Latest Releases

Shearsman Library Vol. 22.
Published April 2025. Paperback, 194pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619296

Gustaf Sobin's Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 2010, but left out work which had been collected in special limited editions — and which were outside the main trajectory of his work — as well as work which had been published in magazines but which had then been dropped from his main published collections. This Uncollected volume redresses the balance, and, for good measure, includes an interview with the Mexican poet, Tedi López Mills, which has only previously been published in Spanish. The volume in which that interview appeared, like the rest of the contents of this book, is no longer in print elsewhere.

Published April 2025. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619784

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2025, featuring poetry by Martin Anderson, Claire Crowther, Keri Finlayson, Jane Frank, Amlanjyoti Goswami, David Hadbawnik, Matt Haw, Norman Jope, Alicia Byrne Keane, Linda Kemp, L. Kiew, Fiona Larkin, John Levy, Nicky Melville, John Newson, Anita Ngai, Mark Nowak, Eliza O'Toole, Adam Panichi, John Phillips, Ian Pople, Anna Reckin, Wendy Saloman, Nathan Shepherdson and Janet Sutherland, plus translations of Jürgen Becker (by Martyn Crucefix), Rilke (by John Greening), Evelyn Schlag (by Karen Leeder) and Volha Hapeyeva (by Annie Rutherford).

Shearsman Library Vol. 21
Published April 2025. Paperback, 186pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619838

This to That and Thus contains four separate complete collections, the author’s first four books, thus demonstrating the wellsprings of a remarkable career.

“For a poetry that yields such immediate and immense pleasure, the work of Joseph Donahue remains hard to characterize. Joseph Donahue has spent [four] decades crafting a sensibility that straddles the often-reductive binaries of literary discourse. As sacred as it is profane, as popular as it is avant-garde, and as funny as it is forlorn, Donahue’s poetry puts forward a voice that resists easy categorization. While there are many aesthetic reasons that make Donahue’s poetry difficult to encapsulate, the most pressing obstruction to characterizing his poetry is the little precedence that exists for such an endeavor.” 

—J. Peter Moore, Jacket2

Shearsman Library Vol. 20. Second edition. First UK edition.
Published April 2025. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848619692

What's in Store, first published in Canada in 2008, was Trevor Joyce's first full-length book following the publication of his collected poems, with the first dream of the fire they hunt the cold (Shearsman Books, 2001; 2nd edition 2003). For this volume, the author shaped eight years' worth of work — individual poems, extended sequences, translations from the Irish, Chinese, and other languages — into a continuous book-length structure. These poems find Joyce reaching out towards a jarringly wide range of styles and voices, from the tart lyricism of his re-workings of European folksongs to the ferociously dense collage/inscription of "STILLSMAN." Brought together as a book, the poems take on further meanings: What's in Store is at once a Borgesian guide to the history, customs and scientific discourse of an unknown country, and an Oulipian textual machine, whose workings by turns terrify and exalt.

Translated from Spanish and French by Tony Frazer. Bilingual volume.

Published April 2025. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619937

Huidobro published Poemas árticos in Madrid in 1918, this being the last of a rapid series of publications which established him as a major new talent both in French and in Spanish. Poemas árticos is particularly interesting in that it shows the author taking on board lessons learned from Guillaume Apollinaire—an early friend in Paris—and also Pierre Reverdy; Reverdy and Huidobro soon fell out, seemingly because of a dispute over who was the real originator of Creationism, the movement associated with Huidobro, and of which he was—to be honest—the only full-time member. In any event, this is his longest Spanish-language volume up to this point, and marks a significant breakthrough, bringing as it does the latest French innovations into Spanish for the first time. This second edition features some revisions to the translations, but also reacts the layouts of the poem to accord as far as possible with the 1918 Madrid edition.

Published March 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619739

These poems explore further and future ways of plants and trees, and won’t duck from being permeated at the same time by irradiating horizons or tensile symbols which perform a vital role in any multi-dimensional inter-relations.

‘This is not a poetry about trees, but about trees as a means of thinking, the material through which we can and do think, a world, its ontology, its epistemology too.The tree as discourse. The tree as perceiver of what the tree needs to know.’ —Stephen Collis

Published March 2025. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619708

"With a Stranger's Eyes is in two parts. The first, 'Dutch Girl' is set mainly in the Netherlands, where Jeremy Hooker lived for four years with his wife, Mieke. The second, longer part records responses to history and landscapes primarily in South Wales where Hooker has lived since 2001. It also celebrates a number of Welsh writers, such as David Jones, Idris Davies, and Waldo Williams. The spirit of the poetry reflects the Welsh tradition of praise poetry. It is, however, very much the work of an English poet who recognises that he will always be a stranger in Wales, as he was also in Holland. Strangeness, in fact, is a fact that he recognises as integral to our human condition, which may produce an 'art of seeing' below superficial vision of surfaces into perception of the sacred and the quickness of existence." —Jeremy Hooker

Translated from Dutch by Donald Gardner. Published with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Published February 2025. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619319

Maria Barnas’ witty and subversive poetry can be seen as a quest for an identity that always just eludes her: ‘The floors / are buckling and the windows and doors / show cracks. These are the hinges / of an existence I call my own.’ Nothing is what it seems for her and appearances are indeed just that — appearances. In another poem, she points out that, ‘The corner of an eye can contain many things’, and this could almost be taken as a mission statement. 

       Barnas is an artist and critic as well as a poet. In her poetry she asks how adequate language is to grasp what we see. Is one’s native language a ‘home’? How reliable is it and is it equal to the task of representing reality, above all the reality of our interaction with each other, that is undermined by ambiguity, personal history, as well as the secret passages of Freudianism. This enquiry comes to a peak in her most recent collection, Diamond without r, in which she investigates her Polish roots as well as her adolescent years spent in Swindon. Polish words and scenes are held up to the prism of her lines, and there are also fragments of English, which may comprise flashbacks of her English experience. 

       For the reader this poetry has an unstable character; it expresses an urgency to belong as well as a sense of rejection, a desire sometimes to say two, contradictory things at once. It is at times quizzical, defiant and mocking.

2nd edition. Translated from Spanish & French by Tony Frazer

Published February 2025. Paperback, 128pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618640

The prose-poem Temblor de cielo  was written in 1928 and published in 1931. A more unified work than its companion volume, Altazor —also published in 1931, but longer in gestation—this might owe more to its style of delivery: an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure—part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner’s opera (another ecstatic outpouring on the theme of love, sex and death) and part Ximena Amunátegui, the young woman who had become the poet’s second wife. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism, a movement which Huidobro had previously attacked. It is also the last time that Huidobro was to adopt the god-like narrative persona that occurs in his earlier work. In 1932 the author's French version appeared in Paris, which differs in some respects from the Spanish; for this second edition we have added that French version, plus an additional translation and a number of revisions to the original translation.

Translated from Russian by Stephen Capus

Published February 2025. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619685  Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa, Ukraine, in 1889, as Anna Gorenko. She adopted her pen-name from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and lived most of her life in that city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilev. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks for counter-revolutionary activities. 

      Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections, Rosary and White Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Between the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini in 1923 and the death of Stalin in 1953—with a brief reprieve during the Great Patriotic War—she found herself subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake of the notorious Zhdanov speech, in which she was described as a ‘cross between a nun and a whore’. Nonetheless, although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted exclusion from publication as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. Stephen Capus's formal translations offer a new way of approaching Akhmatova for Anglophone readers.

Published February 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems — of air, of glass, of wind, of west.

Translated from German by Nicholas Grindell.
Published February 2025. Paperback, 84pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20.

ISBN 9781848619630

Among many other things, Honey Protocols can be approached as a dictionary (offering peculiar and extravagant definitions of creatures and concepts alike), as a routine documenting its own abolition (48 of its 66 poems open with the same phrase, escaping this compulsion towards the end), or as a book of tall tales (in one, two men sail a three-masted trampoline out onto a lake, the trampoline capsizes, they sink, the lake spits them back out onto the promenade). The collection might also be read as a dreamlike visit to the battlefield where the kind of stories we like to tell ourselves cross swords with the kind of stories that are constantly told to us (and sold to us) by the massed forces of mockery (with tech support from the Delphic engineers).

Published January 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”.

Translated from Italian by Sarah Stickney.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. English only.

ISBN 9781848619616

This volume offers a translation of a large proportion of the author's recent huge selected volume in Italy. Restricted to the English versions in order to save the book from a vast page-count, it offers readers a superb over-view of a lifetime's creativity in Italian, and Albanian — for some of the work began life in the author's native language, before his exile in Italy.

“Gëzim Hajdari’s generous literary, scholarly, and editorial work extends across different countries and languages. Resistance, commitment, social justice, freedom, courage, and solidarity are at the centre of his research. In his own words, ‘Good poetry is an act of life and of ethics. A great life means great poetry.’ An already established poet in Albania, after moving to Italy, the author went through a patient, painful, and empowering reconstruction of his unique poetic voice, which has since developed as translingual Albanian-Italian.

 This edition represents the first English translation of Hajdari’s Poesie scelte, masterfully carried out by Sarah Stickney, who reconstructs the sense of subjectivity and history that is foundational to Hajdari’s poetic career. This book as such presents Anglophone readerships not only with a masterpiece of translingual poetry but also with what I have previously defined as Hajdari’s first self-anthology, that is, a retrospective collection and reorganisation—constructed by the author himself—of a substantial part of his published poetic work, here meticulously re-read and re-interpreted.’’—Alice Loda

Published January 2025. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,

Walked over my baskets full of bread,

Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,

And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:

      Hawk, take everything

      That is weak in me,

      In your claws: eat it.

      Leave me wise and patient.

Published January 2025. Paperback, 412pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32

ISBN 9781848619609

Before Dark: Collected Poems reflects Anderson’s peripatetic lifestyle of three decades. During a weekend in Paris in 1971, whilst teaching at the University of Grenoble, he met T.T. Wong, a young Chinese artist from Shanghai, and their long discussions cemented his aspiration to go East. English society had, he felt, since he was born into it shortly after the end of World War II, succeeded only in submerging his nose in the effluvium of a squalid sewer of class discriminations, so the time was more than ripe for him to bid farewell to the UK. Arriving, eventually, at the University of Hong Kong where T.T. Wong’s letter of introduction to a young Dostoevsky scholar heading a department had directed his feet, Anderson discovered that it was an institution where the ancien régime (Terms of Service finely calibrated to reflect skin pigmentation…) was firmly entrenched. After a good number of years he moved still further east, to Manila and the University of the Philippines. Through all these years, and the first few years of his return to the UK, the poems of Before Dark were written, along with the prose The Hoplite Journals, described by the novelist James Hamilton-Paterson as “enter[ing] that select pantheon of books to travel with, a vademecum ... A most remarkable achievement.”