British Poetry Titles: Authors S to Z

 Published 2016. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

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

 A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas – whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille) – is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as archipelagic, maritime, aloof.  His own account of the voyage is lost. Lesley Saunder fills in the gaps

Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616424 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Flying School is a book of beautifully crafted poems about the contrivances by which we attempt to enrich or repair our lives. One dominant image is flight and, more specifically, parachutes – reflecting an aspiration to come to terms with our hardest challenges, including the reality of death. The book ends with a series of heartbreaking elegies for the poet’s father, unflinching in their grief-stricken gaze.

      In this highly various collection, plain-spoken storytelling jostles against more oblique or lyrical voices, while sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and ‘triplets’ (mixing traditional and consonantal rhyme) offer the pleasures of accomplished form. The common factor is a vividly observed aliveness, often inflected with wit. Saxton has conjured a teeming imaginative world that never fails to convince, entertain or move.

Published 2024. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619135 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“I go to Ian Seed’s poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There’s a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live ‘joyously and seriously’ against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops – it deserves legions of readers.”  —Luke Kennard

"Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafes, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding ‘obsession’, ‘unspeakable desire’, erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity’s transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, ‘I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story’ and reminds us, ‘It takes a stranger to see the beauty’. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a ‘poet soul’. A translator of Jacob’s poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet’s soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." —Cassandra Atherton

Published by Gratton Street Irregulars; distributed by Shearsman Books.

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

ISBN 9781848613737 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

John Seed is the author of eight collections of verse, including: Divided into One (Poetical Histories, 2003), New and Collected Poems and Pictures from Mayhew (both Shearsman, 2005), That Barrikins: Pictures from Mayhew II (Shearsman, 2007), and Manchester : August 16th & 17th 1819 (Intercapillary Editions, 2013).

Published July 2024. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619517

This posthumous collection by Gavin Selerie brings together all the uncollected poems from the last phase of his life – fewer than might have expected perhaps, as he was also busy in the final part of his life with the composition of a memoir of his visit to the USA in the late 1960s. That memoir, Edges of Memory, will be published in due course.

As Robert Hampson’s obituary details, Gavin’s work tended towards long forms, based on extensive research, although shorter works did crop up throughout his life, as evidenced by the large volume of Collected Sonnets (Shearsman Books, 2019). These last poetic forays are shorter poems, although inevitably they also include a long-ish sequence centred on the author’s favourite London haunt of Cricklewood.

Published 2009. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610187 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. [...] As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these stories—real, fantastic, or both—are only our stories so far.

Published 2017. Paperback, 122pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615656 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. For his last project before his disappearance around 2010, Van Valckenborch supposedly asked one poet from each of the EU states to write him a poem. Of course, he wrote them himself … Each poem was then supposedly translated into Flemish (or occasionally French) via robot (online) translators and the resultant poem ‘finalised’ by Van Valckenborch before presentation on this website. The poems that follow are best thought of as collaborations between Van Valckenborch and the 25 imaginary poets and the robot translator. (As the EU expanded so did the Union: there are now 27 ‘members’.)

      We have, as usual, been accused of making these translations ourselves, or even of making the poets up (many of them might take exception, a few might be rather tickled by that suggestion). Firstly our expertise does not extend to all the languages encountered. Secondly, our professional pride as translators would have prohibited the use of electronic translation devices and we have only been forced to enter into a secondary relationship with this medium by Van Valckenborch’s engagement with it, which we rather regret. —Annemie and Martin Krol-Dupuis (Brussels).

Published August 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619357

At one level, the poems in British Standards are transpositions of Romantic era sonnets that pay homage to the exuberance and variety of that tradition, whether through examples of well-known poets, from Wordsworth to Clare, or through those of lesser-known practitioners, Mary Robinson to Hartley Coleridge. At another level, these transpositions chart the recent national banana-skin slippage from the hubris of Brexit to the mismanagement of Covid (including the privations and solitudes of lockdown). At both levels, they are satirical and funny, whether British Standard dogging sites are introduced as the sole Brexit benefit, or ‘our’ hapless prime minister stumbles from indiscretion to disgrace. Between the levels, they vibrate with implication, rock with savage laughter. 

Published 2024. Paperback, 216pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619524

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves Robert Sheppard has made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and his own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but offers them to fellow poets, critics, and even to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own.

Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 164pp. £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9780907562504 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Otters and Martens was Simms' first major British collection in some years, and — at the time — his largest-ever book. The volume unites all of his poems that concern or revolve around otters and martens, poems in which his concerns as a poet fuse with those of the naturalist that he also is. For lovers of poetry and mustelidae alike.



Published 2005. Paperback 9.25 x 7.5ins, 208pp. £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9780907562931 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This volume is a second retrospective edition of the work of Colin Simms, covering his North American poems and showcasing his six long poems on Amerindian themes: Rushmore Inhabitation, No Northwestern Passage, Parflèche, Missouri River Songs, A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-Course and Carcajou . While these poems still demonstrate the author's remarkable use of language they also show his engagement with open-field poetics, an aptly American format for the wide open spaces of the Great Plains and the all-encompassing narrative that he spins for the reader. To these long poems are added more than 50 shorter poems on connected themes, drawn from throughout the poet's career.

Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18 

ISBN 9781905700356 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here .]

This is Colin Simms' third Shearsman collection. A noted naturalist and expert on birds of prey, he collects here his poems on the subject of gyrfalcons, magnificent raptor birds that he has studied in Britain, North America, Iceland and Siberia. The book also contains some of his field drawings of the birds.

Edited by Barry Schwabsky

Published 2016. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615106 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This selection of Smith's work features generous selections from Fifteen Exits , Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge , alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content . On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: ‘It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries’.

Published 2021. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848617629 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

M. Stasiak grew up in Newfoundland, and now lives and works in London. Her work has been published in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, Brittle Star, Interpreter’s House, Envoi, Urthona, Iota, Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and Shearsman . This is her first chapbook.

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

ISBN 9781848619425

‘Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shores of our self-destruction, read him before the tide comes in…’ wrote the poet Hugo Williams after reading his debut collection Glaciation in 2007, which went on to win the international Glen Dimplex Award for a first collection of poetry in 2008. Now some seventeen years later and four collections on, the tide has certainly come in and we note from our precarious vantage point in Western Europe, is rising month on month. Immortal Wreckage is Will Stone’s fifth collection and the poems collected here were nourished from the profoundly unsettling years that began with the Covid pandemic, and those in its wake which have sired a global societal disequilibrium which shows no sign of constriction. The poems of Immortal Wreckage attempt to gain purchase at least inwardly on this unprecedented dystopian extravaganza, the poet’s raptor like eye passing like a lighthouse beam in the darkness with regular insistence, illuminating if only briefly the vainglorious landscape of new ruins we have built, overseen by political coteries of rapscallions and charismatic psychopaths masquerading as honest brokers of progress or reform, this immortal wreckage which we have bequeathed to the children, our descendants.

Published 2016. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614949 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Winner of the Saltire Award for the Best Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, 2017.

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's First Collection Prize, 2017.

"Em Strang's poems are shamanic, in that they restore to us abandoned mythologies. Nothing is stable in this very real world, where houses can become birds, where the animal lies shallowly below the surface of the human, where poems are haunted with what is unsaid. An 'old throat from the other side', full of bewilderment, concern, passion and beauty." —Jen Hadfield



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

ISBN 9781848619395

Firebird explores the fires of destruction and rebirth, both literal and spiritual. Each poem invites the reader to consider ‘the necessity of mystery’, where grief and joy, death and rebirth, stagnation and transformation exist alongside one another, ‘exactly as they are’. 

        In two sections of ekphrastic poems, Em Strang engages with visual art by American painter and erstwhile nun, Meinrad Craighead, and Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio. The poems speak specifically to Craighead’s 2004 Bosque Fire series – images made in the wake of a devastating fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived – and to a number of Caravaggio’s religious paintings made between 1595 and 1609.

        Firebird is an invitation into a unitive perspective, where the source of all creation ‘is a presence that protects us from nothing, even while it sustains us in all things’ and where ‘even if we burn to death, the fire is trustworthy’ (James Finley). These are poems of radical love and courage in the face of ongoing fire.

Published 2023. Paperback, 266pp, 9 x 6 ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848618824 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In her fifth book Janet Sutherland explores journals written by her great-great-grandfather, George Davies, as he travelled to Serbia with his Queen’s Messenger friend, Mr Gutch, in 1846 and 1847. She writes her own journals during a trip to Hungary and Serbia in 2018 and after her cancer diagnosis and treatment during the first Covid lockdowns of 2020. Poems, journals, letters, messenger regulations and other testimony, both imaginary and actual, question, answer and echo each other in a radical collage. All the writers are grappling with uncertainties. Sutherland is intrigued by what these testimonies reveal and hide. Part history, part poetry, part travelogue – these journals, poems and other writings interweave the then and now, the observed and imagined. What do we know about these messages and their messengers? What secrets and possibilities might these words carry? What can they tell us about ourselves?

Published 2014. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613539 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem (and therefore must include some hate). The poem is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human mouth." — Irving Weinman

Edited & introduced by Mark Scroggins.

Published 2019. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616455 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Swinburne's first collection, Poems and Ballads (1866), generated a storm of critical and public controversy, being attacked for licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and the author was forced to transfer his works to another house. The present selection of Swinburne’s verse focuses precisely on what the first reviewers of the 1866 book found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ varieties. The anonymous review for the London Review called the poems ‘depraved and morbid in the last degree’; Robert Buchanan in the Athenaeum pronounced Swinburne ‘unclean for the sake of uncleanness’; and John Morley, in the most thorough and eloquent of the attacks (in the Saturday Review ), called the poems ‘nameless shameless abominations’, Swinburne’s ‘a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lemprière’, and Swinburne himself ‘the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’. Contemporary readers are less likely to condemn a poet for hinting at or even outrightly depicting sex, but Swinburne’s treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock.