Irish Poetry Titles
Daragh Breen Birds in November
Published 2023. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618589 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
From the Purgatorial state of the epigraph and an opening sequence that riffs on the Navigatio Santi Brendani
epic, through November’s titular birds flitting in and out of existence, to the trawler that seems determined to find some sort of escape at the collection’s finale, these poems examine various ghost-states on which life and death, light and dark hinge. There are also encounters with Armstrong returning from the Moon, Virginia Woolf entering its tides, and a reclusive badger hinting at a hidden life up there. There are moments of light as well as a pig makes a tapestry for peace, Ireland’s forgotten handball alleys are recast in gold, and Lear wrestles with his own antlers.
This is Daragh Breen’s third collection from Shearsman Books, preceded by Nostoc and What the Wolf Heard. He lives in County Cork, Ireland, and his poetry has recently appeared in journals such as Blackbox Manifold, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine, Molly Bloom and The Fortnightly Review.
Daragh Breen Nostoc
Published 2020. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616912 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Like the eponymous fungus that appears to be regurgitated by the Earth herself after rain, fragments of invented folklore and mongrel histories have stained through from Breen’s subconscious and come to bloom as a trio of sequences that deal, in turn, with man’s tampering with Nature’s DNA through the selective breeding of dogs, societal fears of the witch figure, and the hopelessness of augury in the face of the inevitability of death.
There are also poems that touch on the animal-mood of man, the masks and headgear that we wear so as to try to interpret the nature of Nature, and our self-banishment from our own Eden arising out of our growing estrangement from it.
Daragh Breen What the Wolf Heard
Published 2016. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614963 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In the opening Lighthouses
section of this volume the west coast of Ireland is recast as a kind of Burroughsian Land of the Dead, with the ghost-lights from defunct lighthouses mixing with those of the automated in a sequence that slowly allows itself to be decoded.
Ned Kelly, given his own requiem, is found morphing in and out of a lupine-self following the destruction of the last wolf in Ireland and a period which saw the mass-banishment of many of the country’s underclasses to the new British antipodean colonies. Other poems are suggestive of a bestiary, presenting various animals that have been damaged and reformed by their current environment.
Susan Connolly Forest Music
Published 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610262 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Forest Music
is Susan Connolly's second full-length collection. Many poems in the book depict the author's personal encounter with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth century.
Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.
Susan Connolly The Sun-Artist
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.
Susan Connolly Bridge of the Ford — Visual Poetry from Drogheda
Published 2016. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614659 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“This is a love letter to the poet’s home territory: the Boyne Valley, its fabled and blooded river, the port of Drogheda and the mouth of the Boyne at Mornington and Baltray. Susan Connolly is a true original and like all true originals is intensely concerned with sources. These poems reach back to Kells, to Durrow, to Lindisfarne, to the holy books of those places, for the ground of their being. On the page, they negotiate visual spaces that can comfortably fit and ritualize the neolithic, contemporary hostage crises, Alexander Calder, the whammy pedal of a guitar. Symmetrical patternings that recall Persian carpets, traditional embroideries, and intricate folk handwork sit beside witty visual and verbal puns that recall ’60s and ’70s concrete poetry. Not the least of its many charms are the glimpses in this book of a fugitive Irish lyric poet flitting through the pages.”
—Paula Meehan
Susan Connolly The Orchard Keeper
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.
Anamaría Crowe Serrano onWords and upWords
Published 2016. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614574 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In these poems, words are a scalpel that probes the shifting sands of meaning. Themes of identity, communication, love, loss and isolation are peeled back to reveal, with devastating precision, both the deficiencies and the power of language: words that can heal or save; words that paralyse and attack. The poet uses her instrument – language – both to celebrate and to question whether words can ever be a true medium to define, express identity, communicate. With an unflinching gaze and an originality we have already come to know in Anamaría Crowe Serrano’s work, she both exalts and undermines patterns and form in a way that surprises, provokes and exhilarates."
—Elizabeth McSkeane
Anamaría Crowe Serrano Femispheres
Published 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700592 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection for Irish poet-translator Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Over the past two to three years her work has been appearing in magazines in Ireland, the UK and the USA, as have her translations from the Spanish and Italian.
Trevor Joycewith the first dream of fire they hunt the cold. A Body of Work, 1966-2000
2nd Edition. Published 2003. Paperback 9x6ins, 241pp, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 978-0-907562-37-5 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A collected poems (up until the new millennium) by this late-modernist Irish poet who is finally being recognised for the important figure that he is. His first publication in the UK, this book is jointly published with New Writers' Press, Dublin. A previous edition, in a slightly different format, was published in 2001, and is now out of print.
Trevor Joyce Courts of Air and Earth
Published 2008. Paperback 8x5ins, 92pp, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume extracts the author's remarkable translation of the epic 'Sweeny Peregrine' from the above volume and offers it together with a large group of other versions from the Old and Middle Irish, thus offering Anglophone readers a glimpse of some very unusual verse that rarely sees the light of day outside academic volumes, while also transposing it into a form that will seem familiar to readers of Joyce's own work.
Trevor Joyce Selected Poems 1967–2014
Published 2014. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613522 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trevor Joyce’s Selected Poems
offers a major career retrospective, taking texts not only from his earlier Shearsman collected volume, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold
(2001; 2nd edition, 2003) and the subsequent large Canadian volume, What’s in Store
(2007), but also from harder-to-find, and more recent material, both translated and original.
Kenneth Keating (ed.)
A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric - Essays on the Poetry of Maurice Scully
Published 2020. Paperback, 212pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848617292 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Maurice Scully is not a poet for whom experience is shrouded in words. He doesn’t begin with complicated patterns of sound that disentangle into conventional forms, or a neat trope that encapsulates a truth that oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed. He begins outside the job, the task ahead of him and the Tipp-Ex on the table. The poem, as it writes itself before our eyes, is not a particularly desirable consumable; it is not a hoarded memory or a discovered analogy worked up into universal truth. Objects and events are left alone to retain their ordinariness. This is not high-octane performance; the poet is not a magus overwhelming us with rich metaphor and heavy consonants, tricksy rhymes and deft analogies. It’s instead more like the work of a verbal mime artist: nothing permanent is involved except what’s conjured up; making poems is work as play. While poems that seek to impress their skill can lose touch with that aim – be overtaken by ambition, rivalry or simply the need to put bread on the table with a new USP –, differently, here, the self-deprecating humour undercuts pretension. The formula is low-energy and sustainable, a manner of proceeding that doesn’t exhaust the available means, that leaves its readers a decent breathing space." — from the Introduction by J.C.C. Mays
David Lloyd Arc & Sill — Selected Poems 1979–2009
Published 2012. Paperback, 150pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612112 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"David Lloyd's two recent chapbooks, Sill and Vega, have seen his poetic writing develop a constellated elegance, drawing on the European dialectical lyric for the resonance of key terms such as 'sill', 'lintel', 'sheet', 'flock' and 'stone' but on American objectivism for its precisely-punctuated prosody. While David Lloyd can be a mighty polemicist in scholarship, his poetry is noteworthy for its extreme linguistic scrupulousness." —John Wilkinson
Billy Mills Five Easy Pieces
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).
Billy Mills Lares / Manes — Collected Poems
Published 2009. Paperback, 360pp, 9x6ins, £17.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610460 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here .]
Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. After spending some time in Spain and the UK, he now lives and works in the mid-west of Ireland. This collection brings together his seven previously published volumes, which have been revised and corrected, plus a selection of newer, previously uncollected work.
Billy Mills a book of sounds
Published November 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619289
In the Postface to his
114 Songs
of 1922, Charles Ives wrote: “Some of the songs in this book, particularly among the latter ones, cannot be sung, and if they could, perhaps might prefer, if they had a say, to remain as they are; that is, ‘in the leaf’ and that they will remain in this peaceful state is more than presumable.” Oddly enough, some of the songs in this book have been sung, but most remain silent on the page awaiting a willing reader who’s ready to take the title at face value. These are songs in which “nothing happens/& it is good” if you want it to be. —Billy Mills
Niamh O'Mahony Essays on the Poetry of Trevor Joyce
Published 2015. Paperback, 242pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613393 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Essays on the Poetry of Trevor Joyce
is the first collection of critical responses to an Irish poet whose writing consistently challenges received ideas of Irish poetry.
The contributions that make up this collection span Joyce's writing career, from Sole Glum Trek
(1967) to Rome's Wreck
(2014), and are written by literary critics, poets, and publishers. These essays illuminate Joyce's poetry, aligning careful reading with insightful analysis to reveal Joyce as one of Ireland's most innovative and creative living poets.
Contributors to this volume include: Lucy Collins, Eric Falci, Fergal Gaynor, John Goodby, Fanny Howe, David Lloyd, Peter Manson, Niamh O'Mahony, Marthine Satris, Geoffrey Squires, Keith Tuma and Jeffrey Twitchell Waas.
Maurice Scully Airs
Published 2022. Paperback, 128pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618015 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Maurice Scully has published several books of poetry over a long writing life, most
recently Play Book
(Coracle Press, 2019) & Things That Happen
(Shearsman, 2020). Things That Happen
(1981–2006), is an 8-volume work, revised, corrected & collated as a large single volume for Shearsman, representing a unique achievement in modern Irish letters. A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric, a collection of essays on his work including bibliography & interview with the poet, appeared from Shearsman in 2020.
This new work, Airs, shows Scully, at 70, at the height of his powers.
‘Scully has a mesmerising capacity to choose ordinary words, to a large extent words that anyone could find themselves saying, & by cleaning off their edges & exactly composing their syllables, transform them from roadstone into fresh-washed pebbles … brilliance extracted from the everyday…’
—Tony Baker, Golden Handcuffs Review
on Things That Happen
Maurice Scully Things That Happen
Published 2020. Paperback, 612pp, 9 x 6ins, £22.95 / $35
ISBN 9781848617124 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Finally in one volume, this book brings together all the various parts of Maurice Scully's magnum opus, written over a 25-year period: 5 Freedoms of Movement, Livelihood, Sonata
and Tig. The largest of those individual releases, Livelihood, has long been out of print, as (now) is Sonata, thus leaving interested readers with only the opening movement and the closing coda of the whole work, until now, that is. The author has revised the entire work for this edition, and the book is accompanied by a volume of essays on Maurice Scully's work (see under Keating
above).
Maurice Scully Several Dances
Published 2014. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613362 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This book is not quite a ‘collection’ or ‘poems’. Something odd is going on: things repeat, vary, develop, disappear to reappear skewed and the book ends, then doesn’t. And the ‘poems’ involve events in literature, poetry we all know – Yeats, Carlos Williams – and some we don’t – anonymous Irish poets of several centuries ago – and brings them in a dance across time, into the mind. Moments in time are not frozen, things that happen are not selected and described. They just happen. Fluid energy is taken on for what it is, and that’s the way things are.
Maurice Scully Humming
Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610590 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Humming
is Maurice Scully's first full-length book of new work since the Things That Happen
project (1981–2006). Dedicated to the poet's late brother, it places human life in the larger frame of history and pre-history, of a world in drifts of pollen, and other life possibilities over large stretches of time in which the poetry can score its pollen-like trace knowing
"how to wait
what to expect" what to expect"
Maurice Scully Tig
Published 2006. 102pp, paperback 8.5x5.5ins. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562962 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Maurice Scully is one of Ireland's most original poets, and most unusual. All of his work over the past 25 years has been part of one enormous project, under the umbrella title Things That Happen, which is completed with the appearance of this volume, the final section of the whole work, and Sonata
(the penultimate section, also published in 2006 by Reality Street Editions). A criss-crossing of languages and cultures, and the point at which the personal life of the author intersects with the public domain, Tig
is an absorbing book in its own right, as well as being the summation of one of the most interesting projects in recent Irish writing.
Michael Smith Maldon — A Version
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
Michael Smith Prayers for the Dead and other poems
Published 2014. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613379 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is Michael Smith's first collection since his Collected Poems
of 2009, and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: "Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head, ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable, unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits. Beckett said it thus: 'All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody is prayer.' Enigmatic, but what else would one expect from Beckett? Essentially, I perceive prayer as a form of homage or 'recognition'—the other word used by Beckett."
Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo Poems from Other Tongues
Published 2011. Paperback, 106pp, 9x6ins, £10.95. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9781848611344 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A companion volume to Michael Smith's Maldon & Other Translations
(2004), this volume collects his translations from Greek, Latin, Irish and Andalusian Arabic, the latter poems being co-translated with Luis Ingelmo.
Michael Smith Collected Poems
Published 2009. Paperback, 244pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848610538 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume superseded the author's Selected Poems, The Purpose of the Gift
(Shearsman Books, 2004), which was withdrawn from the catalogue when this volume appeared. Michael Smith is the author of seven previous collections, only two of which appeared in the UK, and a large number of translations, mainly from Spanish. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain
with Trevor Joyce. Although better-known for his translations, his original work should be recognised for its own special qualities.
Michael Smith Maldon & Other Translations
Published 2004. Paperback 9x6ins, 154pp. £9.95
ISBN 9780907562603. OUT OF PRINT
N.B. This volume has been superseded by Cantes flamencos and the chapbook Maldon — A Version
(see above, and also in the Translations catalogue under Smith).
Maldon
contains translations from the Anglo-Saxon (The Battle of Maldon), the 18th-century Irish (The Death of Art O'Leary
and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen) and a large selection of cantes flamencos
(flamenco songs) translated from an Andalusian dialect of Spanish. Although better-known in the UK for his translations of the baroque poets Góngora and Quevedo, Michael Smith has also translated the works of Rosalía de Castro, Neruda, Lorca and Miguel Hernández.
Michael Smith The Purpose of the Gift — Selected Poems
Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 161pp. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562597
This volume represents a full-scale career retrospective for an Irish poet, who remains too little-known in Britain. He is the author of six previous collections, only one of which appeared in the UK. Born in Dublin in 1942, he founded the seminal New Writers' Press and co-founded the magazine The Lace Curtain
with Trevor Joyce. Although best-known for his translations from the Spanish, his own work should be better-known.
Geoffrey Squires (ed./trans.) My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200
Published 2015. Paperback, 240pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848614338 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems translated here were, with one or two possible exceptions, written between the 7th and 12th centuries AD, making them the oldest vernacular poetry in Europe. Latin, which arrived with Christianity in the 5th century and brought a script, was the only other language in play, although there are occasional loanwords from Norse and other tongues.
Scholars can roughly assign the poems to centuries, on the basis of changes in syntax and word forms, but many that were written earlier exist only in later manuscripts. Dating is thus hazardous, and nor do we usually know the author. It is likely that one was written by a druid, six by women and rather more by professional bards; the remainder are probably by clerics or scribes.
Catherine Walsh Optic Verve
Published 2009. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610798 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Optic Verve
is the latest long poem by Catherine Walsh, perhaps Ireland's most radical experimental woman poet.
"It seems a shame that many Irish poetry readers are unaware of Catherine Walsh's very obvious gifts. Her brilliant punning, the way she assembles disjointed, yet perfectly rendered fragments of Dublin argot and her ability to imply simultaneous narratives mark her out from her contemporaries." —Dónal Moriarty: The Art of Brian Coffey
Catherine Walsh City West
Published 2005. 84pp. Paperback, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562542 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Irish poet Catherine Walsh is noted for her long poems in experimental forms, and City West, completed in 2000, is her most recent such work, following Pitch (Pig Press, 1994) and Idir Eatortha
(Invisible Books, 1996). Previously City West
was only available in an Irish small-press edition, with a tiny print-run.
Augustus Young Diversifications
Published 2009. 88pp. Paperback, £10.95
ISBN 9781848610446 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A book in three parts: a translation of Mayakovsky's A Cloud in Pants, a group of free versions of Brecht, and a sequence of original poems.
"No poet is an island. Making poetry is a matter of promontories. Imitating fellow practitioners is the sterile one. The fertile promontory is engagement with poets who seem to offer a promised land. My pont d'amour
has lead me to Mayakovsky, who brought me closer to the tundra of the personal in an impersonal world, and Brecht, who drew me towards the confines of intimacy and work, and the outreaches of the political.
The full range of Brecht's poetry only became apparent in the late seventies. I began to make versions of them. Most were not translations per se, rather adaptations or a one-sided collaboration. A Brecht poem triggered a response. In this short selection the emphasis is on the work related poems. Some are in the style of Brecht rather than influenced by a particular poem. For example, I didn't think the poem Brecht wrote on the suicide of Walter Benjamin did justice to their collaboration, and worked one of my own by drawing from Mayakovsky's famous poem reproaching Esenin for killing himself. My 'version' is perhaps the one Brecht might have written if his friend was there to read it." —Ausgustus Young
