E-Books Free PDF Downloads

1.8 Mb, 84pp, published in 2022.

An extraordinary mixture of artwork, text and (e)book design, this is Argentinian poet Mecedes Roffé's latest work in translation.

115kb, 6x6ins, 77pp, published in 2011.

Another instalment in Geoffrey Squires' explorations of space, silence and abstraction.

160kb, 6.875x6ins, 30pp, published in 2011.

A non-linear murder mystery.....

86kb, 6x6ins, 31pp, published in 2011.

Gautam Verma's poetic response to an exhibition by Swiss artist Silvia Baechli, with a cover image provided by the artist.

123kb, 8.5x5.5ins, 36pp, published in 2011.

A long poem embedded in a travel diary.

200kb, 7x7ins, 40pp, published in 2010.

Best known for his plays and fiction, Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979) has become in the past two decades a totemic figure for younger Cuban poets, despite the relative paucity of his poetic production. As he said himself, "I have always considered myself a casual poet."

     Piñera was written out of history and refused the right to publish or leave the island, like so many others in the dark decade of the 1970s, and he owes his current status perhaps as much to that repression and his legendary if sometimes exaggerated resistance to the powerful, and to his open homosexuality, as to his irreverent humour and his embrace of everyday event and the language and culture of the streets.

400kb, 8.5x5.5ins, 178pp, published in 2008.

This volume is made available as a supporting document for our anthology Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age, in which many of the translations were by Sir Richard Fanshawe. Fanshawe's wife wrote this charming memoir after his death, as an instructive volume for their son. The book sheds light on how it was to be a senior diplomat (and the wife of one) in the mid-17th century, and Sir Richard was a very senior diplomat indeed, as Ambassador first to Lisbon (where he negotiated the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza), and finally to Madrid.

188kb, 6x6ins, 56pp, published in 2007.

A long sequence of 5-line poems that are variations on musical themes, taking off from the form of Bach's Chaconne, while splicing elements of Coltrane and medieval music.

224kb, 4.5x6ins, 63pp, published in 2007.

Another spare text by Geoffrey Squires, pendant in some ways to Lines (see below), in which a very few words, their position and a lot of white space allow contemplative reverberations to occur.

103kb, 6x5ins, 38pp, published in 2007.

The Swede Poems are selections from a much longer work, Stranger Kin, found material and composed lyrics interweaving over a Scandinavian background.

290kb, 6x6ins, 30pp, published in 2006.

Carlos T. Blackburn's penetrating Portraits sequence is based on his work in a care home.

268kb, 5x6ins, 92pp, published in 2006.

Geoffrey Squires' latest poem is a very spare text, consisting often of no more than one line per page. A poem that strains after the unsayable, that seeks meaning in the corners of language and in the echoes and repetitions of phrases, the text builds up slowly and insistently, challenging the reader's receptivity. To be read in single-page mode.

156kb, 5x5ins, 44pp, published in 2006.

Gautam Verma's second e-book with Shearsman is a long, spare, meditative work that revolves around death and its aftermath.

364kb, A5 format, 18pp, published in 2005.

Gautam Verma, originally from India, now lives in Piacenza, Italy following the completion of his PhD in English at the University of Denver. His work has also appeared in Drunken Boat, Slant Review, Segue, Diagram, Folio, Free-Verse, and Art Times among others.

In Ladakh is a narrative poem of a journey in the Himalayas. Cover photo of crows at Lamayuru by the author.

80kb, A5 format, 40pp, published in 2005.

Stephen Vincent lives in San Francisco. His most recent books include Walking (Junction Press), A Walk Toward Spicer (Cherry On the Top Press), and Sleeping With Sappho (faux ebooks). 

112kb, A5 format, 27pp, published in print form 2004, and online in 2005.

Anne-Marie Albiach (1937-2012) was one of France's leading avant-garde poets. Although much of her work has been translated and published in the USA, little has been available in Britain. This chapbook unites two texts from very early and very late in her career: Flammigère was her first book, a long poem published in 1967 as a limited edition by Siècle à Mains in London, where she was then living; 'La ligne … la perte' appeared in 1999 in a festschrift volume dedicated to fellow poet Claude Royet-Journoud and was later collected in the volume Figurations de l'image (Flammarion, Paris, 2004). Flammigère was never collected in any of Ms. Albiach's French volumes and she always declined permission for its republication, although her posthumous Collected rectified that. She did however permit an Italian translation and, in 2004, this English translation and Shearsman Books remains grateful for her permission to bring these two poems together. Originally issued as a print chapbook, this is now only available in PDF form.

248kb, 7x7ins, 44pp, published 2004

Different Birds is a long poem that records the American author's encounter with Australia in 2003. Different birds, indeed…

(172kb, 7x6ins, 78pp, published 2004)

First published in 2001 by Vagabond Press in Australia, Talking to Neruda's Questions is M.T.C. Cronin's response to Pablo Neruda's final book, The Book of Questions (El Libro de las preguntas). Also available for download here is a separate PDF (70kb) containing the author's introductory essay to this project.

(68kb, 8x5ins, 36pp, published 2003)

A collection of poems that the author terms 'collage-haiku'. Collage, in that each three-line poem consists entirely of lines by other poets. (A full index of the sources is also provided, and you'll find the juxtapositions extraordinary.)

(268kb, A5, 80pp, published 2003)

Originally made available in connection with a special feature in the now-deleted Shearsman Gallery, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, this e-book is 80 pages long and contains poems written after the completion of the author's second collection, a.m. (Salt Publishing, 2003).

(296kb, A5, 45pp, published 2003)

Originally made available in connection with a special feature in the now-deleted Shearsman Gallery, An Introduction to the Work of Michael Ayres, this PDF e-book consists of poems from an abandoned book project from the mid-1990s, between the author's first two major collections. This e-book includes 17 poems and a 4-page afterword in which the author discusses the project and the nature of his work at the time.

(136kb, A5, 22pp, published 2003)

Contains the entire text of the long poem originally featured in the now-deleted Shearsman Gallery. Firewriting imagines that the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin escaped death by his own hand on the French-Spanish border in 1940 – his revolver misfired – and has survived as a kind of wanderer and witness. After the war he returned to Paris, but later moved to London where, in the now of the poem at the age of 120, he is recalling some of his ideas – and confessing – to a nurse, whom he imagines might also be a student of his work. Click on the image on the left to download the PDF now. Please note that the version of Firewriting presented here is an earlier draft of the text which subsequently appeared in the author's 2005 Shearsman collection Firewriting & other poems.