Latest Releases

Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published September 2026. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380404

In the first ten years of her Paris exile Marina Tsvetaeva produced far less poetry than when living in the Czech Lands, or in the tumultuous Moscow years between 1917 and 1922. The poetry was also different in kind. It came in cycles, prompted by the deaths of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Max Voloshin, or by passionate involvements with younger poets of the emigration. Rejecting totalitarianism on both the right and the left, she reached a high point with sequences to the different tables on which she wrote during thirty years, or to a bush (eliciting admiration from both Anna Akhmatova and Lydia Chukovskaya). In ‘Yearning to get back home’, comparing herself to a ‘Kamchatkan bear with no ice floe’, she expresses the full ambivalence of her attitude to the Russian homeland she had abandoned and where she would return, with tragic consequences, in July 1939.

Published September 2026. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380510

Agnieszka Studzińska’s Seamless challenges our relationship with language and uncertainty. Language in this collection becomes a ghostly haunt, tracing the journeys and moments in which the narrator encounters language’s difficulties and absence. The collection asks what it means to make meaning in the natural world and in our everyday lives. The poems are set against a lyrical narrative of doubt and hesitation, where private moments open to larger philosophical questions. Even the ghost of Derrida is gently foregrounded in his own questioning of what it means to speak and write.

Published September 2026. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380541

This collection’s fictional protagonist, Herron, is a cadet in the Irish diplomatic service, a young literary Irishman of a type that moved to Paris in the 1930s and got to know the surrealists (Denis Devlin being the model). Herron is a bit Barnaboothian, a bit W.V. Balloon, and a bit the author. The book is an elegy for the Romanian-French poet and existentialist Benjamin Fondane, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. It’s a book about dreams, Surrealism, and low dishonest decades, then and now, exploring bureaucratic sclerosis in the face of atrocity. It attempts to do what Walter Benjamin described as "remembrance": making the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended.

Published September 2026. Paperback, 118pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380442

“This collection is savagely, sagely, unctuously, unrestrainedly, wisely, Oscar Wilde- and Aesopianly hilarious. There is no let up for the accumulation of insight accrued by humanity, by empires and civilizations past and present. Caleshu is having the time of his life playing the Shakespearian fool who genially welcomes us into the carousel of his mind. I love every page of this dazzling book which is guaranteed to be a mock-Christmas classic, or at least it should be!” —Daljit Nagra

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 9781848619777

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.