British Poetry Titles: Authors M to P

Edited by Colin Bramwell & Gerda Stevenson

Published 2024. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619050 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Aonghas Macneacail (1942–2022) originally intended for this book to signal his return to the literary sphere after a long convalescence. As his health declined, he was clearly comforted by the fact that this work would see the light of day: we talked together frequently about it, until he was unable to do so. He wanted this book to correct the perception of himself as a Gaelic writer, first and foremost. Gaelic was one of his three languages – Scots and English were the others. Before we started working on the book, I visited him to interview him about the project. We both agreed that a book of English-language work might have some public utility, as proof that Scottish writing is polyglot by nature. We thought that correcting the public perception of him as a Gaelic poet entirely would also be to correct perceptions of division in the language situation in Scotland more generally. Now that the process of putting this book together has come to an end, the truth of that feels clearer, to me. Aonghas’s work looks forward to a future where, as he puts it in ‘last night’, ‘my language [will] embrace / its sister tongue’. As with any bilingual poet, the point must be made: his English poetry drew from the same source as his Gaelic work. It is the intertwining of tongues which creates the tenor of the work. Aonghas’s famous poem ‘tha gàidhlig bheò’ (‘gaelic is alive’) ends with the following lines: ‘ach dèan dannsa dèan dannsa / `s e obair th`ann a bhith dannsa’. ‘be dancing be dancing / it is work to be dancing’. Of course the dance will require a partner. English was a partner-language to Aonghas’s Gaelic. Scots was another. This linguistic hybridity defines him, as much as it defines the general tenor of Scottish literature today. —from Colin Bramwell's introduction

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.

Published 2010. Paperback, 182pp, 9x6ins, £14.95. Not for sale in the USA.

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

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.

Published 2014. Paperback, 318pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $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. 

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 

Published 2005. Paperback, 113pp, 8.5x 5.5ins. £12.95

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.

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



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.

Published 2024. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619272

This cranic, or skull, of ordinaries is a landscape well-known to poet Eliza O'Toole who has long tramped the Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border with her dog Fin, nose-down tail-up, urging her on. In the muddy paint-water of John Constable and the rambling madness of John Clare, O'Toole takes her own step lightly into a calendar year of a landscape displaced. Chronicling the cycle of seasons, book-ended by (poisonous) aconites, these poems are decisive moments in time that mark life-death-decay, as a series of alternative, textual landscape paintings. At times raw, O'Toole points toward the corrosion of landscape rendered in words or oils by a masculine eye and the ironic subsequent degradation of this pastoral idyll by ongoing very real eco-losses and agri-changes. Yet, in elevating the landscape unto itself, a complex undergrowth of magnetic field work emerges and from that, the lithe 'isness' of place which never fully subscribes to human cartographics and which, in its fundament, will long outlast us.

Edited by Ian Brinton, with a Preface by Joe Luna.
Published 2020. Paperback, 198pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

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 . 

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.

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.

Published 2024. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9781848619067 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In his fourth collection from Shearsman Books, Alasdair Paterson ranges as widely as ever – from the bewilderments of a Scottish childhood to the mixed messages of later life, from gnarly nature notes to an A-Z of lines salvaged from lost Russian novels. The spirit of Mercury – bringer of messages, patron of tricksters, keeper and crosser of boundaries – hovers invisibly and a tad unreliably overhead.

—Stornoway Puffin

Published 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.

Published 2024. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619463

“Some poets live deep back, quietly, in far places, still. I love the poetry of my friend, John Phillips. He is a master of the compressed, cut lyric.” —Kent Johnson

“John Phillips writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work. At his best, Phillips is absolutely dazzling.” —Ron Silliman, on Language Is

Published 2009. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

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…



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

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. 

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

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.

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).

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.