Books published by Shearsman Books

A collection that shows the author continuing his forays into collage and experimental writing, but always with a lyric turn.

In stories varying from a funeral eulogy to a compelling wartime romance, Late Driver tells of a number of surprising lives imagined in out of the way places; the mood is restless, probing, suffused with memories and loss - although some rivet-hole stars still let in the light of the young women who first punched them into an empty sky.

A good Cavalier poet from the group that regarded Ben Jonson as friend and exemplar, Richard Lovelace's work deserves more attention than it usually receives. As with his friend Sir John Suckling, he has tended to be overshadowed by the great names of the era - and there were so many of those - but his work still stand up today.

Sir John Suckling (1609-1641) was a significant figure in the group of poets who followed Ben Jonson (often referred to as the "tribe of Ben"), and was a close friend of both Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew. These writers tend to be described as Cavalier poets, having been supporters of King Charles I in the English Civil War.

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.

Putting On My Species is about identity and selfhood, the desire for the very beginning, the sardonic pleasure of making and destroying in order to start over again, the love of poetry. How should I live? Sasja Janssen wonders. Who am I? Am I my memories? In a sober but moving style, Sasja Janssen gnaws away at her species.

Menno Wigman (1966-2018) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Netherlands, with many awards to his name, and his early death sent shock-waves through the Dutch literary world. At times echoing Baudelaire, his poems tend to move from doubt to recommitment, from ironic detachment to passionate engagement.

This volume is a long-awaited collection of essays which gives a chance for Allen Fisher's many admirers to study his work in depth with a group of experts.

The first double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2020 contains poetry from the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, India, Lithuania, Galicia / Spain, Italy and Chile.

Before attaining his poetic maturity - and this would be through poems written mostly in Spanish - Huidobro wrote these two collections in French and published them in Paris in 1925, the same year that a volume of his manifestos appeared (see below). The two books have never been republished in France, and only in collected editions in Chile.

Molly Vogel's first collection of poems, Florilegium is an exploration of life written in 'the language of flowers'. The poems regard flowers as both symbols and means of communication; in a broader sense, they deem the natural world essential to our understanding of words, ourselves, and the divine.

Diana's Tree is an important book - written in Paris, where she lived for four years - and the first really mature work (1963) by Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), increasingly recognised as one of the major poetic voices of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America.

"Johnson's poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard - somebody is going to get bit." - Ron SillimanOffensive to many, perhaps amusing to more, Kent Johnson's singular position in American poetry as its conscience, and its court jester, is unequalled. Perhaps deliberately. A sequel to Homage to the Last Avant-Garde.

Disappearance is Lesley Harrison's first full-length collection, bringing together new work which examines the coastline and our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the waters that surround us. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory, these poems make real our sense of living at the edge of an older, sub-polar world.

Solar Cruise is Claire Crowther's fourth collection. Her first collection, Stretch of Closures, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. Solar Cruise is a love story of a poet and a physicist who is devoted to halting climate change through solar energy. It is a passionately personal but also political work.

Mario Martin Gijon's (Sur)rendering is a sequence of short passionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness.

Bitter Grass was written in 1976 in my last year of high school in Albania. It was refused by the government publisher in Tirana, where the censor said, 'the texts in this collection do not deal with the theme of our socialist village, the transformations that socialism has brought under the guidance of the Party are entirely absent...'

Ickerbrow Trig, the book, is simply a collection of poems written since A Cure for Woodness. As for the book's title, it's simply the remnant of a bonnet-bee and an exhausted pun. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map....

Like the eponymous fungus that appears to be regurgitated by the Earth herself after rain, fragments of invented folklore and mongrel histories have stained through from Breen's subconscious and come to bloom in a trio of poetic sequences.

The second issue of Shearsman for 2019 features poetry by, among others, Annemarie Austin, Alison Brackenbury, Andrew Duncan, Chris Emery, Gerrie Fellows, Lucy Hamilton, Alasdair Paterson, John Phillips, John Seed, Robert Sheppard, Andrew Taylor and Tamar Yoseloff & translations from Lithuanian and Dutch.

Caks (1901-50) is Latvia's leading mid-20th-century poet, an early adopter of modern literary tendencies from wider Europe, and one of the first really urban poets in the Latvian language - until his eruption onto the scene, Latvian poetry had been grounded in rural life, reflecting the preponderance of Latvian speakers in the countryside.

Collected Sonnets gathers nine main sequences from a 50-year span. It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts. Praised by Peter Porter for richly re-working Elizabethan elements, Selerie's sonnets have appealed equally to readers with a modernist bent.

Alfonso Reyes Ochoa (1889-1959) was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat. This is the first major collection of his poetry in English. "A man for whom language has been all that language can be: sound and sign, inert trace and wizardry, a clockwork mechanism and a living thing." (Octavio Paz)

With Brecht, Benn, Bobrowski and Celan, Peter Huchel is one of a handful of essential post-war poets in the German language. A precise observer of natural phenomena, Huchel is above all a realist whose metaphors take us deep into the social and historical landscape, into zones of devastation and despair, the zero-hour of isolation.

"Unforgettable poems that, on the verge of tales and fables, drag the reader toward a universe of screened images, like 'pollen clouds in the slant evening light'." -Antonio Ortega, El Pais

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about London over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place...

Trees become myriad versions (instalments) of themselves without verging onto an unsensing multiplicity as they traverse partially resistant or patient terrains: so these poems explore contrasting tree-states, as sticks or joints, filters of directional light or self-submerged hedges, which are all manners of contraction, extension, mediation, shareable expression."Larkin's 'theological poetics' assumes a world in which we could be said to be 'short of nothing', however 'scarcely' this is apprehended." -Simon Collings "With relation to the holy as subtext, Trees Before Abstinent Ground continues Peter Larkin's dense and enticing meditations with trees. Larkin's poems lure the reader to attend to the incarnational alterity of trees. Through saturated language, the reader encounters trees' vertical customs and feral horizons, as they engage with the habit and culture of light." -Anne Elvey

This mystical verse dives repeatedly into the given, and discovers there a world of symbol and - perhaps above all - movement. It is not Gerard Manley Hopkins's search for 'inscape', but instead an apprehension that from moment to moment forms itself into symbolic codes - and then releases those codes into the material, sensual world.

Laressa Dickey's Syncopations continues the thematic explorations of her earlier work-family, memory, the American South-but displays a depth and richness all its own. [...] Readers are treated to a poet in full command of her art who is willing to share the benefits of her hard-won knowledge, making this a truly essential collection.