Shearsman Books | Irish Authors
Published 2013. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613133 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Sun-Artist is a collection of "pattern poems" by a poet who has been experimenting with visual texts—often with a uniquely Irish "subject matter"—for several years. Her last Shearsman collection, Forest Music, featured a number of such works, but this chapbook is entirely visual.
Published 2017. Paperback, 30pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848615601 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper . Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres.
The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat , warmly recall the lives of close friends and family.
Chapbook, £7.50.
Five Easy Pieces provides a very accessible opening into Mills' work, with all of his main themes and devices present: the found text, the expressive use of space on the page, the landscape as source and record, the personal lyric… (Randolph Healy,
Orbis ).
This book has since been reprinted in the author's Collected (see below).
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island. This was originally published in 2004 as part of the now-deleted volume, Maldon & Other Translations .
"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.”
—Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork
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