Books by Martin Anderson

Includes poems that concern with the nature, from both a perceptual and ontological perspective, of continuing and intrinsic identities.

Through these poems set within a major south east Asian city Anderson weaves, against the rotting entablatures of monumental imperial ambition, slowly degraded aspirations of native and non-native inhabitant.

Many of the sequences begin in the geography of the Essex salt marsh: here the condition of spiritual inanition, which has so frequently been attributed by the West to the non-West to legitimise aggression whilst masking its real objective, finds objective representation. It is the aggressor himself, not the victim, who suffers from inanition...

Obsequy For Lost Things consists of three prose-poetry sequences. The first two share the setting of the Thames estuary. They all share, however, like the author's previous collection of prose-poetry sequences (from Skylight Press) Interlocutors of Paradise, a concern with history and the psychology of colonialism.

The Lower Reaches is framed within precise geography, the Lower Hope region of the Thames estuary where the author was born and grew up beside a river on which "the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire" floated.

A collection of five short meditations on colonialism and the Western mind. Written as a series of symbolist-tinged prose-poems, each section situates the reader in crafted spaces, hollows to be filled either by spiritual purpose or willful invasion.

The poems of Snow look both to the Far East for their ostensible subject matter and back to the UK. Snow is a collection in its own right; its choice and arrangement of poems suggests a terrain richer and more complex than those of individual poems and collections, and one within which they may be rewardingly re-encountered.

Issued at the same time as the third volume of Martin Anderson's Hoplite Journals, Shearsman Books now makes available a compendium edition of all three volumes under one set of covers, and in a larger format.

Martin Anderson is currently a Distinguished Overseer at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, his alma mater. He has pursued many endeavors during his life: trial lawyer in Hawaii and San Francisco; active reservist in the United States Marine Corps with two tours of active duty in World War II and the Inchon/Chosin campaign in Korea; developing partner in Heavenly Valley Ski resort in Lake Tahoe and other land developments; and Kenya rancher. Martin currently lives in Palo Alto, CA and continues to visit Kenya annually.