British Poetry Titles: Authors K to L

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

ISBN 9781848613157 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Thin Ice takes the reader on an odyssey of the imagination, with poems whose sources range from a childhood in Maine, to New York City of the Vietnam era, to our paranoid post-9/11 world. There is a measure of relief in the quotidian pleasures of our beleaguered natural environment, whether from a terrace on a Greek island, or the poet's garden in Cornwall. Thin Ice follows Alice Kavounas' earlier collections, Ornament of Asia , and The Invited.

Published October 2023. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618947 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog’s ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of an African finch, or in finding herself a holidaying bystander in 1968, witnessing tanks en route to the invasion of former Czechoslovakia. This acutely-assembled collection is rich in such telling intersections, and her narrative energy is flawless. She follows threads of thought and memory and imagination with exact insight and compassion. She reminds us that unless we give honour and attention to the past, we are lost. Her poems are rich in those qualities that we require of poems, so that we may better comprehend and celebrate our human lives.” —Penelope Shuttle 

Published 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619678

The Exact Colour of Snow articulates a complicit, playful commentary on our mundane interactions with the natural world. Notes, fragments and glimpsed biographies explore how we ignore our fragile landscape even while grounded in its rhythms, shapes and colours. Skeining through the fashion and factories of global import export and dye making, we travel back to soil, plants and animals. A route that offers different harvests: clearing bombs to erect North Sea windmills in the Mesolithic sludge of Doggerland, unseasonal Abbotsford oranges, and the production of fine leather for golf gloves from hairsheep in Yemen and North Africa. Behind the scenes in these poems, the excluded – often mothers or young women – observe and study to understand the whole shape of things. The final colour of snow in this collection is green. Exact Colour of Snow follows Bridget Khursheed’s debut, The Last Days of Petrol, which was hailed by Joyce McMillan, of The Scotsman, as “…brave, brilliant and chilling poetry, which almost forces a recognition of the new precarity of human life on earth”.

Published by Three Highgate Editions, and distributed by Shearsman Books.
Published October 2024. Full-colour hardcover, 24pp, 9.25 x 7.5ins, £16 / $27.50

ISBN 9781739544911.
With a poem by Martha Kapos, an essay by Alistair Hicks, and a translation of Mayakovsky by Irina Johnstone.

This volume offers a number of full-colour reproductions of works by the artist Ken Kiff (1935–2001) together with poems that spring from a similar source of inspiration. Three poems by Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara and Ken Kiff’s close friend Martha Kapos shed light on the way Kiff, like Paul Klee before him, took a line for a walk, and then another line, and then yet another. Kapos’ poem was inspired by 'A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island' by Frank O’Hara, which in turn was written in jealous awe after reading Mayakovsky’s 'An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage'.

Published 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610170 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Connoisseurs of the arcane will no doubt wonder what it is about Plymouth and Buddhism: first Lobsang Rampa, a.k.a. Cyril Henry Hoskins, self-styled bodily host to a reincarnated Tibetan lama, and now Kenny Knight's frequent invocations of the Dalai Lama—occasionally accompanied by Ruth Padel—in a new Book of the Dead. While Nirvana might be hard to reach in this suburban district of Plymouth, the highlight of which is a misplaced 19th century fort, Honicknowle nonetheless reaches the status of myth in this debut collection of poems. The Honicknowle Book of the Dead is where memory, movies, television and 1960s' rock bands merge into a surreal narrative; it is where Lorna Doone and Louis Aragon share pages with Hank Marvin and Elvis Presley, where the local poetry scene announces its presence, and where—in an alternate universe—Ted Heath led Britain into the Common Market, Ted Heath, the band-leader, that is. For memory is confusion, and being young is confusing, and poetry is rarely anything but confusion. Welcome to extraordinary world of Kenny Knight.

Published 2012. Paperback, 192pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848612426 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"For Larkin, landscape is not so much a thing as a process, a kind of prosody marked by opening (which the prose poem enacts through clearings of verse) and by colonizing, to a rhythm not necessarily human. It is a process whose articulations colonize the poet-forester's abandoned grammars." —Jonathan Skinner

Published 2014. Paperback, 194pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613843 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“Larkin’s is the most radically decentered poetry of ecological apprehension and conscience that we have in English, and if it is also among the most estrangingly beautiful, that is no accident. Larkin’s verse rides its Modernist inheritances through and past what we now think of as postmodernism, fetching up on some farther, stranger shore.” —G. C. Waldrep



Published 2017. Paperback, 206pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615588 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Larkin’s writing maps out and conceptually creates a scarce, minimally legible layer, and does so as a form of adoration or communion – the presence of scarcity makes its opposite, creative plenitude, come as close as possible." —Edmund Hardy

Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616752 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Trees become myriad versions (instalments) of themselves without verging onto an unsensing multiplicity as they traverse partially resistant or patient terrains: so these poems explore contrasting tree-states, as sticks or joints, filters of directional light or self-submerged hedges, which are all manners of contraction, extension, mediation, shareable expression.

“Larkin’s ‘theological poetics’ assumes a world in which we could be said to be ‘short of nothing’, however ‘scarcely’ this is apprehended.” —Simon Collings

Published 2021. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848617568 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

These poems entwine round such matters as how roots move as they grow or how feet plant themselves, why a forest admits lanes and lines but obstructs them into shelter, how a tree might relate to all it isn’t, what the hidden domains of nature can mean in and for trees, or the way in which trees cast the skies themselves into flight. The two last poems envisage a body language for trees, or how a dead upright tree remains a living nub of forest.

“Setting up an ecological orientation against habitual ways of reading and perceiving language, Larkin’s poems offer scientifically descriptive close investigations of trees whilst implying an allegorical dimension. They do so by means of a range of registers that only gain their scarce value in relation to one another.” —Katharina Maria Kalinowski 

Published 2023. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618954 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Larkin’s way of pulling language up by the roots – literally, as we have frequently to go back to the root meanings of words to understand his unorthodox grammar – does not make it easy for the reader, but he is a rewarding and deeply original poet.” —Isobel Armstrong

 “No poet has ever given so much to trees – his thought, his attention, his invention – which lets him then, in turn, give these trees to us, and in ways that highlight the complexities of their architectures and their contexts, their interactions with the myriad communities in which they participate. This new collection branches out toward grasses, seeds, electricity … all propelled by a wonderful tanglework of sound that reflects the environmental networks in which trees play such a crucial role. This book is a sheer gift – of trees and to trees, and above all, to readers who love them.” —Cole Swensen

Shearsman Classics No. 12. Introduced by Jeremy Hooker 

Published 2011. Paperback, 180pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848611573 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) was the volume that Lawrence himself described as his best collection of poetry. Composed in various locations during his exile—in Italy, France, Germany and the United States—this long collection occupies a crucial place in the development of his poetry and is that rarest of creations: a masterpiece of modernist nature writing. This version offers the full text of the first British edition (which included the poems from Tortoises , excluded from the US edition). The prose prefaces, composed for a later re-issue are also included.

Published 2017. Paperback, 130pp, 8.25 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615427 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Here the text or the poem is a swimming pool, a pool in which language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or phenomenological spaces; fluid places for being, thinking or even swimming in the world. It is polyglot within English, let alone in relation to all the other tongues that are almost audible and to the maps of Europe that move to and fro somewhere beneath the text.

Published 2012. Paperback, 260pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848611887 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In this twenty-first century poem, Tony Lopez samples and seamlessly combines writings from many fields of science and culture, composing by means of intuitive and discreet intervention something quite unique. In a review of Darwin (one 10% section of Only More So ) Ron Silliman described this writing as "the most exquisitely constructed prose I've ever read—more lush than Proust"; he wrote that it “just might be the most beautiful poetry collection ever written". Only More So engages the darkest aspects of human nature, extinction and genocide; it may also be the first Constructivist poem composed on the pleasure principle.

Published 2012. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20  2nd edition.

ISBN 9781848611948 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"[…] by far my favourite individual volume of poetry this year [was] Tony Lopez's False Memory , a series of sonnet sequences collaging and remixing the white noise of 1990s Britain into a disorienting, sometimes hilarious, often sinister, and always satirical challenge." —Robert Potts, The Guardian , 6 December 2003.

Published 2012. Paperback, 138pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612235 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. He read Modern Languages at Cambridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in Japan and England. With his wife, Lynn Guest, a historical novelist, he now lives in Exeter. His Collected Poems, A Puzzling Harvest , was published by Anvil in 2002. Subsequent collections include Some Time (Anvil) and Comparisons & Conversions (Shearsman). He is also the author of three novels and a number of translations from French and German. This festschrift volume is published to coincide with his 80th birthday and features tributes from friends, colleagues and fellow poets and translators.

12.94Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610651 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In contrast to the long, trans-cultural narratives of Ancestors and Species , Tom Lowenstein's new poetry is pared down in this volume to the briefest of utterances.

A long expensive journey. The landscape

grown stranger. A space at the end

where there's no more to interpret.

Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610583 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"There's something about [these] poems ... that I find fascinating. His style is laconic, undemonstrative, but under the style is an enquiring mind and a sense of the strangeness of language. [H]e can be as plain as a pikestaff, deeply personal, and move into the mysterious use of technical language, culled from his own enormous reading. His use of collage to create many of his texts never seems forced or clever in any way; it somehow seems to flow together into a poem that investigates, subtly and without you noticing mostly, what the possibilities of language are in describing, or rather connoting, the world of phenomena."— Brando's Ha t

Published 2015. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614192 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In The Return of the Man Who Has Everything , Rupert Loydell continues to explore post-confessional narrative in his poems, as he has previously done in Wildlife and the Smartarse anthology. The Man Who Has Everything is an unlikely anti-hero, adrift in a world of instant gratification, momentary experiences and instant answers, in contrast to the music, art, books and conversation he prefers. Melancholic, witty and sometimes absurd, these new poems offer stories and observations, asides and assumptions, as they try to clear a way through the chaos that surrounds us and make sense of contemporary life.

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

ISBN 9781848618893 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In this new book of poems Rupert Loydell writes about the world he now finds himself living in, questioning the damage caused by time, memory, lockdown, aging, politics, lies, neglect and disinformation. Whether grappling with social history, corrupt data, road-building, Grenfell Tower, urban graffiti, faith and fine art, or ‘the fickleness of language’, these damaged prayers and disbelieving explorations are ‘configured for maximum twitch’. And despite the resigned conclusion that ‘we are only ever likely to have a clear backwards view’, and even though ‘it is totally absurd to expect answers that might help explain our world’, Loydell clings to the way that ‘memory is all about being able to change the past’ and notes that ‘the future is here right now’.