British Poetry Titles: Authors D to E

Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 109pp, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9780907562443

The author's second full-scale collection, following a series of fine chapbooks, and his largest collection so far. Ian Davidson is one of the most exciting and innovative English-language poets currently writing in Wales, and his radical engagement with landscape in these poems offers new ways of using and approaching landscape within the context of a poem.



Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848615625 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

These poems were written on the way to work, walking the two and a half miles from near Saltwell Park in Gateshead to Northumbria University in Newcastle. The journey took me through Gateshead’s residential streets, its town centre and over the Tyne, often by the High Level Bridge. I’d try to write something in my head every day before I got to work, while still free of the numbing rush of its demands. Sometimes a whole poem would appear, at other times one or two words or lines would shift and repeat through seemingly endless variations, refusing to settle.

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

ISBN 9781848613669 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Patricia Debney’s first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books, 2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. A novel, Losing You (bluechrome) appeared in 2007. Her second collection of prose poems, Littoral , was published by Shearsman Books in 2013. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.

Exploring fragmentation, delusion and parental ageing, the long poem Gestation forms part of her next collection, Baby.

Published 2022. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618091 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Tom Docherty’s first collection, If the Mute Timber , begins ‘not with a book / nor even an attentive ear’, but with the elusive fragment of its title. The poems situate themselves in medias res : among birds or gravestones, between lines of prayer, in the flux of appearances. Places without words become focal points: the poems seek articulation in life before birth and after death; in animal and imagined lives; in works of music, painting, and architecture; and in the varied silences of human and divine relationships. In one sense, the poems are variations on the vanitas –  but the transience of life and its artefacts is transposed to an offering, a potential key in which to register the work. When followed to their natural end, fragments become sentences, notes are sung.

Published 2013. Paperback, 190pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848612778 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"A sequence of fragments seems the most appropriate form for a work of this kind, introductory, surveying, essentially personal, marked, as with all things, by my own reading and preoccupations. 'Maybe,' Waldrop writes, 'the essence of the fragment is that it cuts out explanation, an essential act of poetry.' It constitutes, Waldrop continues, a 'lessening of distinctness, of "identity."' I do not claim to be comprehensive. Nor do I mean to speak for Waldrop or her work but simply to speak about some of its aspects, its various senses of poetics, the shifting relationships between theory and practice, to draw out a number of examples and to trace certain lines of thinking, ways of thinking." —Nikolai Duffy

Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 62pp, £7.50

ISBN 9780907562276

This collection consists of the second half of the author's Threads of Iron manuscript, subject of much discussion since its partial appearance in magazines in the early 1980s. The first half of Threads was collected in 1990 as Cut Memories and False Commands (Reality Studios, London). 

See below for the complete Threads of Iron —now available as one complete volume from Shearsman Books.

Published 2000. A5 Paperback, 52pp, £7.50

ISBN 9780907562283

A collection of the author's poems dating from the late 1990s.

Published 2006. 8.5x5.5ins, 116pp, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700035 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Here are arcane mysteries, here are forgotten histories; here are assorted arcana and incunabula; and here there is a transposition of a Chinese classic to contemporary Glasgow, filtered through the mesh of a Chinese martial-arts movie. And what connects aerial photography, growing up in the Turkic lands, and sound-poetry (the difficulties of)?—Andrew Duncan's imagination, which ranges far and wide, but always brings back news of interesting climes, and landhaps even the poets' heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

Published August 2023. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619012 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The original idea of “paintings on glass” was to get close to folk art. After a long period attempting to learn Gaelic and Welsh, this new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the peddlers who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.

      This is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance. (Andrew Duncan)

Published 2009. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £17.95 / $27

ISBN 9781848610071 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Andrew Duncan's latest study of contemporary British poetry offers studies of some thirteen poets, together with a number of general essays giving an overview of events and trends in British poetry over the past thirty to forty years. Some of the names will surprise, others will be expected. The juxtapositions of ideas, and of names, will disturb those who are more comfortable with trench warfare than with dialogue, and Duncan's startling aperçus will leave even the most well-read student of poetry wondering.

Published 2012. Paperback, 312pp, 9x6ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848611375 [Download a PDF containing the introduction to this book here .]

"The story of poetry since 1960 is largely of people rebelling against what was there in the 1950s. But another story is about poets who didn't revolt against that, but went on with it—developing it organically. The present work deals with a complex of issues, but started with the double twist, that two 50s poets, Logue and Hill, have dominated the artistic scene over the last ten years (or, say, 1996 to 2006) and that the death of the main '50s style has liberated the official English poetry, with the decease of certain inhibitions which were glued together and brewed up to weapons grade quality back in the 1950s." —Andrew Duncan

Published 2016. Paperback, 318pp, 9 x 6ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848614994 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Does what is true depend on where you are? Or, can we speak of a British culture which varies gradually over the 600 miles from one end of the island to the other, with currents gradually mutating and turning into their opposites as they cross such a distance? The unbalanced local energies which gave birth to the central horror of possessive individualism, the Empire, and the State as war-machine, do not sound their triumphalist self-praises without conjuring up a reaction in favour of collective values, pacifism, equity, and the languages of the periphery. Poetry has to offer more than the illusion of being in the few rooms where a metropolitan elite solemnly engages in the circularity of authentication. A polemic tour of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England exposes the possibility that the finest poets of the last 50 years have lived in the outlands, not networking and neglecting to acquire linguistic signs of status. We contemplate the sublime through the works of Sorley Maclean, Glyn Jones, Colin Simms, and Michael Haslam. But a second look at poetry in the South jettisons the shallow tricks favoured by High Street cultural managers to reveal a hidden stratum of intellectually sophisticated poets, even in Babylon. 

Published 2022. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £17.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848617490 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"There are several reasons for writing about the Seventies at this point. One is a reading of a recent collection of memories of the decade by participants. My impression was that they couldn’t remember the period – too much time had gone by. They had lost all sense of differentiation and were writing about 1975 as if it was 2015. It is also possible that any attitudes of the previous time which didn’t chime with current positions were being written out, consciously or unconsciously. The extent of the mismatch is of great importance, I think. This suggested that there was a real problem with memory, justifying an account based on contemporary documents. The other problem with memory is that we are living in a splinter dictatorship, a cultural phase where the forces of convergence have stacked arms and opinions are split up into small groups. How can there be a collective memory when there is no single point on which all factions agree? so how can I record collective memory? in what sense is any statement about poetry true? But this argues even more for putting facts down and increasing the area free from malicious invention. We need to think about the divergence as a phenomenon in itself, a kind of cultural gravity that guides all the watercourses. The splintering allows local freedom at most locations – what it does not allow is unifying literary opinion." — Andrew Duncan

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

ISBN 9781848619418


The very idea of beautiful feelings makes people laugh, but surely we prefer beautiful feelings to other feelings and sensitive poets to insensitive ones. Few poets proclaim their insensitivity. All the same the phrase points to a possible lack of balance. If the focal point is sensitivity then that might restrict the world of the poem to a small zone close to the poet’s skin, with everything collective, objective, political, abstract, technical, etc., disappearing from view. Even if we accept that poetry is now subjective and egocentric, we can ask if this is an ideology, and look for external forces supporting it, for the currents of poetry which breach its rules, and for historical moments which closed off an exit into other possibilities.
       The main feature of the 21st C scene is the great number of poets at work. This is a motive for writing about as many poets as possible, eighty in this case. They are only partly hidden by the details we don’t know. The field may have no overall shape but its local fabric looks like a rich differentiation into linguistic micro-climates, brought about by the sheer number of people and their interest in fine distinctions. If we stroll through enough of the new poets, we may find that sensitivity and the need to be original have shaped a landscape of diversity and achievement which excels our capacity to take it in. This is a park designed for collectors of exotic and finely wrought artistic sensations. Where realms of talent are hidden behind realms of talent, an expedition can last for years.

Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610675 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This book, spanning two decades of work, contains songs that have never been and never will be sung; anti-lyric and narrative poems for which a musical equivalent has been constructed; and text written specifically for musical purposes. The volume is completed with scores composed by Elaine Edwards of settings of three poems from Ken Edwards' earlier book eight + six.

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

ISBN 9781848616134 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]

 I’ve played, watched and loved football all my life. Along with birds and birding it is my most enduring passion. So I thought I’d write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. I started fluently, but one thing and another got in the way and the footballing Muse abandoned me after about twenty poems. The poems in this chapbook are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. Plus a sub. Messi comes last, but it is definitely not him.

Published 2016. Chapbook, 26pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614871 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In Scar , Carrie Etter compellingly explores the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois. The language shifts and evolves painfully as the land and its inhabitants find themselves wracked by climatic and political forces beyond their control.

You can hear the author talking about Scar on a podcast from the Scottish Poetry Library here , interviewed by fellow Shearsman author, JL Williams.

Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848613140 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The poems in this chapbook form an individual sequence. At the same time, they present a new and longer section of an ongoing series. The Sea Quells responds to and continues Collecting Shells, which was published in 2011 with Oystercatcher Press and is included, in excerpt form, in the anthologies Sea Pie (Shearsman) and Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe).

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 978184861454-3 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A sequel to 2013's Sea Quells, CONT . continues Amy Evan's explorations of language and the infinte whiteness of the page. 

Published 2018. Chapbook, 42pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848616226 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

PASS PORT is a travel document—a transcript of the first half of the at-sea installation SOUNDING((ING))S, which ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea across the English Channel, and underneath the seabed through the Channel Tunnel. Bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny refugees movement across the English-French border. The installation offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts, and the asylum-seeking body within the EU.

Edited by Robert Sheppard.

Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610255 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Paul Evans (1945–1991) was a significant member of the group of new radical poets that appeared in England in the late 1960s, but his work remains scattered through a number of small-press publications from 1970–1987 and is now entirely out of print. This Selected Poems redresses the situation and makes available a broad selection of Evans' work from throughout his career—a career that was cut tragically short by a climbing accident.