British Poetry Titles: Authors Q to R

Published October 2024. Paperback, 486pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $35

ISBN 9781848619562

"A life’s work of steady, compassionate, precise observation animates these deceptively simple poems, rooted in their landscape and making a sense of home over and over again in each one. A virtuoso of stress and line endings, Elaine Randell has the ability to turn the events of each day into a kind of thought-music, while the sequences of prose narrative vignettes provide glimpses of the difficult lives of the sorts of troubled people she has come into contact in her professional work, sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, sometimes hopeless, sometimes almost comic. It’s all about the truth of things." — Ian Patterson

Published 2008. Paperback, 147pp, 8.5x5.5ins

ISBN 9780907562719  WITHDRAWN AFTER THE RELEASE OF THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (see above)

This Selected Poems represents thirty-five years of work as poet, glimpses in time, concerns, loves, gardening and other preoccupations. 

"Elaine Randell's poetry is about people, that is herself and the lives of those around her. The personal and the words are set in context, in the houses and streets and countryside we inhabit, we move through. [. . .] In her sequences ‘Watching women with children', 'Six pieces from the sauna' and 'Hard to Place', like Charles Reznikoff's Testimonies, people speak for themselves and their words are respected. And at the root of this respect is the heart, the base-line we work from, the qualities of love we choose, value or deny. The love for ourselves and for others. But though the heart is always at the centre of her work it never indulges in the vanities of egotism. The unique ego is out to lunch, on the shelf where it belongs. What matters is both what truly happens in the heart and what's out there, what the other people are saying and doing, even what the creatures and plants are saying and doing. That quality of carefulness." —Lee Harwood

Published 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611832 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Landscape, textiles, plant-forms, the mysterious taxonomies of perfume are here themes for poetry that works the edge between lyric consonance and radical disjuncture. Three Reds , Anna Reckin's first book-length collection, draws on materials from China, Australia, Portugal and her native East Anglia to produce poems whose emotional complexities surface in the push and pull of sound patterns and visual design, and in the gaps and overlaps of words' makings and their givens.



Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615809  [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Landscape, textiles, plant-forms, the mysterious taxonomies of perfume are here themes for poetry that works the edge between lyric consonance and radical disjuncture. Three Reds , Anna Reckin's first book-length collection, draws on materials from China, Australia, Portugal and her native East Anglia to produce poems whose emotional complexities surface in the push and pull of sound patterns and visual design, and in the gaps and overlaps of words' makings and their givens.



Published 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610552 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Bona Drag , a rich, brilliantly inventive collection of poems covering every detail of the poet's obsessive life, from the colour of Posh Spice's heels, to London street encounters, underworld friends, urban survival tactics, neuroscientific concepts and extraterrestrials, more than confirms J.G. Ballard's assessment of Reed, as "the most gifted poet working today, an extraordinary talent."



Published 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Bona Vada (gay slang for "good looking"), the companion volume to Bona Drag (Shearsman, 2009), again finds Jeremy Reed—described by J.G. Ballard as having "an imagination almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance", and by the rock bandit Pete Doherty as "a legend"—piloting stunning imagery into vitally modern big city experience. Reed's image-grab often has him refer to himself as a kleptomaniac as his obsessive raids on streetwise visual detail are converted into powerfully original poetry. If Reed's operational grid is principally London's West End, then his exhilaratingly controversial remit continuously pushes poetry's frontiers out into the always excitingly controversially new.

Published 2014. Paperback, 150pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613232 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The first book of Jeremy Reed's uncompromising, explicitly autobiographical expose of his life as a leading London poet from the 1980s to the present day, a major long poem written in the shop, while managing Red Snapper Books in the period 2007-2008, takes in an acutely personalised retrieval of the Piccadilly Circus ethos in the eighties, including meetings with the artist Francis Bacon, bohemian Soho, an index of personal obsessions including rock music and fashion, a defiant colour block of personal friends, patrons, pick-ups and demi-monde outlaws, all generously characterised for their individual importance and contribution to the poet's life, and a direct full-on involvement with unstoppable big-city momentum in the capital, intensely lived on a day to day basis. The book is a highly courageous and cutting edge poet's autobiography, explicit and detailed in a way few poets would dare celebrate quite literally the uncensored resources of a highly individual and sustained personal creativity.

Published 2016. Paperback, 132p, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614635 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Asa Benveniste (1925-1990) who founded the legendary Trigram Press in London in 1965, ostensibly to publish Anglo-American cutting-edge poetry, was not only a self-taught, one-off maverick genius as a printer, typographer and book-designer, but also a superbly innovative language poet, whose own poetry tended to be obscured by his merits as a publisher. Throughout its duration, 1965-1978, the Trigram list epitomised ultimate hipster cool, as a leading independent. Jeremy Reed's deeply personal tribute to Benveniste as his enduring poetic avatar, and the encourager and publisher of his early poetry informs a book that is both an appraising memoir and a significant evaluation of Trigram Press. The book also includes a reprint of Benveniste's collection Edge (1975), as well as miscellaneous writings of his retrieved from small press publications.

Published 2019. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616271 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American Studies at Essex University, wasn’t easy as an anomalous poet living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape came by way of finding part-­time employment with John Berger, part of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton’s LSD documentation of her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry. When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in Chester Gate, Regent’s Park a big light went out in me, and my poem ‘Elegy for Paula Stratton’ can be found in the collection This Is how You Disappear , my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)

Edited with an Introduction by Grevel Lindop
Published July 2024. Paperback, 306pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619159

Jeremy Reed’s output has been prodigious. Since 1975 he has published more than forty books of poems, besides countless pamphlets and fugitive pieces, and many novels, biographies and books on cultural history. The full range of his poetry will never be truly known, for he often writes in public places, and if someone expresses interest may give them the poem. By the time this selection appears his tally will have grown further, because he writes continuously. His poems are his diary, his autobiography, his therapy, his addiction. Reed has moved from publisher to publisher, often writing for several at the same time, and his style has evolved continuously over more than four decades. Formalist, symbolist, language poet, nature-poet, modernist, post-modernist, performance poet: Reed has been all these and more.

Edited by Ian Brinton

Published 2016. Paperback, 128pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614888 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



John Riley (1937-1978) was known as one of the members of the so-called Cambridge School of poetry, and was co-editor, with Tim Longville, of the seminal Grosseteste Review and its associated press. His poetry, as with many others associated with the magazine, shows the influence of Pound and Olson, but it also reveals his interest in the Russian tradition — exemplified by his fine translations of Mandelstam, and by his long poem, 'Czargrad', the latter a glimpse of Byzantium under its Russian name.

Published 1995. A5 Paperback, 32pp. OUT OF PRINT

ISBN 9780907562207.



Published jointly with Oasis Books, London, this book comprises the first four sections of the long poem Alstonefield . Parts of section 5 subsequently appeared in Shearsman, PN Review and other journals. A new edition, including the complete Section 5 (which is longer than the first four sections put together) was published by Carcanet Press, Manchester, in 2003. 

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 1997. A5 Paperback, 55pp. £7.50

ISBN 9780907562245



Until the 2007 titles listed below, this was Riley's most recent full-length collection, apart from Passing Measures (Carcanet, Manchester, 2001), which is the author's Selected Poems, the experimental sequence Excavations (Reality Street Editions, 2005), and A Map of Faring , published only in the USA.

NOW (MOSTLY) INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2014. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613867 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]



The Dance at Mociu brings together some thirty 'stories' of Transylvania, a part of the world that has fascinated the author for many years, and which he and his wife have visited annually since 1998. These pieces are not stories in the conventional sense, but range from meditation to epiphany, from observation to recordings of an old world that seems threatened — the world of 'Old Europe', that Central Europe whose borders were flexible in the extreme, whose populations found themselves changing nationalities with alarming frequency in the 20th century, and whose cultures survived all the vicissitudes of war and rampant nationalisms only to face an uncertain future in the post-communist present. Expanded version of the 2003 edition, in a larger format.

Published 2007. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700158 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



Since the 1970s, Peter Riley and his wife have been making regular trips to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, and he has been writing a series of poems and meditations about the place—a spectacular area of natural beauty. To date, many of these poems, and poem-sequences, have appeared in small-press and bibliophile editions, and in artists' books. Three of the sequences were also collected in the author's Selected Poems, Passing Measures , published by Carcanet in 2000. Now, for the first time, all of Peter Riley's Llyn writings—both poems and prose-poems—are collected together under one set of covers.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2007. Paperback, 212pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781905700097 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



The subtitle says it all: here are numerous stray publications and lost poems, and prose-poems from throughout the author's career. Amongst many other works, the collection includes the previously unpublished sixth part of the long poem 'Alstonefield'.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2009. Paperback, 128pp, 8x5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610514 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]



Greek Passages is a set of 105 prose-poems derived from four sojourns in Greece, mostly in the vicinity of Argos and thus at the hub of early Greek power. The structure is entirely diurnal, building each poem from the day’s events, so that cognizance of monumental historical figures and events infiltrate from outside into notes of fauna, ruins, the news, books about Greece or not, American music listened to, pleasant dinners, dreams of northern England etcetera. Two shorter stays on the west coast of the Peloponnese furnish beginning and ending sections of a gentler, more lyrical cast, and there are interruptive excursions, mostly to the remains of cities and wars. Everywhere what is presented to the eyes is the starting-point for a poetical process creating lenses in location and sense. NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2010. Paperback, 204pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848610927 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]

The Derbyshire Poems brings back into print two important earlier collections (from the 1970s and 1980s) by Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts , together with the explanatory essays that were originally issued alongside the latter volume, and an uncollected sequence from the same period which belongs with the other poems dealing with the Peak District. This is an important volume which provides the bcakground to Riley's later forays into writing in, of, and under the landscape.

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613942 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]



Due North is a poem in twelve chapters concerned with human movement northwards or out in the quest for work, subsistence, settlement and gratification, and in danger of getting trapped in various enclosures, including thought-traps. The cast includes migrant workers, returning soldiers, children growing up, and population movements such as the early 19th-century descent on the northern manufacturing districts from demographic disaster zones, with my awareness of my own ancestry among the displaced Irish of Manchester and West Yorkshire. Woven into this are various artistic, poetical, cultural and instinctive ventures to traverse cold and emptiness, limit and futility, in the hope of attaining the metaphor of lasting warmth. Its pattern is that of a long sequence of beginnings, some of which reach their conclusions, usually elsewhere in the text, some of which don’t. The textual mode is literal and lyrical, to posit the value of these two forces in sustaining hope. (Peter Riley) 

NOW INCLUDED IN THE AUTHOR'S COLLECTED POEMS (SEE BELOW).

Published 2017. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615458 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

" Dawn Songs consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called ‘Mass Lyric’; and ‘Dawn Songs’ itself, which concerns a lamentational genre of Transylvanian village music and forms the bulk of the book. So if ever there was a book discussing musical practices which very few people outside the area know about or want to, this is it." —Peter Riley



Published 2018. Paperback, 608pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848616103 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 1 covers 1962–1997, encompassing books such as Love-Strife Machine, The Linear Journal, The Llyn Writings, The Derbyshire Poems (including Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts), Noon Province, Reader, Lecture, Author and Snow has Settled…

Published 2018. Paperback, 592pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848616110 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley’s collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 2 covers the period from the late 1990s to 2015, covering books such as Excavations, Alstonefield, Two Setts and Coda, The Glacial Stairway, Greek Passages and Due North . Like its companion volume, it also contains a large number of uncollected poems.

Published February 2023. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848618855 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

        ‘How do you get mortal harmony

out of a stone box into the moving air?

With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.’

Proof asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren’s song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet’s task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. Proof brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision. 

   ‘And it is through

this hole in the night that the wren sings.’

Published 2021. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617285 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]

"The song, ‘Last Kind Words Blues’, was recorded in 1930 in a makeshift studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, and issued by Paramount Records as one side of a 78 rpm shellac disc with the musician’s name given as “Geeshie Wiley”. It’s not a straightforward lyric. It’s not about slavery, but slavery is there in it. It’s about the victims of war, but forgets that it is." — Peter Riley

Peter Riley then invited responses from other poets and the results are here, with contributions from Tony Baker, Kelvin Corcoran, Ian Duhig, Khaled Hakim, Michael Haslam, Peter Hughes, Tom Lowenstein, Laura Potts, John Seed, Zoë Skoulding, Jon Thompson and Judith Willson.

Published 2025. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380008

While editors and publishers in the past have always described my short form poems as haiku, I prefer to call the majority of the short form poems of the type in this collection as One-strike Poems, since the term ‘haiku’ relates to a very different cultural and historical mind-set and developmental literary process. And long before my awareness of haiku, the source of my short form poems came originally from my interest in the chants and prayers of indigenous peoples, and then later, graffiti on the walls of the various cities I either lived in or visited. Resulting in my early poems often being of an aphoristic or epigrammatic nature.

              My poems at this time were also sourced in my encounters with an object or event, when a poem might immediately and spontaneously arise out of the experience and be committed, just as it is, to any piece of paper to hand, in that moment. And in the few instances where any change was made afterwards, it was only in the moving of a word or two from one line to another, or on very rare occasions, perhaps the changing of a single word.      (Malcolm Ritchie)

Edited by Robert Sheppard

Published 2024. Paperback, 152pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619180

Mary Robinson (née Darby) was born in 1758 in Bristol, and was a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and actress. Tutored by both Garrick and Sheridan, she had a short but dazzling career on the London stage, where she was spotted by the young Prince Regent and became his mistress. The resultant scandal was hot gossip and salacious news, brought to a new reading public by the institution of the daily paper, for which, ironically, Robinson would later write. Although she had always written, her main literary career dates from a serious accident in 1783, which left her permanently disabled. In the 1790s, she produced most of her best work, with an ever-accelerating productivity, in verse and fiction, until her death in 1800 (she wrote 70 poems in that last year). Once associated with fashionable Della Cruscan poetry, in the final years of her life she was in contact with S.T. Coleridge and William Godwin, representatives of vanguards in both politics and literature. After her death, her work suffered from an almost-complete obscurity, aided and abetted by Victorian revulsion at her scandalous past. This position has now changed, and there has been considerable interest in her life, her writing, and the connection between the two in recent years.  

Published 2015. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613898 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]

Hearing Rilke quoted at the Co-op, an experience evoked in the title poem to Peter Robinson’s latest collection, Buried Music , the poet continues his work of discovering poetry in everyday, anywhere places. It is as if, as Roy Fisher intuited, ‘he carries a listening device, alert for the moments when the tectonic plates of mental experience slide quietly one beneath another to create paradoxes and complexities that call for poems to be made.’ Prompted by varieties of losses — health, hopes, friends or relatives — his listening unearths a rhythmic contour from such opening cracks in the terrain. Buried Music finds poetry in its absence, presence in the place of what’s missing. For those who have followed his trajectory, this new book offers a fresh opportunity to tune in to the work of what Poetry Review has called ‘a major English poet’, one according to The London Magazine , who is ‘writing at the height of his powers’ and producing, in the words of the selectors for the Poetry Book Society in 2012, ‘his finest work to date.’ For those new to his writing, this world is all before you.

Published 2012. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611863 [Download a sample PDF from this book here] 

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Peter Robinson's new collection, The Returning Sky , carefully sequences the poems written over the four years from the time he left Japan and returned to England, through the global financial crisis, and into our current austerity culture. Opening with a sequence inspired by an unexpected visit to the United States, The Returning Sky then explores experiences of repatriation with the vividness and freshness of a reverse culture shock. The book takes up the inextricably financial, cultural, and emotional themes that Robinson had first scouted in collections from the years before his long economic exile, while his evocatively inventive forms invite new readers to follow his traces with the same warmth and candour he shows to his returning ones.

Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

This is Peter Robinson's first collection with Shearsman Books, and his first since returning from Japan to live and work in the UK — he is now Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. Peter Robinson has published some 15 volumes of verse, including a substantial Selected Poems from Carcanet Press, as well as aphorisms and prose poems, literary criticism, and translations of such poets as Luciano Erba and Vittorio Sereni.

Published 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610620 [Download a sample PDF from this book here ]



When Peter Robinson published Untitled Deeds in 2004, a number of his readers expressed surprise that the writer who, as early as 1983, had been described as 'the finest poet of his generation' in PN Review and, two decades later in The Reader , 'the finest poet alive', should suddenly emerge from his exile in Japan as an aphorist. What had happened? While the Western world was declaring war on an abstraction, Robinson had been drawing up peace terms with a host of them. Finding weapons of mass destruction in the speechifying of politicians, and the toxicity of pension plan promises, feeling chilled by global warming, and hot under the collar, the poet found no other respite than to reach for his notebooks. What came from them were wrung-out dishcloths and acupuncturists' needles, sound bites that chew on what they eschew, salves for old saws, and less-is-more morsels which were promptly anthologized in The Boodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations (2006) and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (2007). Now, five years further, in this volume Robinson's enlarged and extended reflections look out on the world and see a wounded head bandaged in clouds. These words that didn't come to mind when occasion demanded, words that were the right thing to say when the moment had passed, now reach us with a timely lateness that appears, for all that, to be just what we were waiting for.

Published 2006. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700042 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Talk about Poetry is made up of twelve interviews, conducted over the last decade or so for hard-to-find print and internet journals, in which Peter Robinson discusses such subjects as poetry and sexual violence, the balkanization of the art and ways to resist it, the techniques of poetry and how they engage with the circumstances of life, and the connections between his own poetry, literary criticism, translations, aphoristic writings, and ancillary work. He recalls the editing of Perfect Bound and Numbers, and the organization of the Cambridge Poetry Festival; he responds to criticism, praises fellow writers, has his doubts about some questions put to him, and much more besides. Talk about Poetry is not only a companion volume to The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson , published in June 2006, but also a reliably open-minded guide through the forest of poetry during the last thirty years.

Published 2010. Paperback, 222pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848611207



Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It begins with an unofficial gathering of poems and prose pieces covering the writer's entire career, none of which are to be found in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005 , his most recent collected edition. This is followed by a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following among significant contemporaries and juniors, including Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, Laurie Duggan, August Kleinzahler, R.F. Langley, Angela Leighton, John Matthias, and John Wilkinson. This is followed by a group of informal essays and other prose comments on working with Fisher or Fisher's work by, among others, Charles Lock, Peter Makin, Ralph Pite, Richard Price, and David Wheatley. All in all, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a must-have for the poet's fans, new and old, with its sequence of intriguing insights into the oeuvre and abiding significance of this unique literary artist.

Published 2012. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848612549 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here .]



When Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting , has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

Published 2013. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612921 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and accompanies Silent Conversations : A Reader's Life , shortly to appear from Seagull Books. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's parents.



Published 2022. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618299 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Rushmer's spare and abstract linguistic structures may well be unique in contemporary British poetry, drawing, as they do, on a European poetic tradition that questions the nature of language and its relationship with perception. Words are valued for their own sake, held up for examination and made to chime like struck glass. To the crystalline abstractions that Rushmer inherits from French poetry is added Taoist-inspired spirituality and the influence of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in an amalgam of great beauty. What Space Between Us is a landmark collection; a wide-ranging and rich series of poems, which asks time and attention of the reader, but will repay it abundantly." —Alan Baker