Books published by Shearsman Books

'Firewriting' is John Muckle's first collection of poems, following two collections of short fiction. The book revolves around the long title poem, an extraordinary conceit which imagines that Walter Benjamin survived and lived to an advanced age. This and the supporting poems demonstrate the author's narrative skills.

A collection of short lyrics by this Devon-based poet, imbued with his trademark compression of language.

This volume is a journey embarked on via contradictory terms that occur when one attempts to explore the limitations of human (vs?) sentient abidance. Postmodern problems with things and places such as home, body, language, tradition, and rabbit hole become the relative metastructures through which these contradictions are channeled.

Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: 'Silenzio'. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through this collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says.

How do we find anchorage in a time of planetary crisis, 'our words/ for world migrating'? 'What is common in this. Explain.' "These are poems that open us to new relations with the world." (David Herd)

Douglas Oliver (1937-2000) was a poet with a substantial reputation in the late 1980s and 1990s, finding a larger audience for his socially-committed poetry in a way that no other of his poetic background had done, or perhaps wished to do. This is an important retrospective survey of a significant British poet.

Arrivals of Light is the latest collection by the expatriate Scottish poet, Robin Fulton Macpherson, and his first to be published in the UK for many years. Shorter and more gnomic than the work that first made his name in Scotland, these poems open up a new direction for a poet who still has much to say to us in his 80s.

Finally in one volume, this book brings together all the various parts of Maurice Scully's magnum opus, written over a 25-year period: 5 Freedoms of Movement, Livelihood, Sonata and Tig. Most of the individual components of the book have been out of print for some time. The author has revised the entire work for this first complete edition.

Will Stone reclaims here his role of cerebral journeyman: an inveterate trawler of history, moving between epochs and events, between personalities, cultures and landscapes, leaving behind delicate silken threads of suggestion, salvaging what remains of the humanistic in delineating the replicating tragedies and punishments endured by the fallen.

Epic Series brings together three long poems by Elena Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories.

This issue includes poetry by (among others) Kate Ashton, Richard Berengarten, Daragh Breen, Giles Goodland, Lucy Hamilton, Jill Jones, John Phillips, Hannah Star Rogers, Jaya Savige, Janet Sutherland, Helen Tookey, Judith Willson and Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, plus translations of Sylvie Marie (from Flemish) by Richard Berengarten.

Last Harvest brings together poems of place, poems on religion, poems on family and friendships, and poems that rebel against the passing of the years. [...] enough however here for mysteries, times to get lost on, found again, a different beauty, wilder, spread, bare and always the past put there in stone to stay

Combines a revised text of the first part of "The Memory of the Drift" (written 1993-1999, and originally published in 2001) with the three interlocking, previously uncollected, books in which its argument is extended: "In the Common Era, Dog Mercury and Vicinal.

A collection of essays on the highly individual art of the Irish poet, Maurice Scully; the volume contains an interview with the poet together with essays by J.C.C. Mays, Aodan McCardle, David Lloyd, Kit Fryatt, Lucy Collins, Michael S. Begnal, Eric Falci, Mairead Byrne and Philip Coleman.

The poems in Youthful Verses cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Tsvetaeva's life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet.

With The Red Place, Lars Amund Vaage has written a rich and complex poem that radiates great tenderness for the different dimensions of life. The poet takes us on a journey inwards and backwards in time. He is visited by the dead, by his mother and his father. Music is important, and we see him at the piano as a child, a youth and a grown man.

Motive & Opportunity is principally located in Los Angeles, where the poet has lived and worked since 1968. The five pieces collected here are various attempts at poetic language trying to settle in this metropolitan sprawl of contradictions. Or as Carey McWilliams said: an Island on the Land, "very much a city that refuses to know itself."

The prose poems in The Underground Cabaret form the final volume of a quartet, following on from New York Hotel, Identity Papers and Makers of Empty Dreams.

This year-long sequence of five-line poems takes as its point of departure the French Republican Calendar, devised by the poet Fabre d'Eglantine with the aim of breaking the power of the Church and returning symbolic importance to the agricultural worker.

In A Confusion of Marys Rupert Loydell and Sarah Cave re-imagine the story of the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. The work is part of an ongoing exploration of this material and associated themes such as colour, contemporary art, spiritual/alien intervention and intrusion into the human realm, symbolism and the nature of belief and submission.

Huidobro published this collection of manifestos and statements on poetics in 1925, and it summed up the previous 8 or 9 years of his work. The truth is, however, that he was already moving away from some of the positions espoused in this volume, and it was one of his last original publications in French.

Here are the last steps of Lycambes, close to following the death of his daughters with his own, and reminiscing. Central to this reminiscence are the early expeditions to colonise Thasos he undertook with Telesicles, Archilochus's father. .... Notions of the slip encompass all manner of acts of evasion, disguise, and the tying of a noose.

In Country of Warm Snow, the author seeks to represent the duality of a life lived in two places at once. It is the life of an immigrant who has been in the US for fifty-odd years, whose heart, when he's in one place, yearns for the other.

This is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and features ten poets: Pilar Adon, Martha Asuncion Alonso, Graciela Baquero, Mercedes Cebrian, Maria Eloy-Garcia, Berta Garcia Faet, Erika Martinez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero - one born in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and three in the 1980s.

In 1931, Huidobro and Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short, and so wrote two further solo stories. The contents are therefore not three, not huge and not novels.

Aidan Semmens's new collection moves from the range of the world to the deeply personal, always placing the detail in historical context. Using a variety of poetic techniques, he moves from the moral ambiguities of empire to the run-in to Brexit; from a reworked 40-year-old prize-winning poem to the breakdown of language suffered by his mother.

Aiming above all to be 'a careful, attentive, reader', Jeremy Hooker seeks in this volume to illuminate subjects that have been neglected or undervalued relative to mainstream fashions, such as the poetry of David Jones, George Oppen and Christopher Middleton, Welsh women poets, and neo-romantic painters such as Winifred Nicholson.

This volume draws on over 50 years of poetry written by a poet whose work stands a little askew to the dominant modes in Britain, and a poet with a decided admiration for the work of both George Oppen and David Jones. Jeremy Hooker is a poet with a powerful sense of place, whose joy in landscape and his surroundings shines through his body of work.

Geoffrey Hill was, by common consent, one of the finest poets in the English language in the second half of the 20th century, and the early years of the 21st. This volume brings together essays comparing Hill's work to that of other poets, as well as covering specific works, and the relationship of his work to philosophy or 18thC literature.