British Poetry Titles: Authors C

Published 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618718 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Interiors and Other Poems takes the reader down divergent pathways, along the river Stour through the Blackmore Vale weaving threads of identities, history, and the natural world. The poems dive deep into psychic and neurological divergent selves beneath an accrued social, cultural, and environmental history of the area. The personae are both grounded and estranged, living, and breathing as fictive constructs, and drawing upon the earth and its deep ecology. Living things evoke living things. 

Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614314 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Who is Victor? Like Browning's Waring he eludes the grasp of his friends and admirers, but remains a vital presence in their lives. Anthony Caleshu's superb long poem conjugates our needs and our guilts, our misfortunes and our longings, by narrating an epic quest through polar regions in an aphoristic idiom that dazzles and shimmers like an arctic horizon. Victor lurks somewhere, perhaps up ahead, perhaps behind. 'What's so great about Victor?' the journeying band of brothers are occasionally asked. You must read this poem to find out." —Mark Ford



Published 2023. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618671 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the phenomena of xenia – Greek for ‘hospitality’, later adopted by the Romans as a category of ‘still-life’ painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.

Shearsman Classics series, No. 22. 

Published 2015. Paperback, 200pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23 

ISBN 9781848614390 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Thomas Carew (1595-1640) was, with Robert Herrick, the finest poet of the “tribe of Ben”, the poets who gathered around Ben Jonson in the taverns of Southwark in the early 17th century. This collected edition is the only complete edition of his poems available.

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

ISBN 9781848619661

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

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

ISBN 9781848619166 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

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

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

Edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh

Published 2017. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615281 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Alfred Celestine was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and came to London in 1977, remaining there until his death in 2009. He published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turne r (The Many Press, 1978) and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003). Weightless Word is easily the most comprehensive selection of his poetry to date, revealing his range and power as a poet.

Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615069 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice — 4th Quarter 2016

Geraldine Clarkson lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, and the Magma Editors’, Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. Declare is her first chapbook.

Published 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616158  [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Geraldine Clarkson’s work brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s remark that “a thought to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility”. Clarkson is one of few poets whose work insists on, and succeeds in, finding new and more ambitious ways to integrate affective experience, emotion, thought and an imaginative expansiveness that is entirely her own. Her rare gift is to produce a poetry that sings, even as it swinges." — Ahren Warner

Published 2023. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618688 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A rottenness at the heart of things, mapped onto England—the Midlands, London and other cities—manifests via apocalyptic omens and curses, and things being upside-down; an underworld and stasis. The Medlar, Mespilus germanica , the aromatic and romantic medieval fruit, member of the apple and quince family, is considered inedible until ‘bletted’, i.e. left to go rotten and sweet. The collection touches on themes of xenophobia, Brexit and hypocrisy, and dallies in the English hedgerows, lanes and forests, sometimes with the English poets, seeking out the regenerative chaos and mischief present in nature. There is a fugitive hope of flow and change, breaking out of old patterns; a quest for sweetness. 

Published 2006. 120pp, paperback. £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700059 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Designed to Fade is a narrative poem about life in the modern city of London, a journey through a day in London seen through a woman's eyes. The drama begins in the early hours and ends at the same time the following day. Referring to city poetry by other poets and experimenting with poetic form in an attempt to develop a women's poetry of the city, the author has developed an intriguing post-modernist slant to the dramatic unities of time, place and character. As city dweller you will find yourself in here. There are place names, descriptions of commuter journeys and brushes with authority, work and bosses which will evoke an empathy that modern poetry has all too often omitted to express. Designed to Fade is a stylistic tour-de-force, and a most unusual sequence of poems.

Shearsman Classics No. 10. Edited by Simon Avery.

Published 2010. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century and they certainly deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.



Published May 2023. Paperback, 766pp, 9 x 6ins, £27.95 / $45.

ISBN 9781848618923 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A major event, this volume covers some 40 years of work.

"Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song… Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." —David Wevill

Published 2022. Chapbook, 24pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618459

What are the captions using us for?

Halsey's series of diagrams and quatrains for Into the Interior is suggestive of a journey through the rebus-like territory of thought itself. Corcoran doubles the quatrains in answering him back, as if such a dialogue might be how to talk to a friend exploring the enigmatic signs of the journey remembered from long ago and made present again.

Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us Your Thinking Tracts or Nation s (West House 2001), A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).

Published 2019. Chapbook, 40pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616349 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

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

Published 2019. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616844 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Below This Level recounts the experience of prostate cancer: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. These poems of tender affirmation and discovery also face up to the hard facts. Their expansive lyricism is dedicated to a sustained recognition of the kindness and intelligence of others.

Published 2004, 196pp, paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. OUT OF PRINT.

ISBN 9780907562399

Kelvin Corcoran's first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages , appeared in 1985 and he has published eight subsequent collections with a range of British small presses. This volume presents a complete new collection, Against Purity, together with a previously unpublished shorter sequence, My Life With Byron , plus selections from each of his previous nine volumes of poetry, to give an overview of the work of one of the finest British poets of his generation.

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

ISBN 9781848619487

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

Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The array of characters in this book of lyric poems personify twenty-first century language, found on adverts, shopfronts, train tickets. Stretch of Closures writes down an urban landscape in an alphabet made readable by its citizens. If it is the dead metaphors that define everyday lives, Claire Crowther shakes them up to show not just history but signposts to the future.



Published 2016. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614932 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The design of a coin is an act of succinct aggrandisement. Bare George explores the coinage of power through a far more famous numismatic image: created in 1817 for King George III and his son, the Prince Regent, by celebrity gem designer Benedetto Pistrucci, it pictures a saint, young St George, lancing a dragon. He is undressed. Any Greek warrior of artistic relevance to the nineteenth century would be. The dragon is submitting, as the opposition needs to be shown to do.

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

ISBN 9781848619388

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

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

ISBN 9781848619470

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

Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613683 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Martyn Crucefix’s new poems vividly evoke the landscapes of northern England and—in a sequence of sonnets inspired by the writing of Rosalía de Castro—the north west of Spain. But more than place, they explore the ways in which we inhabit time—how we are harmed and healed by it, how we deny, ignore, sublimate, repeat or reprise it.

I’d want to say it was past seven o’clock

or perhaps by then even seven-fifteen—

I’m sure of it now—a quarter past the hour

was the time we turned and part of what it meant

     (‘The map house’)