North American Poetry Titles: Authors M to P

Published 2011. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611726 [Download a sample PDF from this book  here .]

In Cadastral Map , Jill Magi writes: "I enter as a writer, one kind of mapmaker, needing to ask, is traditional nature writing in English a cadastral map? Abstracting, narrowing, taking an especially strong hold in North America, the New World that never was new? Even as 'green is the new black' and environmentalism gains moral momentum, is 'nature writing' still our flawed point of origin, creating ideas of the land and nature that tend to erase people and local knowledge as we go?" In answer to these questions, Magi arrives in three states: the New Jersey farmland of her childhood, a Kentucky of deep lyricism and painful inequities, and early 20th century Vermont where progressive policies established an idea of nature, pitting local needs against policies to attract tourists. She enters these questions and sites via poetry—because "a policy is a path that is made, an effect to feel."

Published 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610705 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In her second book of poetry, Camille Martin breathes fresh life into the sonnet in a collection that is at once edgy and lyrical. The word "sonnet" comes from "song," and the musicality of Sonnets is not surprising, given Martin's background as a classical musician. These poems demonstrate a virtuosic range of approaches and themes; some are inspired by texts as disparate as nursery rhymes, theories of cognitive science, a history of street names, and her own dream journals. The chorus of voices in this collection sing confidently and fluently, proving the sonnet to be an ideal vehicle for Martin's love affair with language.

Published 2009. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610521 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

One needs only to watch and listen in gratitude as poems informed by Bronk, Niedecker, Olson (to name a few), and the landscape of Humboldt County, California take shape "In the room / of a memory // of a room" in Joseph Massey's first full-length collection, Areas of Fog .

"Joseph Massey sees with a composer's eye and sings in a microtonality all his own. Syllable by syllable phenomena miraculously unfold. This is fantastic work, understated, charmed, and open. The world simply happens in these poems and its moments are tuned marvels. You don't want to miss it." —Peter Gizzi

Published 2010. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611252 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Trigons derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon . The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled "Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda." Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and Pages: From a Book of Years . In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said that Trigons explores the poet's "usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicist" who becomes a shadowing doppelgänger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role.

Published 2011. Paperback, 370pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848611689 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Who Was Cousin Alice? & Other Questions attempts to answer both the first question posed in the title about American poet John Matthias' early family memories, and then to raise and engage, in a series of memoirs and critical essays, a large number of others. These range from a search for some answers about his wife's British family in 'Kedging in "Kedging in Time",' to memoirs inquiring into 'Poetry and Insomnia,' 'Poetry and Murder,' and the literary imaginations of 'Grand Old Dirty Old Men' (J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, among others), an examination of erotic writing of the old and aging as a manifestation of "late style." Specifically literary essays include considerations of W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Roy Fisher, Paul Muldoon, John Berryman, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Michael Anania, and 'British Poetry at Y2K.' In this hybrid mix of genres—including both very recent work and a selection of pieces culled from the last twenty-five years—Matthias has added a number of poems that enter into a dialogue with his essays and memoirs.

Published 2013. Paperback, 280pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848612792 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Chronologically the first, Collected Shorter Poems , Vol. 1 is editorially the third of John Matthias's three-volume Shearsman Collected Poems. It includes the poems that first made Matthias's reputation—experimental work like 'Turns: Toward a Provisional Poetics and a Discipline'; politically activist poems from the 1960s and '70s such as his elegy for the Kent State University students killed by the Ohio National Guard; poems written from his fifteen years of living off and on in Suffolk; poems articulating an aesthetic of play-and-game like 'Clarifications for Robert Jacoby'; along with several epistolary poems, explorations of place, and family-oriented lyrics, such as the often translated and reprinted 'Poem for Cynouai.' This volume joins C ollected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2 and Collected Longer Poems in bringing together all of the poetry, with the exception of Trigons (available separately from Shearsman), that Matthias wishes to preserve.

Published 2011. Paperback, 284pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848611801 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

This is the first volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting all the poems of John Matthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this initial release in the year that the poet turns 70, these books will bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both sides of the Atlantic need to know better.

Published 2012. Paperback, 356pp, 9x6ins, £1ž.95 / $2ř

ISBN 9781848612402 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The second volume in the Collected Poems of John Matthias, following Vol. 2 of the Shorter Poems in 2011, this volume covers all of the author's long poems from before 2010. That year's Trigons is excluded and remains available from Shearsman. Texts included in the book are: Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest (1986); Northern Summer (1980–1983); The Stefan Batory Poems (1973); The Mihail Lermontov Poems (1976) ; An East Anglian Diptych (1990) ; Cuttings (1995) ; Pages: From a Book of Years (1998); Automystifstical Plaice (2000); Laundry Lists and Manifestoes (2003) and Kedging in Time (2006).



Published 2014. Paperback, 188pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848613706 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy “Westy” Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner’s bear in St. Louis, Hemingway’s lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont’s experience from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century in an idiom different from that of the narrative parts of the book. Different, too, is the final long chapter, “Westmont as Talbot Eastmore,” in which the author of the previous five episodes tells his own story in terms of a miniature bildungsroman which is also an elegy for an old friend.

Published 2016. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615182 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Shortlisted for the 2017 Ohioana Book Award.

Complayntes for Dr. Neuro is John Matthias’s first volume of poetry since Shearsman’s publication of his three volumes of collected poems in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The present book, ending with the title sequence about being forced to confront some of the very neurological problems in fact which have in many earlier poems been something of a theoretical pre- occupation, also represents the more experimental side of his work that has tended to preoccupy the critics who have written on him over the past three decades, along with translation-based work (Virgil, the Chinese Shijing, Rimbaud), a run of austere shorter poems, many of an elegiac cast, and some graffiti-like riffs. Matthias has always written in several styles, and those are once again on display in this volume. The notes include an important gloss on the title poem, 'A Poetics of Parkinson’s.'

Published 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616363 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Acoustic shadows—sound suppressed in such a way that even General Grant was deceived by one at the Battle of Iuka in the American Civil War—complicate the lives of many figures appearing in these poems, including that of the young John Matthias at his grandfather’s house on Iuka Drive in Columbus, Ohio in the 1950s. This book, Matthias’s first volume of entirely new poems since Complayntes for Doctor Neuro (Shearsman, 2016), includes a group of short lyrics followed by an essay called “Some Zones” (about places in which a kind of imaginative clarity becomes possible) and two longish sequences, “Prynne and a Petoskey Stone” and “First and Last Opinions,” dealing with the American Midwest from the perspective of an English poet’s Cambridge, and the Ohio Supreme Court opinions written by Matthias’s father and grandfather. The title poem concludes the volume by bringing together memories and documents relating to the poet’s great-grandfather, especially those pertaining to Civil War battles in which he fought alongside the famous and mysterious Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary , who disappeared in Mexico in 1913.

Published 2016. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614819 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often-vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn — to show, in the manner of a close friend, what the world has to offer, what it sometimes takes away, and what can and should matter most.

Published 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610132 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"From Anglo-Saxon diphthongs to that mysterious three-dimensional mirrored state of being, the enantiomorph, from Aquinas to Hölderlin to California, Deborah Meadows takes us on a journey through the tissues of memory and the patchwork of images that make up our contemporary world of learning, consuming and creating." — John Tranter

Published 2024. Paperback, 478pp, 9 x 6 ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619227 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Toby began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master’s Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. 

       The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young’s Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity’s Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions.

Published 2024. Paperback, 480pp, 9 x 5ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619234 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of my efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 I found I had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while I continued with fiction, I also found I was writing poetry, and since then I have managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, also contains the collections Human Nature (New Directions), Darklight and Death Sentences (both from Shearman), and See / Saw, published here for the first time.  (Toby Olson)

Published 2019. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616684 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Death Sentences  is Toby Olson’s first major collection since  Darklight  (Shearsman, 2007), and many of the poems herein are addressed to his wife, Miriam, who died, after suffering for years from Alzheimer’s disease, in 2014. Many of the other poems, typical of Olson’s concerns, stand as celebrations of what is observed, without metaphor or other literary devices intervening. The four series—Death Sentences, I Don’t Know, Disturbed and Etudes—are highly structured experiments with the sentence.

Published 2007. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700233 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Author of ten novels (among others The Life of Jesus, Seaview and Utah) and over 20 collections of poetry (including We Are the Fire — Selected Poems , and Human Nature , both from New Directions), Toby Olson demonstrates in his new collection that the passage of time has only sharpened his narrative voice. Toby Olson is a story-teller, puckish and avuncular by turns, and this new collection will delight his many admirers.

Published 2021. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848617919 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Song of the Constant Sea is a poem of moderate length which attends to the deeply entangled network of interrelations and genealogies that come together and variously cohere within a single consciousness of being. Starting from home or not home, the poem winds through a catalog of experiences and memories to suggest that home, more than a geographical location, is an imagined and essential space that is both constituted by and participant in building a poetic imaginary committed to liberatory balance, equity, and social justice.

Published 2012. Paperback, 118pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612136 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"For my money, the best poet of my generation… as indifferent to academic fashions as he is to those of the poetry market." —Clive Wilmer

"Perhaps the most challenging—and one of the most rewarding—poets of his generation." —Robert Archambeau

Published 2016. Paperback, 364pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848614734 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Thematically, Cantilena appropriates subjects familiar to the Modernist long poem: recent European and American history, art making, political corruption and the question of individual complicity, and the bearing of classical and religious heritages on the present. Cantilena is also one of our only major long poems so far to consistently engage climate change. Yet, for this reader at least, the work’s chief power comes not from the positions it stakes out on these topics, but rather from its performance of a kind of imaginative magic — what Peck calls ‘undersensing.’ This ‘undersensing’ is carried out in three distinct arenas: historical vignettes, personal remembrances, and synchronicities snatched from a lifetime of reading. It is no exaggeration to say that the poem treats the dead, in Henry Vaughan’s words, as ‘alive and busie.’ These stand-offs with ghosts inform the flux in the speaker’s self, often caught between curiosity and terror: ‘Though they only stand there, they came many miles, / and though you wait, you’ll be the first to move.’ —Nate Klug, ‘Falling In: A Foreword’ 

Published 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619625

"The poem as incremental paradise. Precisely what we find here in the six chambers of this music – the human writing, singing in the discrepancy between language and the world. A discrepancy erased in the power of the poem, its song and rhythm, silences punctuating sound, lifting the lids of the coffins in which we, Mallarmé’s dying poets, live. Traces of Guido and Catullus, instances of the dead, come, at behest of one dead fly, to give anima to us who, but for poetry, would only die. While, in that, mystifications are rigorously deflated on every page, a skepticism that, however, does not deny techné, whether science or form. For what is certainty but avowal of finely-wrought form? So let it be avowed: there are many finely-wrought forms here, in this chamber music. Listen and know: poetry is alive and doing what it does well." —Larry Price

Published 2009. Paperback, 80p, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610156 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Assuming the form of postcards authored by an "alien" of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, et al), Big American Trip is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice behind these texts is at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.