Latest Releases

Published August 2026. Paperback, 204pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781837380103

The purpose of About Poetry is to offer a contextual account of the poetry of Peter Riley. Of course, it is a poetry that speaks for itself, but in About Poetry we also have the voice of the poet himself in counterpoint. To understand aspects of the origin of that voice led to the inclusion of two autobiographical essays. The essays and interviews are not only about Peter Riley’s poetry, its transition through five decades, but also the landscape of contemporary poetry. Much of what is said here explores the poetics of that landscape, its achievements, contradictions, creative diversions and its vitality.  

Published August 2026. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380213

An archipelago is a chain of islands, at once divided and linked by water. The archepelago is a temporal geography of discontinuity, time’s movement broken by displacement, migration, or histories of colonial erasure, but traversed by momentary constellations in which fragmentary times and scattered things find their conjunctions. In Archepelago, David Lloyd traverses a terrain that conjoins the Pacific west coast with Ireland’s western isles and the shores of the Mediterranean, terrains haunted by a network of voices cast out from the radiant disaster of our time.

Translated from Flemish by Donald Gardner. English only.

Published August 2026. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619258

In recent years Stefan Hertmans has acquired an international reputation for his fiction. War and Turpentine, a memoir of his grandfather’s experiences in the First World War, was one of the New York Times’s ten best books of 2016, while The Ascent (De Opgang) sheds an abrasive, troublesome light on the historical tradition in Flanders of collaboration with Fascism. Before he began to write fiction and auto-fiction, however, he already had a very high profile as a poet. Hertmans’ output has been prolific, and it was as a poet that I first made his acquaintance in 2013, when I was asked to translate two of his poems for the annual Lowlands Yearbook. I was struck by the airy lightness of his work: “A child summons you to these hours, / imagine trickling water, / centuries without people. / Be still as ancient stones.” This was a poetry that was both layered and transparent. I saw it as a challenge for a translator and deserving of an international readership.

                 With its insistent musicality, Hertmans’ poetry lodges itself in the reader’s memory. It also engages in a political and social discussion, which means that, while remaining highly concentrated work, it is anything but hermetic. Its relevance to current world issues, in combination with an almost traditional lyricism, makes him a unique figure in the Flemish scene. Perhaps the notion of ‘metamorphosis’ is a key to his work: each of his poems seems like a living creature, undergoing a transformation from start to finish. (Donald Gardner)

Translated from Dutch by Judith Wilkison. English only.

Published July 2026. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380312

Alara Adilow (b. 1988) is an award-winning Dutch poet of Somali origin, living in Amsterdam. She shot to fame with this debut collection, written during her transition from man to woman. Adilow explores concepts of gender (‘nobody has ever seen a real woman’), she writes about the mismatch between body and consciousness, and brings into focus the harsh realities confronting her on a daily basis: ‘I just want to do my shopping as a woman’ and not ‘as if I’m a post-feminist work of art.’ Blending the raw and the lyrical, this passionate and erudite collection takes the reader on a wild journey, where speaker and surroundings are constantly being redefined.

Published July 2026. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380190

A Posthumous Existence is Norman Jope’s eighth full-length collection and his third from Shearsman. Unlike Jope’s previous two Shearsman collections, this one mixes prose-poetry with verse. Writing in Ambit about Jope’s first Shearsman collection, Dreams of the Caucasus, Donald Gardner wrote that his reach ‘is romantic and wide, not only geographically – from the Sahara to the Hungarian puszta and on to the Arctic Circle. As with much travel writing, there is a goal beyond the journey. These texts are an attempt to read nature for signs and they also represent a quest for the elemental in himself, a sort of spiritual geology’.

           These concerns remain central, with locations ranging as far afield as the American Rockies and the Aegean Sea and a blend of first-hand and virtual experience. One section focuses on visits to Italy, and the titular poem of the collection reflects this – prompted as it was by a visit to the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, where Keats lamented the ‘posthumous existence’ he felt himself confined to in a letter sent in November 1820 to Charles Armitage Brown. Perhaps it’s not just the author who might lead a ‘posthumous existence’ but also the poem, which is inevitably the product of a time and a place that has passed. The question of what might remain current is unanswerable, all the more so at the time of composition, but there is always the hope of a hospitable shore that these poems seek.

Translated from Spanish by Peter Boyle
Published July 2026. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380244

Born in the province of León in 1957, Juan Carlos Mestre has emerged as one of the outstanding Spanish poets of the last fifty years. In this ample selection from three of Mestre's highly acclaimed collections, poetry becomes an explosion of language that surprises, wildly inventive and subtly moving. There is a baroque expansiveness to Mestre's work, a delight in stretching language to encompass the widest range of experiences.

      Behind the humour and playfulness lies a deep sense of life's tragedies, an implicit plea for compassion. Whether in the mix of filial tenderness and grief in 'Father' or in the humorous celebration of conjugal love in 'Argonauts' whether in a poem rich in political resonance like 'Ancestors' or in a short poem about poetry like 'Tribe', Mestre knows how to touch the reader with a strangely unsettling clarity.

      Bristling with a dadaist spirit of irreverence, Juan Carlos Mestre's poetry never goes in obvious directions. Instead Mestre reminds us that poetry is the unnameable emotion, the truth forever just beyond our reach so that in a definitive way, as the poem 'The Baker's Son' tells us, "what is not said, is still said," and remains said.

      With translations by acclaimed Australian poet and translator Peter Boyle, The Baker's Son offers the English-speaking reader a first, very generous sample of Mestre's finest work.

Published July 2026. Paperback, 154pp, 9 x 6 ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781837380336 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

This miscellany of essays, poems, translations and reminiscences coalesced around a rather difficult convalescence that I now look back on as a formal introduction to my 85th year. The titular essay on Rilke that comes near the end of the book was the last piece I’d finished before my back went out. Writing it taught me the fertility of exploring the life circumstances behind a poem you’re translating, and this book began with that in mind. Versions of many of the essays and poems in the selection predate this century but I chose them because, burnished with the patina of my discontented winter, they also evoked a life beyond their text. The original poems intentionally pierce (or maybe ignore) the persona of my lifelong pen name. And the translation material focusses on the translator along with the translation. Many of the poems are new, and many of the older ones were reworked. I left the journal extracts intact. Stitching this manuscript together with the help of my decade’s long editor-compadre, Paul Vangelisti, I realized 85th birthdays can indeed be celebrated. You just have to celebrate them backwards.  (Art Beck)

Published June 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25. With full-colour paintings by Alan Parker.

ISBN 9781837380206.

Hardcover, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £25 / $35. With full-colour paintings by Alan Parker. ISBN 9781837380480.

White Pony originated in a suggestion by Alan Parker that he and I collaborate on a series of poems and paintings responding to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s enigmatic poem ‘Erlkönig’ (literally, ‘the Elf-King’, although in English the poem is usually titled ‘The Erl-King’). Alan’s paintings sparked me off, and I shared the sequence-in-progress with him as it developed. Beyond the synergies that inevitably come from such sharing, the poems and paintings developed more or less independently of each other, but always maintaining roots in Goethe’s poem. ‘Erlkönig’ and a literal English translation are given on the following pages. —Steve Ely

I had wanted to work with Steve Ely since reading Englaland, which remains for me one of the genuine masterpieces of contemporary poetry—perhaps not surprising, given that we are of similar age, both rooted in South Yorkshire, and share a worldview shaped by deep history, by the destruction of the communities we grew up in, and by the keen ear for a nightingale singing in the dark. The Erl King seemed the perfect place to begin: a collaboration forged among pit ponies and howling winds, in the long shadow of the Rother Valley, where the mythic and the visceral have always kept close company. —Alan Parker

Published June 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380206

The title Signals to the Disappearing Shore embodies an ambiguity central to the poems’ care for the world we inhabit. Does the shore appear to disappear because viewed from a departing vessel – viewed perhaps by desperate emigrants or deportees; or is it literally disappearing, submerged or eroded by changes wrought by time and humankind? Are the signals waves of farewell, or urgent warnings? From the start, the theme of migration is set in a deep historical context, a pattern extended widely in the long poem ‘A raga for Enheduana’, which ranges in time and geography from the ancient Sumerian poet-priestess who is the earliest individually known writer to the crimes of some contemporary political leaders. Environmental threat is given sharpest expression in the central section of the book, eight poems drawing on the author’s long-held concern over nuclear proliferation, both weapons and power, the human costs and land destruction. The book also includes the 12-part ‘Journal of a plague year’ written, as the title suggests, at the height of the Covid pandemic and the social restrictions that came with it, again drawing links between landscapes and events ancient, medieval and modern.

Translated from German by Martyn Crucefix. With an introductory essay by Lutz Seiler.
Published June 2026. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380084

Jürgen Becker (1932–2024) was born in Cologne, but moved eastwards with his family in 1939, to Thuringia, where he remained until 1947, when the family returned to the Western part of the country and then again to Cologne in 1950. From 1959 to 1964, Becker worked for WDR (West German Radio), and then moved on to become an editor at the Rowohlt publishing house in Hamburg. He went freelance in 1969, and became director of Suhrkamp’s theatre publishing division in 1973, and head of the radio-drama department of Deutschlandfunk (German Radio) He became a member of the seminal 47 Group in 1960 and won the group’s literary prize in 1967. He first became known as a poet in the 1960s, but of a very experimental kind, using open forms and eschewing traditional narrative. Nature and landscape played a prominent role in his work. Some of his poetry publications were accompanied by illustrations from his artist wife, Rango Bohne (1932–2021). As he became one of the most senior figures in German literature, his works received the country’s major prizes: the Peter Huchel Prize, the Heinrich Böll prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Günter Eich Prize, and the Georg Büchner Prize.

Published May 2026. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380299

The poems in this collection were written over a 10-year period, beginning with ‘Springtime in the Rockies’. This poem was sparked by an incident in September 2014 where a bowhunter shot and killed a bull moose in an area where the animals had become habituated to people. The title of the collection is based on the 19th century ideology, ‘Manifest Destiny’, the belief that God gave white Americans the right to expand westward across the North American continent. This nationalistic and idealistic belief had devastating consequences for the native inhabitants, for the wildlife and for the land. The belief was also deeply patriarchal, equating masculine with conquest, and the land with a wild, feminized space that needed to be subjugated. It is a twisted ideology (hence the inversion of the title) given renewed credence under the current US administration.

Translated from German by Alexander Kappe. Bilingual edition.
Published May 2026. Paperback, 172pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781837380077

Yevgeniy Breyger is one of the most outstanding young voices in German-language poetry of the new century. Jan Kuhlbrodt once aptly described Breyger as a poet not only “knowing all the tricks of the rhythmical trade,” but whose poems recall “a kabbalistic incantation,” a “mysticism that turns into the absurd, yet also emerges from it once more.” Breyger allows himself to revive the old idea of the magic of language without buying into its pathos; he allows himself to probe language once more for all its potential; the result is an astounding lyric debut.

        In fugitive moons, a central motif of German Romanticism – the moon – is manipulated. The moon appears in the plural, a team in flight. From whom is one fleeing? Who no longer wishes to remain where they once were? Instead of running yearningly into open arms, one takes to one’s heels and seeks distance; perhaps, then, not only a central motif of Romanticism, but a central feeling of a generation that spent its childhood in the 1990s and its youth in the 2000s in Europe. Everything can be desired except desire itself.

        And with that, this motif – so often a dumping ground in the history of German-language literature – is still not exhausted. For the moon is also one of the many rulers of the tides; what it leaves behind, or what it reveals with the move-ments of the sea, showing what it has hidden in its belly, can only be presented through a kind of linguistic magic. In this way, all manner of debris washes ashore as these poems traverse the world like Rimbaud’s legendary bateau ivre; monstrous beings appear, the monstrous within the everyday appears. Visible, for instance, are the “sand families” that give their names to cycles, the “plant families”; visible, too, that the intensely yearning, post-Romantic poet Trakl “was afraid of staplers, cockroaches, children and amphorae.” 

Published May 2026. Paperback, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781837380268

 In 1895 the photographer P.H. Emerson produced a last body of work, a collection of East Anglian marsh landscapes. Photographs of fugitive qualities of mist and light in a place that blurs distinctions between land and water, the images often seem themselves to be on the point of dissolving. 

Drawing on Emerson’s writings on optics and photographic techniques, as well as his accounts of time spent in East Anglia, This Craft reimagines the photographs’ elusive, ambiguous spaces. What do we see in these landscapes? What is unseen, haunting the moment of stilled time captured by the camera?