Books published by Shearsman Books

This exciting and readable book presents the fifties and sixties as a crucible of new departures, asking what remains and continues from those decades into the cultural present. It takes the form of a series of thematic essays each of which discusses the work of an individual or group of novelists.

This slim collection gathers together John Seed's poems written since the publication of his New and Collected.

The figure of ra-t slithers through these pages like the Zelig of London Town - an ocular witness at every juncture of its history. His split name makes him a fractured and contradictory creature. Always recognisable he is also hesitant and obscure, not unlike this text which at every turn employs discontinuity and slippage as formal strategies.

Helena Eriksson is a Swedish poet. strata was her sixth volume of poetry, an enigmatic book-length work, published in 2004.

Claus von Rosen was born into the German-speaking landed nobility of the Baltic countries, then part of the Russian Empire. [...] With the arrival of World War 2, and the Soviet invasion of Estonia, he was drafted into the German army, serving on the Eastern front. There, he was captured and imprisoned in the Gulag until being freed in 1955.

This is the first volume of critical essays devoted to the work of Trevor Joyce, one of the Ireland's most innovative poets of the past 50 years. Contributions from: Lucy Collins, Eric Falci, Fergal Gaynor, John Goodby, Fanny Howe, David Lloyd, Peter Manson, Niamh O'Mahony, Marthine Satris, Geoffrey Squires, Keith Tuma and Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas.

This is Michael Smith's first collection since his Collected Poems of 2009, and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: "Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head, ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable, unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits."

Comprising work from the early 1970s onwards, Reassembling Still is by far the largest and most comprehensive collection of David Miller's poetry, and includes all of his poetry that he wishes to keep, with the exceptions of the ongoing Spiritual Letters project and his visual poems.

The first issue of Shearsman magazine for 2014, and a big anniversary, as the magazine's second series reaches the 100th issue. Originally appearing as a quarterly, the magazine converted to bi-annual publication in a larger format, but retained the previous numbering system, necessitating a shift to double numbers.

Openings is a sequel to Jeremy Hooker's earlier Welsh Journal and Upstate: A North American Journal, permitting us a peak over the shoulder of a fine English poet at work, and on the move.

These are poems concerned with the living presence of place - and with what is written over it by maps and history, whether in the crash site of a military aircraft in Argyll, in the personal histories of an elegy or in the eroded landscapes of the Scottish hills. Here the living move through time and weather.

The poems in this extraordinary full-length collection by Alice Miller ask you to force yourself beyond your own boundaries. They are curious, restless, bold; they marry lyrical music and intricate metaphor as they search for other human voices beyond the rumblings of the apocalypse and the stubbornness of myth.

Locust and Marlin considers how, in lives bright and brief as a candle's burn, we tell our stories and locate the places where we live and love. Where is the origin, our point in space from which we view the world? How much control do we have over who we are and what impact we have on the territory we inhabit?

From Troy to Arcadia, on the high road to elsewhere and the low road to thereabouts, boarding a ferry 'cross the Mersey and hiking the Jurassic Coast, skating away on Duddingston Loch and dynamiting the frozen rivers of Siberia - Alasdair Paterson plots a course at the cruising speed of the flaneur through the ruins of empires and dreams.

"Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." - Peter Riley

Maureen Thorson's second book of poetry follows a couple as they put their separate histories behind them and create a new life together.Fragments of overheard dialogue, close observations of the changing seasons, and a wry sense of humor blend to narrate the transformation of doubts into certainties, as past heartbreak is set aside.

The Dustbowl is a collection of serial poems that intertwine Arthurian legend and Dust Bowl lore with fragmented memories of a childhood in California. The book's polyphonic voices conjoin perpetually questing knights and those journeying west into a single body.

The second part to be published from Silliman's huge new work-in-progress, Universe,Northern Soul is a book-length poem of observation and reminiscence, a kaleidoscope of impressions occasioned by visits to the north-west of England, home to the music scene of the title.

The House of Straw is Carmen Bugan's second collection, and follows her well-received memoir of life under the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, Burying the Typewriter.

On Narrowness is Claire Crowther's third collection. Her previous collections attracted wide attention; the first was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh first collection prize. She is poet-in-residence at the Royal Mint Museum for 2014-15 and lives in Somerset with her husband, physicist Keith Barnham.

This book offers a critical overview of the work of the British poet Kelvin Corcoran who, over nearly 30 years, has established a reputation as one of the most significant innovative British lyric poets; 'a giant of the middle generation' as Andrew Duncan has described him.

The first book of Jeremy Reed's uncompromising, explicitly autobiographical expose of his life as a leading London poet from the 1980s to the present day, this is a highly courageous and cutting edge poet's autobiography, explicit and detailed in a way few poets would dare.

In 1993, the term Performance Writing suggested simply writing for performance. By 2011, when the author became the first Professor of Performance Writing, it had attained a wider currency in discussions of contemporary writing, and had entered the curriculum well beyond its intense first development at the adventurous Dartington College of Arts.

Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is something unique, something set apart, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, almost becoming a new element. Here, poets from two different languages translate each other.

Two poem-sequences: Pigeons, and Pussy. A short poem on every page, 3 or 4 lines. The sequences presented on facing pages, emphasising the fact that the title word could be subtitled by the other if one wished. At various times hilarious, scurrilous, and thought-provoking, this collection is one of the most unusual you will come across.

The second issue of Shearsman for 2013 contains poetry by Theodoros Chiotis and Sophie Mayer, Patricia Debney, Carrie Etter, Charlotte Faber, Kim Goldberg, Graham Hardie, Michael Haslam, Ralph Hawkins, Jeremy Hooker, Alex Houen, Peter Hughes, John James, Maria Jastrzebska, Kelly Malone, Marion McCready, Maureen McLane, George Messo and more.

Tessitura, Italian 'texture', borrows a musical conceptual term, denoting the textural sweep of melodic contour - kind of safe-space - for a singer or instrumentalist. This collection is intended as an corresponding writerly-space in which I bring together various drifts of work, assemble them into poetry's visual equivalence of music's soundscape.

These book presents two long poem-sequences by one of Argentina's major living poets.