Books published by Shearsman Books

The poems in this book arise amidst those remnants that redefine what we know to be underfoot in the places we live. From the Rose Creek Preserve to Koppel Farm Community Garden to a backyard on Pioneer Hill, these poems suggest that we need to not only understand the complex of relationships but also to listen deeply for meanings at every level.

In as much as you can read poetry and look at paintings you will find serious delight in David Kennedy's poems about Cezanne. The sort of concentration required here however is not an endorsed, mainstream activity. It does not sell beans or financial products; it is simply about seeing...

The first issue of Shearsman magazine for 2015 includes original original poetry from the UK and the USA, plus translations of poetry from Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina, France, and Ancient Rome.

In 2012, Yang Lian and others started an online poetry competition in China. They expected a good response, but received more than 85,000 entries. This anthology offers some of the winning poems from the first two years of the competition, together with comments by the judges and essays by several of the people involved.

the road north is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the masterpieces of travel literature.

"(Scully's) innovations... take a modernist inheritance, strip it of any redisual mythos, & use it to examine the interaction of the writer's reflecting mind with the daily life of everybody... & truly, if one seeks a poetry of the moment that records & wryly critiques the inequities of modern life, Maurice Scully's is it." - Marthine Satris

"This is poetry that goes direct to that other place and inhabits it. in possession of loss has a clear sparseness, almost a minimalism, that is also highly complex. Read as a single book-length poem, it thinks our world without telling openly. This is a poetry that shoulders the big questions.

This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation of poetry.

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.

The legend goes that Florentino was the epitome of the great llanero: handsome, a great rider and cattleman, a ladies' man, but above all, a singer and poet. His improvisations were so fast and to the point that the Devil got jealous and challenged him to a night of singing. If the Devil wins before dawn, Florentino will go back with him to Hell.

The Purloined Letter is the author's third collection. "The Purloined Letter has a dolorous stately piercing almost martial music, like an Elizabethan court dance or Miles Davis in his electric period." -Edwin Frank

A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper. Francis Ledwidge enlisted in 1914, and survived until July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres.

In 2014, Miriam Olson died at the age 80, and after nearly 50 years of marriage. She had suffered from Alzheimer's for some years and Toby became her principal carer. This is a memoir of that period, a story of love and frustration, remembering and forgetting. Miriam is The Other Woman of the title - a woman other than the one she once was.

"Poems traverse geographical locations, from Trinidad to other Caribbean islands and as far as Iceland. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn."

A true cabinet of curiosities, these poems usher in a seemingly endless list of what's been lost: Marrin, along with her parade of ghosts of dead counters, explorers, and collectors, chronicles our demise. Incognitum is an extended fever, an archive, a getting-it-all-down-before the world is gone." -Cynthia Cruz

"This exceptional poet hits a new height with each new book, and the view from this one is great!" - Cole Swensen

The Man Who Has Everything is an unlikely anti-hero, adrift in a world of instant gratification, momentary experiences and instant answers, in contrast to the music, art, books and conversation he prefers.

"Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. [...] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps." -Andrew Duncan

A first full-length collection in the UK for Pete Smith, a Canadian poet born in Coventry but resident in Kamloops, BC, since 1974. In the UK and Canada he worked as a psychiatric nurse with intellectually challenged people in institutional and community settings.

The second issue of Shearsman magazine for 2014 includes new poetry by Peter Boyle, M.T.C. Cronin, Ray DiPalma, Tim Dooley, Michael Farrell, Mark Goodwin, Anne Gorrick, Jeremy Hooker, Norman Jope, Kent MacCarter, Alasdair Paterson, Peter Robinson, Nathan Shepherdson, Scott Thurston, Cristina Viti, Heidi Williamson and several others.

'A Ritual Landscape' sets out Aidan Semmens' stall from the start of this, his third full-length collection. These are poems that 'have legs'-that continue the journey outward begun in A Stone Dog and The Book of Isaac, and elaborate the argument and project of one of our most ambitious and accomplished poets. What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined since the poetry of Roy Fisher in, 'a place of gathering /an enclosure of power and spirit, ' in a 'slow recovery of knowledge'

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.

Partly a modern revision of the Helen myth, Eidolon meditates on the visible and invisible forces of Western civilisation from classical antiquity to present-day America. An Eidolon is an image, a ghost, a scapegoat. It is a device, like deus ex machina, to deal with the problem of narrative, specifically Helen's supposed deceit and infidelity.

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.

In Sea Table Kelvin Corcoran brings it all back home. Not that it was ever very far away, but he has been writing a lot of poetry concerning Greece. Greece, both place and stories, was a lens onto our present condition and its depths, and through that focus he developed an essentially lyrical field as the basis for a move towards larger forms.

This is the Libretto to Nicola LeFanu's opera, Tokaido Road. In 1832 the young Hiroshige sets out on Japan's great Eastern Sea Road, the Tokaido, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The paintings he creates along the way reveal the secrets of a hidden country.

Martyn Crucefix's new poems vividly evoke the landscapes of northern England and - in a sequence of sonnets inspired by the writing of Rosalia de Castro - the north west of Spain. But more than place, they explore the ways in which we inhabit time - how we are harmed and healed by it, how we deny, ignore, sublimate, repeat or reprise it.

Arrivals & Departures is a slim collection of poems by Robert vas Dias, a follow-up to his full-length Shearsman collection, Still * Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice.