muses on matters poetic, social, political. The book also includes an essay-memoir by Marius Kociejowski that traces the growth of his fascination with Middleton's art.
Christopher Middleton Poems 2006-2009
Published 2010. Paperback, 182pp, 9x6ins, £14.95
ISBN 9781848611276 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Christopher Middleton remained, in his eighties, a restless and inventive poet of the very first order. This volume contains three complete collections, and was the first to be published after the author's Collected Poems appeared to considerable acclaim in 2008. The entire collection has since been reprinted in the author's Collected Later Poems (Carcanet Press).
"Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years." —August Kleinzahler, Threepenny Review
Christopher Middleton Serpentine
The Shearsman Library 3
Published 2018. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
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.
John Milbank The Dances of Albion
Published 2015. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613959 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Of this collection, the author says: “Since I come from all over the island of Britain, it is to me my locality in the world, as much as it is my nation. Of the perplexing variety of this region, I try to make sense. Throughout the island I experience landscapes that tend to evaporate, mingling with myths that loom into a persistent reality. The resulting psychogeographies are for me many, though also problematically linked and integrated. This poetic sequence is written in the hope of a true unity of Britain yet to come.”
John Milbank Some Speaking Swirls
Published July 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618930 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The intersection of theology and poetry is a charged zone of encounter and, if I may say it, discipline. Yet there’s a generosity and a lightness to Milbank’s verse: a concinnity both with, and within the now, the lyric moment of generous apprehension, which aligns these taut lyrics with the sensibility of Traherne. 'Ripeness rustles,' but it is brightness that reigns here, among 'alien and yet familiar creatures,' a jackdaw, an escaped jaguar in a wood, a white cat in autumn, 'beech-mulch' that 'sings silently.' These radiant poems overflow with creation and gratitude." — G.C. Waldrep
David Miller Afterword
Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618046 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848618046 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Afterword
is a long poem in fragments, with some long lines of poetry folded over, as it were, onto the next line(s) of the page, as in Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsberg.
It is a long poem in fragments, but it might also be seen as a poem sequence: of memories and meditations, dreams and (for want of a better word) visions. It’s increasingly invaded by images of destruction and desolation: of nature, of animals, of humankind; with those images prefigured by the opening passages.
At the end of the text, the negative emphasis is “turned” upon and against itself into the language of transition. It’s a poem that’s concerned with limits and the possible surpassing or exceeding of limits.
David Miller Reassembling Still — Collected Poems
Published 2014. Paperback, 318pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613317 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still
is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller’s poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters
project and his visual poems.
David Miller Spiritual Letters (Series 6)
Published 2015. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614550 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“The word ‘spiritual’ is, in this volume, ripped away from the New Age and returned to its sources in Kabbalah and early Christian (gnostic) writings. But it carries with it the world as we have it now. A heap of horrors, remnants, a sense of the feminine under assault, and the drive to love. Therefore the dimensions are multiple and unstable. To be human is to be a spiritual entity more aligned with nature than with culture, and therefore to rebel. I am happy to have and to hold this book.” —Fanny Howe, on Series 1-5 of Spiritual Letters
David Miller The Waters of Marah. Selected Prose 1973-1995
Published 2005. Paperback, 113pp, 8.5x 5.5ins. £10.95
ISBN 9780907562665. Not for sale in North America.
The Waters of Marah
brings together the best of David Miller's non-poetic output. The prose here however does include work that would be classified as prose-poetry in most quarters, as well as the longer work, Tesserae, which could be better described as experimental fiction. These pieces tend also to have verse interludes, which further confuses the definition of what category they actually belong to. In the end however, categories are irrelevant, and the work can be read on its own terms, be it prose, be it prose-poetry, be it fiction, be it poetry. This is musical work that explores the parameters of the sayable in a manner that does not repel the reader but rather draws him/her in as a participant in a remarkable enterprise.
Geraldine Monk (ed.) CUSP — Recollections of Poetry in Transition
Published 2012. Paperback, 244pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612501 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or "cusp" I'm concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed."—from Geraldine Monk's introduction to this volume
Helen Moore Hedge Fund
Published 2012. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612013 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Like the vision it preserves and celebrates, the language of this collection draws its strength from a deep rootedness in the natural world. At once eulogist for all that sustains our life and elegist for all that we despoil, Helen Moore emerges in Hedge Fund
as an urgent, compelling and compassionate voice for these critical times." —Lindsay Clarke
John Muckle London Brakes — a novel
Published 2010. Paperback, 296pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611016 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes—a motorcycle courier on a big bike, picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits—the answer to every question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London town. Set in the 1980s, London Brakes
shows us an England of conflicting loyalties and low impostures—a city divided by inequality and opportunism: a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life.
John Muckle My Pale Tulip — A Novel
Published 2012. Paperback, 228pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612167 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There wasn't much to do in the battered, half-forgotten seaside resort of Jaywick Sands, Essex—nothing really, except to listen to the North Sea pound against the sea-defences and wait for the next run-down holiday shack to go up like a barbeque torch. Lee and Will were an odd pair, deeply eccentric kids, living alone with their mothers and struggling through resit classes in college. But all that was to change on the day they kidnapped Charley Price in an old motor they'd just stolen, and made a heroic run with her for the ferry to the far land where the tulips grow.
My Pale Tulip
takes a scenic route across low countries to the beautiful cities of Delft and Utrecht—where darkness lies in ambush. It is a classic tale of flight and crash-landing: poignant, sharp-witted, with a voice all its own.
John Muckle Falling Through — a novel
Published 2017. Paperback, 232pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615359 [Download a sample PDF from this book.]
Graham Bartlett is a private English tutor. He lives in North London and travels to meet numerous teenage clients. He is a lonely person, unable to find steady work, but does his best to survive and deliver sound lessons to a large number of youngsters, diving in and out of their homes with a battered satchel on his shoulder, glimpsing their families and backgrounds. Browsing the internet he discovers an unpleasant murder has occurred in the quiet suburban avenue where he grew up. The horrific discovery of a woman’s callously disposed-of body half-interests him whilst seeming to have little to do with his own life, apart from accidents of place and memory. Intertwined with his peripatetic journeys across a cityscape marked by recent riots are the stories of people he has known, or imagines, or has actual dealings with in the present.
Falling Through
is a novel of encounters and evasions: north of the Thames, south of hell.
John Muckle
Late Driver
Published 2020. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617308 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Pauline is at the end of her life, wool-gathering in a chair, but simultaneously in her prime, driving between dress shops in her blue Opel Kadett; Eileen Platt, an American nurse, is stationed on a remote airfield – known as Mudville – in the Blackdown Hills, Devon, her duties to patch up returning aircrew of Liberator bombers. She doesn’t want to go home to Des Moines after the war. She wants to stay in England.
Near the old airfield a family play out their last moves in a place superficially unchanged, in a country whose old order is breaking up, slipping past proper recall. Richie’s rotting Jags and Daimlers no longer run; women still care for men, sometimes may be cared for in turn – but sometimes the cars may change without warning, and wasps swarm madly out of the jar.
In stories varying in size and manner from a funeral eulogy to a compelling wartime romance, Late Driver
tells of a number of surprising lives imagined in out of the way places; the mood is restless, probing, suffused with memories and loss – although some rivet-hole stars still let in the light of the young women who first punched them into an empty sky.
John Muckle Little White Bull — British Fiction in the 50s and 60s
Published 2014. Paperback, 342pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848613058 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Little White Bull
takes a fresh look at the times before the day before yesterday, not the end times but the new beginnings, and tries to show how British fiction grappled with subjects as thorny and diverse as the impact of mass immigration and a new kind of rootless working-class character uncontained by previous conceptions of him or herself, and apparently ready to go to war over them. This exciting and readable book presents the fifties and sixties as a crucible of new departures, asking what remains and continues from those decades into the cultural present. It takes the form of a series of thematic essays each of which discusses the work of an individual or group of novelists.
Writers examined in this book are Paul Ableman, Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard, Lynn Reid Banks, John Berger, John Braine, Angela Carter, Nell Dunn, Gillian Freeman, Barry Hines, B.S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, Colin Macinnes, Michael Moorcock, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Bill Naughton, Edna O’Brien, Harold Pinter, Samuel Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Jack Trevor Story, Leslie Thomas, Alexander Trocchi, John Wain, Keith Waterhouse, Raymond Williams and Colin Wilson.
John Muckle Firewriting and other poems
Published 2005. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins. £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This first collection of John Muckle's poetry, written 1998-2004, begins with a sequence about working in Care Homes, continues with poems whose literary subject matter ranges from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Coleridge and Philip K. Dick, reflections on life, love and politics, and closes with 'Firewriting', a long poem which imagines that German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin managed to escape over the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 and has ended up in contemporary London.
John Muckle Mirrorball
Published 2018. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615977 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
What are those distorted smears of colour in the mirror ball? Are they people? Look closer. Yes. They are people. They are us. And there am I, a small pink smudge, an arched eyebrow … or perhaps not: retinal overload, a trick of the light. How do people make sense of themselves, and what do those splintered shafts of vari-coloured liquidity have to tell us about the skins they are bouncing off? Who knows. The speaker of these lines is himself caught up in the glare, garrulous in spite of the din. Mirrorball
collects poems from 2004 to 2018.
Paschalis Nikolaou & John Z. Dillon (eds.) Richard Berengarten —
A Portrait in Inter-Views
Published 2017. Paperback, 204pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23.00
ISBN 9781848615120 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Spanning a period of fifteen years, these five ‘Inter-views’ with Richard Berengarten explore the many facets of his writings. Hospitably and expansively, they yield insights into the work of a poet of our time, his methods, motives, and patterns of thought.
Based in dialogue, an interview is always a collaborative venture. It discovers difference and clarifies commonalities between writer and reader. By working closely together in composing, editing and revisiting transcripts for each interview, Richard Berengarten and his five interlocutors reveal the potential of the literary interview itself, as they articulate and test its reticent boundaries.
Douglas Oliver Islands of Voices
— Selected Poems
Edited by Ian Brinton, with a Preface by Joe Luna.
Published 2020. Paperback, 198pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
Published 2020. Paperback, 198pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848617179 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) was a poet with a substantial reputation in the late 1980s and 1990s, finding a larger audience for his socially-committed poetry in a way that no other of his poetic background had done, or perhaps wished to do. He left school early, worked for many years as a journalist, mostly in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex as a mature student in the 1970s. In this period he was associated with the so-called Cambridge School of poetry, and his work was published by its representative publishers, Ferry Press and Grosseteste Review Editions. He subsequently lived in Paris, New York, and then again in Paris, usually working as a lecturer. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Oppo Hectic, The Diagram Poems, The Harmless Building, The Infant and the Pearl, Kind, Penniless Politics, A Salvo for Africa, and the posthumous volumes, Arrondissements
and Whisper, Louise.
Peter Oswald Sonnets of various sizes
Published 2016. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614925 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poet and dramatist Peter Oswald has been writing sonnets alongside his other work for the best part of thirty years. This volume brings a substantial selection of them together for the first time.
Sonia Overall The Art of Walking
Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614482 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Sonia Overall is a novelist, poet and lecturer based in Kent. The Art of Walking is a collection of responses to movement and place, reflecting the writer’s interest in the relationship between walking and creativity, self and setting.
Fani Papageorgiou When You Said No, Did You Mean Never?
Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612655 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Fani Papageorgiou gives us a poetry in which 'almost everything happens in language' yet what is crucial is precisely what's covered by that harsh little word 'almost,' and in which 'empty space is affected by gravity': the empty space is that of the human heart. This kaleidoscopic sequence of searing fragments marks the arrival of an outstanding poet." —Barry Schwabsky
Fani Papageorgiou Not So Ill with You and Me
Published 2015. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614383 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Fani Papageorgiou’s collection When You Said No, Did You Mean Never?
(Shearsman, 2013) won the Hong Kong Poetry Prize and has since been published in Spanish translation by Bartleby Editores, Madrid. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in various magazines in the USA and the UK.
Comments on the author’s previous collection:
“The poems are intense but enigmatic, as if they were seared in with a damaged branding iron. […] Fani Papageorgiou’s disconcerting and magnetic first book … reminds us (and as Dionne Warwick once observed), a house is not a home; it’s always just a little unfamiliar, just slightly beyond our easy occupation. Which is precisely what draws us to the door, to the briefly lighted windows.” —David Orr, New York Times Book Review
Fani Papageorgiou The Purloined Letter
Published 2017. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615649 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"I like The Purloined Letter
very much. It has a dolorous, stately, piercing, almost martial music, like an Elizabethan court dance or Miles Davis in his electric period. It's funny too."—Edwin Frank
Sandeep Parmar The Marble Orchard
Published 2012. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612044 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sandeep Parmar's powerful debut collection, The Marble Orchard, steps boldly through the personal archive of family histories to art, literature and the imagined lives of modern and ancient heroines, from Mina Loy to Ovid's Heroides. Her experiments are set apart by their pure charge of language and textual silences, inherited from the distance between home, identity and memory.
Sandeep Parmar Eidolon
Published 2015. Paperback, 72pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613928 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Winner of the Ledbury Forte Award for Best Second Collection.
Partly a modern revision of the Helen myth, Eidolon
meditates on the visible and invisible forces of Western civilisation from classical antiquity to present-day America. An eidolon is an image, a ghost, a spectre, a scapegoat. It is a device, like deus ex machina, to deal with the problem of narrative, specifically Helen’s supposed deceit and infidelity. The Eidolon, as a device, is something beauteous and beguiling — as a thing, or as a preoccupation, it is the siren song to the poet who listens for silence. Who gives Helen her voice and what need unites it into a single, constant loathsome creature? Helen is as much the city of Troy as its famed plains and high walls. It might as well be Helen smouldering on the great pyre of defeat, even though she escapes unscathed in Homer’s Odyssey and is restored to her husband’s side by the eidolon’s unique guarantee of her chastity.
Sandeep Parmar Faust
Published 2022. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618275 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Choice, 3rd Quarter 2022.
Poetry Book Society Choice, 3rd Quarter 2022.
Goethe’s version of the scholar’s fateful wager with Mephistopheles inspires the central sequence of Faust, mapped onto the figure of the migrant who flees a postcolonial legacy of fire, displacement and climate destruction for a life of eternal striving. As Parmar asks in 'The Winnowing Shovel': 'How is striving itself, as an idea built into literary models and real-life stereotypes of the good immigrant or the model minority, how might striving—in the Faustian sense—provide a way of thinking about heroism, tragedy (modern and ancient) and migratory grief? Who chooses to leave and why, who attempts to return, who stays on, who, to borrow from Bhanu Kapil’s image of reverse migration, is made psychotic in a national space, who is this hero who journeys, who strives and for what? To be visible or invisible? As others have looked to the Faust legend for ways to explore the insatiability of man’s appetites, the questions I put to Goethe’s version specifically bring together three strands: striving as a fear of and countermeasure against mortality; a critique of globalisation and technology; and the female element underlying male aggression, destruction and desire.' From Goethe to Elizabeth Bishop, Vivien Eliot to Winckelmann, Homer and Marilyn Monroe—Faust’s poems meditate on the accrual of loss and of the impossibility of home.
Alasdair Paterson My My My Life
Published 2021. Paperback, 70pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617520 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In My My My Life
Alasdair Paterson treats us to a cornucopia of existential titbits, real or imaginary - from questions of pirate and Pictish identity to riffs on twilight and the twilight years, via an involuntary appearance in a Breughel painting, the poetic output of a mad king and dinner in a Titanic-themed restaurant. And much more…
"Beware, Mr Paterson! The Stornoway Puffin
has its eye on you!"
—Stornoway Puffin
Alasdair Paterson Elsewhere or Thereabouts
Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613270 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
From Troy to Arcadia, on the high road to elsewhere and the low road to thereabouts, boarding a ferry 'cross the Mersey and hiking the Jurassic Coast, skating away on Duddingston Loch and dynamiting the frozen rivers of Siberia, lured to the summit and drawn to the edge — Alasdair Paterson plots a course at the cruising speed of the flâneur through the ruins of empires, dreams and good intentions. Though pavement cafes still play a part…
Alasdair Paterson On the Governing of Empires
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611160 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Finding Kristallnacht in an optician's chart, flushing heresy from a Michelin guide, procuring princesses courtesy of furnishings catalogues and constructing a guided tour of Bedlam from the names of British moths, Alasdair Paterson brings a Byzantine range of techniques — cut-and-mosaic, palimpsest dialectic, diplomatic transplant and induced mutation — to a series of innocent texts, most without a prior thought of poetry in their heads, to build an indispensible vademecum for the imperially and post-imperially inclined.
Simon Perril Archilochus on the Moon
Published 2013. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613065 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Archilochus, ancient Greece's first lyric poet, was a soldier, part slave, part aristocrat, who took part in the earliest colonial expeditions. When Lycambes broke off the poet's engagement to his daughter Neobulé, legend has it that Archilochus wrote such scurrilous poems about the affair that the entire family committed suicide. Perril's Archilochus has been sent into exile to colonise the moon, that curator of lost objects and desires. This collection voices the ageing poet's dissection of hope and desire, and his meditation upon the body that barely houses them.
Simon Perri Beneath
Published 2015. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614406 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848614406 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Beneath is subtitled a “nekyiad”, and thus is a kind of sequel to Simon Perril’s extraordinary last collection, Archilochus on the Moon
(2013). A nekyia
(ἡ νέκυια) in Ancient Greece was a rite in which ghosts were called forth and questioned as to the future. The nekyia has long figured in literature, dating back to Book 11—itself known as the Nekyia in the classical era—of the Odyssey.
Simon Perril The Slip
Published 2020. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617216 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Slip
is the final volume of Perril’s trilogy excavating the crime scene at the centre of archaic lyric. We can’t know whether ancient Greece’s first lyric poet Archilochus ‘really’ used his Iambic prowess to curse Lycambes’ family to its grave for a broken marriage oath. But neither can we doubt that his poetic legacy, in Antiquity and beyond, was a by-word for judgements over the acceptability, or otherwise, of indulgence in poetic harm; just as the literary form of Iambic he is famous for initiating is a locus of ethical crises.
The Slip is steeped in the animal fables within the surviving fragments of Archilochus, pre-Aesopical ainos that were likely stock elements of Iambic verse. Most famous are the sequence of fragments in which the fox recounts his revenge upon the eagle (widely regarded as code for Lycambes) who has betrayed their friendship by eating the vixen’s cubs. The fox curses the eagle and appeals to Zeus to intervene and bring justice to bear; the greedy eagle steals meat from a sacrificial altar only to have it burn down his nest and cause its young to fall out into the jaws of its vulpine rival.
So, here are the last steps of the ‘wolf walker’ Lycambes, undergoing his curse in the Dog Days of summer on the cusp of following the death of his daughters with his own, and reminiscing. Central to this reminiscence are the early expeditions to colonise Thasos he undertook with Telesicles, Archilochus’s father, and that doubtless confirmed, if not established, the bond between the families that he shatters in breaking his oath. In pottery, the slip is a liquified suspension of clay in water and was painted onto the areas of ancient pots intended to emerge black in the firing process. Needless to say, notions of the slip also encompass all manner of acts of evasion, disguise, and the tying of a noose.
The Slip is steeped in the animal fables within the surviving fragments of Archilochus, pre-Aesopical ainos that were likely stock elements of Iambic verse. Most famous are the sequence of fragments in which the fox recounts his revenge upon the eagle (widely regarded as code for Lycambes) who has betrayed their friendship by eating the vixen’s cubs. The fox curses the eagle and appeals to Zeus to intervene and bring justice to bear; the greedy eagle steals meat from a sacrificial altar only to have it burn down his nest and cause its young to fall out into the jaws of its vulpine rival.
So, here are the last steps of the ‘wolf walker’ Lycambes, undergoing his curse in the Dog Days of summer on the cusp of following the death of his daughters with his own, and reminiscing. Central to this reminiscence are the early expeditions to colonise Thasos he undertook with Telesicles, Archilochus’s father, and that doubtless confirmed, if not established, the bond between the families that he shatters in breaking his oath. In pottery, the slip is a liquified suspension of clay in water and was painted onto the areas of ancient pots intended to emerge black in the firing process. Needless to say, notions of the slip also encompass all manner of acts of evasion, disguise, and the tying of a noose.
Simon Perril Two Duets With Occasion
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.
John Phillips Shape of Faith
Published 2017. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615328 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Phillips would have us look no further than the poem itself for the primary matter of its own accordant recognition as fact. So that to write is to read ourselves into being alive in forms we have no further proof of than the act of the poem's own declaration."— Patrick James Dunagan
"At its best this is highly unusual, Spartan, thought-provoking, intelligent and subtly, quietly moving work." — David Miller
Tom Phillips (ed.) Peter Robinson: A Portrait of His Work
Published 2021. Paperback, 320pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617445 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume contains essays by Ian Brinton, Peter Carpenter, Tony Crowley, Martin Dodsworth, Andrew Houwen, Miki Iwata, James Peake, Piers Pennington, Tom Phillips, Adam Piette, Elaine Randell, Anna Saroldi, Matthew Sperling, and Alison Stone, which covers all aspects of Peter Robinson's literary output.
Peter Philpott Textual Possessions
Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 132pp, £12.95 / 20
ISBN 9780907562535 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Textual Possessions
is the first large collection by Peter Philpott for many years. This volume brings together three long sequences of poems: In the Present Historic Tense, An Encounter Upon the Beach at Minehead With the Prince of This World, and On Being Voiced. Peter Philpott is editor of the online poetry journal Great Works
Peter Philpott Are we not drawn . . .
Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610248 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Are We Not Drawn… takes off from a palindrome quoted in Anne Michael's novel, Fugitive Pieces: "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?" Drawn onward; but trapped in repetition and mirroring. The mirrors are now fractured: each line breaks under the strain, as voices and images pour in. Verbal repetitions, starting with the words of the palindrome, give some sorts of paths through, continually evolving and shifting. A work of naïve realism, then, capable of recording how gardenias, Inca mummies and the iron mines of West Somerset determine our days. Just listen to what you are being told…
Peter Philpott Ianthe Poems
Published 2015. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614178 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
“Haunted by a phrase of Keston Sutherland’s, ‘The pressure to think and sing’, Peter Philpott’s lyrics on his granddaughter Ianthe read like the meditations of a slightly deranged but liberated Wordsworth, who has escaped onto the streets of the twenty-first century, not quite sure whether he is the grandfather or the grandchild. Full of grace and wonder, and a grasp of complex forms which have been chewed carefully before being spat out again, this is poetry of the highest order, proving without question that there are no ideas but in sings.” —Philip Terry
Frances Presley Collected Poems, Volume 1 — 1973–2004
Published 2022. Paperback, 346pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / US$27.
ISBN 9781848618114 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first volume of Frances Presley’s Collected Poems, 1973 to 2004, provides an important overview of her earlier life and poetic development. She experiments with modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations, sometimes associated with the new British poetry. Her feminism and political commitment are sharply defined, alongside a growing concern for ecology. It includes The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop, Linocut and Somerset Letters, as well as her collaborations, with artist Irma Irsara, on women’s clothing, Automatic Cross Stitch, and with poet Elizabeth James, Neither the One nor the Other. It supersedes and expands her selected poems, Paravane (2004) and Myne (2006).
Frances Presley Collected Poems, Volume 2 — 2004–2020
Published 2022. Paperback, 464pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / US$32.
ISBN 9781848618121 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The second volume of Frances Presley’s Collected Poems, 2004 to 2020, brings together a distinctive body of work, representing a major achievement in modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen. There is also a new sequence, Channels, on shorelines and parallel coasts.
Frances Presley Ada Unseen
Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616639 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘Mathematical Science is the language of the unseen relations between things’, wrote Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary. She had a home on Exmoor and this landscape is reimagined through a combination of science and poetics, also part of a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, ADADA:landescape. Ada loved birds, especially song birds, and studied the theory of flight. In a series of poems about birds and flight some are designed like punch cards to isolate key words and create an alternative text for a woman’s life. The third sequence explores, through a 21st century lens, various aspects of the ’unseen’ which were of interest to Ada: these include the human body, computing, music, the imaginary, and dark matter. There is also an internet cut up and paste on the word ‘Ada’ and copious Notes.
Frances Presley The Sex of Art
The Shearsman Library 7
Published 2018. Paperback, 92pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Frances Presley halse for hazel
Published 2014. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613409 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Halse
is Exmoor dialect for hazel, as transcribed by local historian Hazel Eardley-Wilmot: a convergence of names which initiates a new poetic syntax of marginal trees and tongues. Halse for hazel
has three sections, Halse, Col
and Hassel:
alternate and playful names for hazel, which map wide ranging geographic and linguistic areas, as well as political and environmental pressures. Halse begins with Exmoor tree names and ends with Lorna Doone, while Col moves from an irreverent Celtic tree alphabet to Atlantic woods in Scotland where hazel dominates. Hassel
takes us from the devastation of Oak Change, after WWI, to the naming of hidden whitebeams in Avon Gorge. Much of Halse for hazel, like Presley’s earlier sequences, Myne and Lines
of sight, is ‘blind writing’, when the eye and mind focus on the landscape rather than the page, although what we see and how we see are more at risk. The visual design of the text is shaped by the language of trees and their strange physical evolution, in dialogue with the images of Irma Irsara. The book also contains a recent collaboration with American poet and artist Julia Cohen, commissioned for Likestarlings.
Frances Presley Lines of sight
Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610392 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Frances Presley's Lines of sight
brings together all her poems from 'Stone settings and longstones', a sequence framed by the Neolithic stone monuments on Exmoor. The poems reflect the fragile, elusive and even disputed existence of these sites, as well as the enduring landscape which surrounds them. They reveal, too, more recent layers of history, and the creation of new stone settings. The writings of a local woman archaeologist are also a source of rediscovery and radical realignment. This sequence is part of a collaboration and performance with Tilla Brading.
Other monuments are engaged with in 'Female figures'. These are the rare statues of women in public spaces. The figures chosen are Queen Anne, Margaret Thatcher and Julian of Norwich, along with the spaces they overlook. The final poetic sequence 'The first book of her life', includes a meditation on the war experiences of Frances Presley's mother, and creatively rereads an old Dutch dictionary and primer, in a search for origins of identity and language.
Frances Presley Myne: New & Selected Poems & Prose 1976-2005
Published 2006. Paperback, 9x6ins, 200pp. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9780907562535
Myne
is a survey of Frances Presley's career to date, as well as a new collection of her poems. It begins with two recent cycles: the title sequence inspired by the Somerset landscape, and 'Stone Settings', which retraces the enigmatic patterns of prehistoric stones on Exmoor. Also here are the entire Somerset Letters, and Linocut, both originally published by Oasis Books, plus substantial selections from the author’s first two books, The Sex of Art and Hula Hoop.
J.H. Prynne Or Scissel
Published 2018. Chapbook, 38pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616219
This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passagebetween J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation,subsequent eventually to
Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).
J.H. Prynne Whitman and Truth
Published 2022. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848617926
Whitman and Truth is a set of reading notes intended to introduce third-year university students to Whitman’s reading of war, with enlightening comparisons offered from the work Susan Sontag, Sir Philip Sidney, Mo Yan, Edmund Blunden, and others.
J.H. Prynne, John James, Andrew Crozier Three Books
Published 2021. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617421 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 1975 J.H. Prynne published High Pink on Chrome. The publication was to be avidly devoured by his admirers and fellow poets. Prynne’s example loomed large, especially in Cambridge, and John James and Andrew Crozier would both often respond to his work. Later in 1975, John James published Striking the Pavilion of Zero, which references Prynne, and then, three years later, Andrew Crozier published High Zero, the title of which references, and responds to, both of the preceding books — in this case, the connection goes even further, with the first poem in the book being based on the final poem in Prynne’s collection, and the last poem being based on the first poem in the James collection.
This unusual compendium volume gives readers a chance to look in on this cardinal moment in radical English poetry, and see the connections at work. The sequences can be read in the various collected editions of the three poets, but the limited-edition originals are long out of print. Here the poems are presented together and afresh in the original context of their first grace and audacity.
This unusual compendium volume gives readers a chance to look in on this cardinal moment in radical English poetry, and see the connections at work. The sequences can be read in the various collected editions of the three poets, but the limited-edition originals are long out of print. Here the poems are presented together and afresh in the original context of their first grace and audacity.
Elaine Randell Selected Poems 1970–2005
Published 2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562719 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume showcases over 30 years' work by Elaine Randell, a poet whose work has unaccountably drifted from public view these past several years. The Selected Poems
demonstrates what we have been missing: a vibrant and original voice in an era too full of poetic clones, and a mixture of lyric poems and decidedly unsettling narative monologues, based on the author's experience of dealing with children at risk.
Elaine Randell Faulty Mothering
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610897 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Faulty Mothering
is based on my work with families but focusing on mothers in particular who are experiencing problems in attachment to their children. A backdrop to such difficulties maybe poverty, mental-health problems, substance misuse, adoption, fostering, domestic violence or being poorly parented themselves. I am interested in the capacity of people to change and in the courage of children and young people who adapt and survive adversity. The poems explore those issues. The 'Song Cycles', which make up the rest of the book, come from a call and response, using sentences sometimes written by others in novels which have resonated for me. — Elaine Randell
Elaine Randell The Meaning of Things
Published 2017. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615144 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
‘Elaine Randell’s writing was jump-started early by the outpouring of experimental small-press poetry and publishing that accompanied the emergence of pop art. That movement drew attention to the art–life divide by reducing it to a sharp but casual edginess. The poetry associated with this moment adopted informal means to freshen its reader relations across the same frontier. Randell’s subsequent career in social work and psychotherapy has found her firmly on the side of life. The poems in The Meaning of Things, though making no such claims for their acts, are alive with the clear feeling, ethical tact, and rhythmical skill required to move rapidly back and forth along that borderline.’ —Peter Robinson
Anna Reckin Three Reds
Published 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611832 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Landscape, textiles, plant-forms, the mysterious taxonomies of perfume are here themes for poetry that works the edge between lyric consonance and radical disjuncture. Three Reds, Anna Reckin's first book-length collection, draws on materials from China, Australia, Portugal and her native East Anglia to produce poems whose emotional complexities surface in the push and pull of sound patterns and visual design, and in the gaps and overlaps of words' makings and their givens.
Anna Reckin Three Reds
Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615809 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Landscape, textiles, plant-forms, the mysterious taxonomies of perfume are here themes for poetry that works the edge between lyric consonance and radical disjuncture. Three Reds, Anna Reckin's first book-length collection, draws on materials from China, Australia, Portugal and her native East Anglia to produce poems whose emotional complexities surface in the push and pull of sound patterns and visual design, and in the gaps and overlaps of words' makings and their givens.
Jeremy Reed Bona Drag
Published 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610552 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Bona Drag, a rich, brilliantly inventive collection of poems covering every detail of the poet's obsessive life, from the colour of Posh Spice's heels, to London street encounters, underworld friends, urban survival tactics, neuroscientific concepts and extraterrestrials, more than confirms J.G. Ballard's assessment of Reed, as "the most gifted poet working today, an extraordinary talent."
Jeremy Reed Bona Vada
Published 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Bona Vada
(gay slang for "good looking"), the companion volume to Bona Drag
(Shearsman, 2009), again finds Jeremy Reed—described by J.G. Ballard as having "an imagination almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance", and by the rock bandit Pete Doherty as "a legend"—piloting stunning imagery into vitally modern big city experience. Reed's image-grab often has him refer to himself as a kleptomaniac as his obsessive raids on streetwise visual detail are converted into powerfully original poetry. If Reed's operational grid is principally London's West End, then his exhilaratingly controversial remit continuously pushes poetry's frontiers out into the always excitingly controversially new.
Jeremy Reed The Glamour Poet Versus Francis Bacon, Rent and Eyelinered Pussycat Dolls
Published 2014. Paperback, 150pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613232 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first book of Jeremy Reed's uncompromising, explicitly autobiographical expose of his life as a leading London poet from the 1980s to the present day, a major long poem written in the shop, while managing Red Snapper Books in the period 2007-2008, takes in an acutely personalised retrieval of the Piccadilly Circus ethos in the eighties, including meetings with the artist Francis Bacon, bohemian Soho, an index of personal obsessions including rock music and fashion, a defiant colour block of personal friends, patrons, pick-ups and demi-monde
outlaws, all generously characterised for their individual importance and contribution to the poet's life, and a direct full-on involvement with unstoppable big-city momentum in the capital, intensely lived on a day to day basis. The book is a highly courageous and cutting edge poet's autobiography, explicit and detailed in a way few poets would dare celebrate quite literally the uncensored resources of a highly individual and sustained personal creativity.
Jeremy Reed I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Asa Benveniste and Trigram Press
Published 2016. Paperback, 132p, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614635 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Asa Benveniste (1925-1990) who founded the legendary Trigram Press in London in 1965, ostensibly to publish Anglo-American cutting-edge poetry, was not only a self-taught, one-off maverick genius as a printer, typographer and book-designer, but also a superbly innovative language poet, whose own poetry tended to be obscured by his merits as a publisher. Throughout its duration, 1965-1978, the Trigram list epitomised ultimate hipster cool, as a leading independent. Jeremy Reed's deeply personal tribute to Benveniste as his enduring poetic avatar, and the encourager and publisher of his early poetry informs a book that is both an appraising memoir and a significant evaluation of Trigram Press. The book also includes a reprint of Benveniste's collection Edge
(1975), as well as miscellaneous writings of his retrieved from small press publications.
Jeremy Reed The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg
The Shearsman Library 6
Published 2018. Paperback, 68pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
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.
Jeremy Reed Psychedelic Meadow
Published 2019. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616271 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American Studies at Essex University, wasn’t easy as an anomalous poet living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape came by way of finding part-time employment with John Berger, part of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton’s LSD documentation of her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry. When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in Chester Gate, Regent’s Park a big light went out in me, and my poem ‘Elegy for Paula Stratton’ can be found in the collection This Is how You Disappear, my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)
John Riley Selected Poetry & Prose
Edited by Ian Brinton
Published 2016. Paperback, 128pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614888 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
John Riley (1937-1978) was known as one of the members of the so-called Cambridge School of poetry, and was co-editor, with Tim Longville, of the seminal Grosseteste Review and its associated press. His poetry, as with many others associated with the magazine, shows the influence of Pound and Olson, but it also reveals his interest in the Russian tradition — exemplified by his fine translations of Mandelstam, and by his long poem, 'Czargrad', the latter a glimpse of Byzantium under its Russian name.
Peter Riley Alstonefield
Published 1995. A5 Paperback, 32pp. £4.50 / $9.95
ISBN 9780907562207. OUT OF PRINT
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London, this book comprises the first four sections of the long poem Alstonefield . Parts of section 5 subsequently appeared in Shearsman, PN Review and other journals. A new edition, including the complete Section 5 (which is longer than the first four sections put together) was published by Carcanet Press, Manchester, in 2003.
NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley Snow Has Settled [...] Bury Me Here
Published 1997. A5 Paperback, 55pp. £7.50
ISBN 9780907562245
Until the 2007 titles listed below, this was Riley's most recent full-length collection, apart from Passing Measures (Carcanet, Manchester, 2001), which is the author's Selected Poems, the experimental sequence Excavations (Reality Street Editions, 2005), and A Map of Faring , published only in the USA.
NOW (MOSTLY) INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
![Peter Riley: Snow Has Settled [...] Bury Me Here](https://lirp.cdn-website.com/12e499a6/dms3rep/multi/opt/peter_riley_snow_has_settled_bury_me_here-1920w.jpg)
Peter Riley The Dance at Mociu
Published 2003. Paperback, 119pp, 8x5ins. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562368
Superseded by the expanded 2nd edition shown below.
Peter Riley The Dance at Mociu (2nd, expanded edition)
Published 2014. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613867 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Dance at Mociu
brings together some thirty 'stories' of Transylvania, a part of the world that has fascinated the author for many years, and which he and his wife have visited annually since 1998. These pieces are not stories in the conventional sense, but range from meditation to epiphany, from observation to recordings of an old world that seems threatened — the world of 'Old Europe', that Central Europe whose borders were flexible in the extreme, whose populations found themselves changing nationalities with alarming frequency in the 20th century, and whose cultures survived all the vicissitudes of war and rampant nationalisms only to face an uncertain future in the post-communist present. Expanded version of the 2003 edition, in a larger format.
Peter Riley The Llyn Writings
Published 2007. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Since the 1970s, Peter Riley and his wife have been making regular trips to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, and he has been writing a series of poems and meditations about the place—a spectacular area of natural beauty. To date, many of these poems, and poem-sequences, have appeared in small-press and bibliophile editions, and in artists' books. Three of the sequences were also collected in the author's Selected Poems, Passing Measures , published by Carcanet in 2000. Now, for the first time, all of Peter Riley's Llyn writings—both poems and prose-poems—are collected together under one set of covers.
NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley The Day's Final Balance — Uncollected Writings 1965-2006
Published 2007. Paperback, 212pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700097 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The subtitle says it all: here are numerous stray publications and lost poems, and prose-poems from throughout the author's career. Amongst many other works, the collection includes the previously unpublished sixth part of the long poem 'Alstonefield'.
NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley Greek Passages
Published 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 8x5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610514 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Greek Passages is a set of 105 prose-poems derived from four sojourns in Greece, mostly in the vicinity of Argos and thus at the hub of early Greek power. The structure is entirely diurnal, building each poem from the day’s events, so that cognizance of monumental historical figures and events infiltrate from outside into notes of fauna, ruins, the news, books about Greece or not, American music listened to, pleasant dinners, dreams of northern England etcetera. Two shorter stays on the west coast of the Peloponnese furnish beginning and ending sections of a gentler, more lyrical cast, and there are interruptive excursions, mostly to the remains of cities and wars. Everywhere what is presented to the eyes is the starting-point for a poetical process creating lenses in location and sense. NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley The Derbyshire Poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 204pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610927 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Derbyshire Poems brings back into print two important earlier collections (from the 1970s and 1980s) by Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts , together with the explanatory essays that were originally issued alongside the latter volume, and an uncollected sequence from the same period which belongs with the other poems dealing with the Peak District. This is an important volume which provides the bcakground to Riley's later forays into writing in, of, and under the landscape.
NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley Due North
Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613942 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps. The cast includes migrant workers, returning soldiers, children growing up, and population movements such as the early 19th-century descent on the northern manufacturing districts from demographic disaster zones, with my awareness of my own ancestry among the displaced Irish of Manchester and West Yorkshire. Woven into this are various artistic, poetical, cultural and instinctive ventures to traverse cold and emptiness, limit and futility, in the hope of attaining the metaphor of lasting warmth. Its pattern is that of a long sequence of beginnings, some of which reach their conclusions, usually elsewhere in the text, some of which don’t. The textual mode is literal and lyrical, to posit the value of these two forces in sustaining hope. (Peter Riley)
NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).
Peter Riley Dawn Songs
Published 2017. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848615458 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Dawn Songs
consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called ‘Mass Lyric’; and ‘Dawn Songs’ itself, which concerns a lamentational genre of Transylvanian village music and forms the bulk of the book. So if ever there was a book discussing musical practices which very few people outside the area know about or want to, this is it." —Peter Riley
Peter Riley Collected Poems Vol. 1
Published 2018. Paperback, 608pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32
ISBN 9781848616103 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 1 covers 1962–1997, encompassing books such as
Love-Strife Machine, The Linear Journal, The Llyn Writings, The Derbyshire Poems (including Lines on the Liver and
Tracks and Mineshafts),
Noon Province, Reader, Lecture, Author and
Snow has Settled…
Peter Riley Collected Poems Vol. 2
Published 2018. Paperback, 592pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32
ISBN 9781848616110 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 2 covers the period from the late 1990s to 2015, covering books such as Excavations, Alstonefield, Two Setts and Coda, The Glacial Stairway, Greek Passages and Due North . Like its companion volume, it also contains a large number of uncollected poems.
Peter Riley "Proof..."
Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618855 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
‘How do you get mortal harmony
out of a stone box into the moving air?
With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.’
Proof asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren’s song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet’s task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. Proof brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision.
‘And it is through
this hole in the night that the wren sings.’
Peter Riley (ed.) Last Kind Words
Published 2021. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617285 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The song, ‘Last Kind Words Blues’, was recorded in 1930 in a makeshift studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, and issued by Paramount Records as one side of a 78 rpm shellac disc with the musician’s name given as “Geeshie Wiley”. It’s not a straightforward lyric. It’s not about slavery, but slavery is there in it. It’s about the victims of war, but forgets that it is." — Peter Riley
Peter Riley then invited responses from other poets and the results are here, with contributions from Tony Baker, Kelvin Corcoran,
Ian Duhig
, Khaled Hakim, Michael Haslam, Peter Hughes, Tom Lowenstein,
Laura Potts, John Seed, Zoë Skoulding, Jon Thompson and Judith Willson.
Mary Robinson Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 33. Edited by Robert Sheppard
Publication 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.
Peter Robinson The Personal Art — On Poetry and Poets
Published 2021. Paperback, 440pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30
ISBN 9781848617438 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
As Angela Leighton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Robinson ‘has been a generous promoter of contemporary poetry for decades, and this collection of essays bears witness to his dedication and energy.’ What she had to say then of Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations
(2005) could not be truer for The Personal Art, a new and comprehensive gathering of Robinson’s critical writings on Anglophone poets from Great Britain and Ireland, the United States, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand. Here are essays and reviews of collections by poets he has admired and followed over some forty-five years. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Elizabeth Bishop, Douglas Oliver, John James, Peter Riley, Sinéad Morrissey, Peter Sirr, Derek Walcott and Bill Manhire are among the many writers whose work he addresses. To these have been added some memoirs on his childhood and youth in Liverpool, his becoming a reader, on the Cambridge Poetry Festival, the events around his diagnosis and operation for a benign brain tumour, and the importance of Roy Fisher as example and mentor. Robinson ‘writes with an unformulaic enthusiasm,’ Leighton observed, ‘moving easily from biographical, political and poetic contexts to the nitty gritty of close reading, while also striking an easy, readable tone.’ The Personal Art
is an essential guide to the poetry that has shaped and fed the imagination of a distinctive and original poet.
Peter Robinson Collected Poems 1976-2016
Published 2017. Paperback, 518pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32
ISBN 9781848615243 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Collected Poems 1976–2016
gathers carefully chosen and reviewed texts from Peter Robinson’s nine books of poetry, to which is added a newly completed tenth collection. They include his early experiments in northern social realism, and domestic interiors coloured by the experience of sexual violence, explored in the seven lyrics that form part two of This Other Life. Here are his dialogues with Italian poetry and culture, and unforeseen encounters with Japan, all in relation to the historical vicissitudes of his home country, and the landscapes in a much-revisited Liverpool. For the Small Mercies, published here for the first time, completes a triptych of books written since Robinson’s return after nearly two decades of working in Kyoto and Sendai, a return that, coinciding with the global financial crisis and onset of austerity culture, provided occasions for further reflections on the economic motifs of his earliest poems.
Peter Robinson Buried Music
Published 2015. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613898 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hearing Rilke quoted at the Co-op, an experience evoked in the title poem to Peter Robinson’s latest collection, Buried Music, the poet continues his work of discovering poetry in everyday, anywhere places. It is as if, as Roy Fisher intuited, ‘he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made.’ Prompted by varieties of losses — health, hopes, friends or relatives — his listening unearths a rhythmic contour from such opening cracks in the terrain. Buried Music
finds poetry in its absence, presence in the place of what’s missing. For those who have followed his trajectory, this new book offers a fresh opportunity to tune in to the work of what Poetry Review
has called ‘a major English poet’, one according to The London Magazine, who is ‘writing at the height of his powers’ and producing, in the words of the selectors for the Poetry Book Society in 2012, ‘his finest work to date.’ For those new to his writing, this world is all before you.
Peter Robinson The Returning Sky
Published 2012. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611863 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Peter Robinson's new collection, The Returning Sky, carefully sequences the poems written over the four years from the time he left Japan and returned to England, through the global financial crisis, and into our current austerity culture. Opening with a sequence inspired by an unexpected visit to the United States, The Returning Sky
then explores experiences of repatriation with the vividness and freshness of a reverse culture shock. The book takes up the inextricably financial, cultural, and emotional themes that Robinson had first scouted in collections from the years before his long economic exile, while his evocatively inventive forms invite new readers to follow his traces with the same warmth and candour he shows to his returning ones.
Peter Robinson The Look of Goodbye
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is Peter Robinson's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since returning from Japan to live and work in the UK — he is now Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Peter Robinson has published some 15 volumes of verse, including a substantial Selected Poems
from Carcanet Press, as well as aphorisms and prose poems, literary criticism, and translations of such poets as Luciano Erba and Vittorio Sereni.
Peter Robinson Spirits of the Stair — Selected Aphorisms
Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610620 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds
in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader, 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling chilled by global warming, and hot under the collar, the poet found no other respite than to reach for his notebooks. What came from them were wrung-out dishcloths and acupuncturists' needles, sound bites that chew on what they eschew, salves for old saws, and less-is-more morsels which were promptly anthologized in The Boodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations
(2006) and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists
(2007). Now, five years further, in this volume Robinson's enlarged and extended reflections look out on the world and see a wounded head bandaged in clouds. These words that didn't come to mind when occasion demanded, words that were the right thing to say when the moment had passed, now reach us with a timely lateness that appears, for all that, to be just what we were waiting for.
Peter Robinson Talk about Poetry — Conversations on the Art
Published 2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700042 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Talk about Poetry
is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry
is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years.
Peter Robinson (ed.) An Unofficial Roy Fisher
Published 2010. Paperback, 222pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611207
Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher
is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It begins with an unofficial gathering of poems and prose pieces covering the writer's entire career, none of which are to be found in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005, his most recent collected edition. This is followed by a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following among significant contemporaries and juniors, including Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, Laurie Duggan, August Kleinzahler, R.F. Langley, Angela Leighton, John Matthias, and John Wilkinson. This is followed by a group of informal essays and other prose comments on working with Fisher or Fisher's work by, among others, Charles Lock, Peter Makin, Ralph Pite, Richard Price, and David Wheatley. All in all, An Unofficial Roy Fisher
is a must-have for the poet's fans, new and old, with its sequence of intriguing insights into the oeuvre and abiding significance of this unique literary artist.
Peter Robinson (ed.) Bernard Spencer —
Essays on His Poetry and Life
Published 2012. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612549 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here.]
When Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems
(1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose
(2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.
Gillian Rose Paradiso
Published 2015. Paperback, 72pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN9781848614345 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortly before her death, philosopher Gillian Rose began work on a new book—her Paradiso—thus fulfilling her promise at the end of Love’s Work
to ‘stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk’. Confident even only a week before her death that she could complete the work, all that remains are these fragments. In them, Rose combines the detached insight of one who is taking leave, or who has almost left, with a desire to participate in the joys of life until the last. Exceeding the injunction to ‘keep your mind in hell and despair not’, Paradiso
sketches a movement through the hell and despair of terminal illness to an affirmation of the joys of companionship and memory. Paradiso contains some of Rose’s most serene and affirmatory writing, and in that light completes one of the most remarkable philosophical oeuvres of the late twentieth century.
Anthony Rudolf A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album
Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612921 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album
is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory
(1999) and accompanies Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life, shortly to appear from Seagull Books. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's parents.
Anthony Rudolf (ed.) Jerzyk
Translated, in part, from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Published 2016. Paperback, 166pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613690 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
On 13 November 1943, Jerzy Feliks Urman (known as Jerzyk) killed himself, thinking the Gestapo had arrived. He was eleven and a half. He and his family were in hiding in Drohobycz, during the German occupation of East Galicia, now western Ukraine. A year earlier the family had quit Stanisławów in the wake of brutal round-ups and deportations of Jews.
The boy’s parents, uncle, and grandmother survived the war. He kept a diary and jottings during the two months before he died. Anthony Rudolf, Jerzyk’s second cousin once removed, published these texts in 1991 in a translation made from a family typescript of the original.
The recent discovery of the diary of Sophie Urman, Jerzyk’s mother, led Rudolf to commission a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She has also revised the earlier translation of Jerzyk’s own diary after comparing the typescript and the original manuscript, which is now in Rudolf’s possession.
Anthony Rudolf Journey Around My Flat
Published 2021. Paperback, 330pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25.
ISBN 9781848617698 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Journey Around My Flat is the fourth in a series of five memoirs. Previous volumes are The Arithmetic of Memory (on growing up in Hampstead Garden Suburb), Silent Conversations (where the author draws on the books in his library to generate thoughts about reading and re-reading) and A Vanished Hand (a short illustrated account of his long-lost autograph album from the 1950s). The final volume is a work-in-progress: In the Picture: Office Hours at the Studio of Paula Rego, an account of the author’s ongoing close association with the painter since the two first met in 1996.
Journey Around My Flat
continues his practice – in the footsteps of Georges Perec and other French writers – of using objects to trigger memories. Rudolf takes the reader on a guided tour of each room in the North London flat, where he has lived for forty years, and includes a generous supply of photos. The book – running parallel to Silent Conversations
– is a chronological successor to The Arithmetic of Memory, which ended with the author about to leave for university.
David Rushmer Remains to Be Seen
Published 2018. Paperback, 160pp,9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615823 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In David Rushmer’s stunning book, Remains to Be Seen, we find a carefully crafted rendering of a voice in the world, each syllable of this drama earned. There is a microtonal attention to reality and a gorgeous music throughout. This is a truly remarkable first book." —Peter Gizzi
David Rushmer What Space Between Us
Published 2022. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848618299 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Rushmer's spare and abstract linguistic structures may well be unique in contemporary British poetry, drawing, as they do, on a European poetic tradition that questions the nature of language and its relationship with perception. Words are valued for their own sake, held up for examination and made to chime like struck glass. To the crystalline abstractions that Rushmer inherits from French poetry is added Taoist-inspired spirituality and the influence of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in an amalgam of great beauty. What Space Between Us is a landmark collection; a wide-ranging and rich series of poems, which asks time and attention of the reader, but will repay it abundantly." —Alan Baker
