Books in the Shearsman Library series

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949-2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer.

The House of Leaves was first published in 1976, and was a significant statement of intent by Nathaniel Tarn - alongside his New Directions volume, Lyrics for the Bride of God - which set the tone for what he wanted to achieve now as an American poet after his emigration from England.

Serpentine was first published in by Oasis Books, London, in 1985. It received little distribution and minimal notice at the time, somewhat to the author's distress, and the publisher's regret. It has never reappeared complete, although selections have appeared in subsequent compilations.

Manners was Gig Ryan's second collection, in 1984, and confirmed the impression she had made with her first book. It has been unavailable for some time. As Martin Johnston said of the first edition: "something new in Australian poetry: a deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative' in verse of hallucinatory vividness and continual wry wit..."

"Avebury freely moves through time, from pre-textual history to descriptions of art and civilisation, in the same way that Olson's Maximus Poems and all of Eliot's poems in Four Quartets envision history as an event that is taking place now and always, past and present simultaneously existing." -Neli Moody

Isthmus was Jeremy Reed's first collection, produced in a finely-printed edition 1980. Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author struggling with a gamut of new influences and trying to find his way in a brave new world of poetry.

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley's first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has since reappeared in other guises, the entire book has not been republished and its structure - mixing prose and poetry freely - is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived.

The Desert Mothers was first published as a chapbook in Mississippi in 1985, and here it is accompanied by three long sequences from the same period, as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

This is a new edition of Kelvin Corcoran's second collection of poems, from 1986.

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.