Shearsman Library Vol. 19
Published 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618961 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest of the poems collected in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which it has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems , which is itself difficult, and expensive, to obtain for readers outside the USA.

“Gustaf Sobin’s poems are not, in any superficial sense, ‘painterly’, but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin’s attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin’s world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious.” —Charles Tomlinson

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