Shearsman Books | British Authors D to G
Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848618480 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Shadow Box originated with a single piece, ‘The Curiosities of Dr Hunter’, a poem which gathered together many objects from Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum in an investigation into the nature of 18th-century collecting; but the museum holds so many objects to catch the eye and imagination – cultural artefacts from across the world, scientific instruments, medical specimens, objects of the natural world – from which so many kinds of poem might be written. Here then are poems caught between the perfection of a single thing and a necessary enquiry into how the object came to be here, what its meanings might be, and who comes to be an observer here.
Published 2006. 9x6ins, 148pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562917 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Welsh Poems might also be called 'Selected Experimental Poems' and highlights Finch's more unusual excursions into verbal and visual trickery. The book covers work written over a period of two decades and was the first such large-scale selection of his work.
Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611078 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Be My Reader is a trove of texts made and found by Finlay over the past two decades, touching on philosophy, landscape, dance, football, travel and technology. Affectionate, celebratory and vulnerable by turns, it includes such key texts as his popular homage to Robert Creeley 'I Know A Poem', the long poem-mapping of the Wittgenstein Hut in Norway, and poems which emerged from art projects for civic spaces and landscapes, all interspersed with pitch-perfect renderings of off-key phrases overheard and chanced upon. Formally adventurous and restlessly curious, Be My Reader is a unique confluence of contemporary experimental and generative forms together with the lyric voice.
Published 2014. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613584 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
the road north is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Osu-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken and Alec left Edo (Edinburgh) on May 16, 2010 — the very same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed in 1689 — and on their return, on May 16, 2011, they published 53 collaborative audio & visual poems describing the landscapes they had seen and the people they had met.
Published 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610347 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Keri Finlayson's first collection Rooms finds its centre in the etymology of the words camera, a chamber and stanza, a resting place. Both are forms of enclosure, of inclusion and exclusion that forge definition and force choices over the stories we want to be told and the stories we want to see. Rooms develops two intertwining narratives. In the first, the poet remembers and reimagines her grandmother as a young woman, and the family stories that surrounded her. Exploring the notions of editing and stitching, patterns and limits, it describes her seduction during the making of a silent film in Cornwall in 1919. The second concerns the history of film from the depiction of multiple movement in early cave painting, through the invention of the camera obscura, to The Jazz Singer ; the first "talkie". What is a history of technology and a story of seduction and violence, is also a collection of stanza about camera, rooms about rooms.
Edited by Andrew Duncan
Published 2013. Paperback, 214pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612730 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Andrew Duncan says of this book:
"The first interview here with Allen Fisher dates from 1973. I took the decision to collect old interviews rather than make an all-new book. I am fascinated by the idea of a very long base line, records of one person's views over 30 years, change as part of the object recorded. Drawing on the creative input of Eric Mottram, Adrian Clarke, and Victoria Sheppard (among others) made the book more robust and embracing."
Edited by Tony Frazer
Published 2013. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612983 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Excerpts from several interviews conducted throughout the author's career and spliced together to form a coherent narrative of his development and his aesthetic. The book closes with two full-length interviews, conducted by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan.
Edited by Peter Robinson
Published 2014. Paperback, 198pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613003 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
An Easily Bewildered Child : Occasional Prose 1963–2013 brings together all Roy Fisher's rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, ‘owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends’.
Edited by Anthony Barnett, and co-published with Allardyce Book.
Published 2008. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781905700806.
A revised Collected , bringing back into print an important body of work. This volume excludes the translations that were printed in the first posthumous gathering of the poet's work, but includes some extra poems and numerous revisions that have been discovered since that publication.
Published 2017. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615380 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Through incisive, intricate, explorative poems, SJ Fowler offers an ambiguous but often starkly humorous viewpoint into the pre-occupations of contemporary being. From incisions into the political and moral factionalism which so often dominates our online existence, to the more sincere negotiations of our private lives, our bodies and our minds, in love and in death. Fundamentally a statement about the Anthropocene, The Guide to Being Bear Aware is doing the work poetry is meant to do, offering more questions than answers.
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612471 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this was Kit Fryatt's first publication. Kit Fryatt divides time between Ireland and Scotland and runs the Wurm im Apfel reading series in Dublin.
Published 2014. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613782
This is the libretto for Nicola LeFanu’s chamber opera Tokaido Road , which had its premiere in July 2014, and is based on Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poems (CB editions, 2011).
In 1832 the young Hiroshige sets out on Japan’s great Eastern Sea Road, the Tokaido, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The paintings he creates along the way reveal the secrets of a hidden country.
Published 2012. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612488 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
One of 5 chapbooks published in the summer of 2012, this volume digs further into Mark Goodwin's explorations of landscape and language.
Published 2015. Paperback, 9x6ins, 118pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614185 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here .]
“ InHouse At Out , Mark Goodwin steps beyond the physical landscapes of Back of A Vast , into a new topography: a world that is a “wild’s inf i nite b its” approached through the gaps and hollows in the word. The holes are apertures as we zoom into language, crack open word hordes and find worlds of association, “hole keys” with which we open kinetic lands as nimble as “music thinking of water”. Here are poems that “house and home // and hone a mind of sky-leaf sheets.” Step out with this book and relish the trip elsewhere.” —Simon Perril
"' House At Out is an echo in a cave you've just discovered, a canopy that lets the light through, a fast river, ready to be waded. The language is full of pores, breathing spaces, places where you can catch your own thoughts or find the gaps where 'tiny homes within a home' exist and 'a shiny poem coils'." —Helen Mort
Published 2017. Paperback, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615632 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
All Space Away and In … is on mist-smudged snow just to our north or in a bulbous evolving sky or in a rhyolite bowl of wobbling Welsh syllables … Here Mark Goodwin becomes involved with animals & ground, as well as people … Poems as clunk-&-puff-of-dirt … creaturely elongation of speed … a fog-hollow of corrie … chalk-hooves flint-ringing … Attempts to free amazement and pin-point sharp where we are …
Published November 2024. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618411
To read Mark Goodwin’s poems of rock and grass and sky and the body-mind moving through them is to enter deep place: living, uncontainable – an event not a landscape. His poems are a grounding in minute shifts and experiences: visual reflections become aural echoes, sounds lift off the page into the ear, inferences and possibilities of language are opened up. Meaning pivots on the unexpected. Word and line breaks are subtle levers of time and scale. The page is Mark Goodwin’s theatre of transformations. Through the slippage and junctures of language, I find myself out in the open, participant in the tactilities and sights and noises of place. His poems, opening on the page in this locked-down time, gladden the heart.
Published 2012. Paperback, 174pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Gestaltbunker encapsulates the diversity of Paul A. Green's output during his long subterranean career. His engagement with nuclear apocalypse, global melt-down and the excesses of media landscaping is modulated through surreal inscapes and an intensifying torsion of language. He moves from mid-life grubbings in the basement of a psyche to marital praise-songs and celebrations. Yet the riddles of time and consciousness continue to pre-occupy him, whether encountered through magick, music or the mysteries of the city.
Published 2012. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612198 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"Diagrams are meant to be clear and precise, serious and informative. David Greenslade shows them to be none of those. In his eyes they become murky and ambiguous, playful and misleading, harbouring deep, discomforting mysteries. Read at your peril: you will never be able to view a diagram in the same way again." — Donald Norman, Prof. Emeritus, Cognitive Studies, University of California, San Diego
Published 2011. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611825 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In David Grubb's new collection collisions, wonders, ballyhoo and sudden light signal the way we walk a tightrope between the real and the imagined. Our human world encompasses clowns, angels, the dead, ghosts and saints, parrots and horses, the upsidedown and secret dancing, kazoo music and heart songs.
The Shearsman Library 10
Published 2018. Chapbook, 8.5 x 5.5ins, 32pp. £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848610194. Download a PDF sampler from this book here .
Harry Guest’s remarkable sequence of Elegies were first published as a chapbook in 1980 by Pig Press in Durham, and were later collected in Lost and Found a large collection of the author’s work in 1983. here we take the chance to return the poems to their original chapbook environment, convinced that the world still needs work like this. Still available in the author’s Anvil collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest , they benefit from being able to breathe more easily in their original form…
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616875 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Throughout his career, Harry Guest has written occasional poems, haiku, squibs and jests, and this little collection brings together a range of them that will delight his readers.
[…] enough however here for mysteries,
times to get lost on, found again,
a different beauty, wilder, spread, bare and
always the past put there in stone to stay
Published 2006. Paperback 9x6ins, 116pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Through a variety of approaches Chris Gutkind shows a self exploring and working itself out across a range of preoccupations. It is a journey from inside to outside, from the more hermetic to the more expansive and from him to you, perhaps into you.
Born in the Netherlands and raised mostly in Canada, Chris Gutkind has lived in London for many years, where he is a librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies. This is his first collection of poetry.
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