Books published by Shearsman Books

'Are you English?' is never a neutral question. In the 11th century a `Presentment of Englishry' was the offering of proof that a dead man was English and therefore unimportant. In the 12th century a priest living in Areley Regis, set out to `tell the noble deeds of the English - no one knows why he chose to write his poem in English.

For Manuel Rivas, words are the most sensitive of creatures. In the same way that frogs or glow-worms are the first to manifest signs of pollution, words suffer as a result of corruption in the socio-political sphere. In his work he is a custodian of all sensitive creatures; his writings document damage and alert us to potential future harm.

In this trailblazing narrative about where we are going as a species, Rosenberg shows us how he became a writer both ancient and contemporary. The crucial Jewish poet of his time, rooted in the Hebrew of the Bible and the existential sublime of the New York School, Rosenberg has been read mainly for his experimental vision.

This selected edition presents an overview of all of Huidobro's work, from 1914 until 1948, moving from the early symbolist work, though the high avant-garde phase, then through the highpoint of his career with Altazor and Skyquake, and on into the late poetry which settles down into a post-vanguard style. Also includes manifestos and interviews.

Joao is a book of sixty-two sonnets recounting twelve years of the life of a poet who travels widely, encountering friends and loves, translators and, sometimes, famous authors. Its protagonist is Joao of eGoli; his christian name is Portuguese for "John" and his epithet - "Place of Gold" - is that of his birthplace, Johannesburg, in Zulu.

The open mouth of the Orcus, in the front-cover photograph, represents an entrance to the underworld, according to all the symbolism embedded in the Gardens of Bomarzo, built in the 16th Century in central Italy. And this book actually seems to play with different strata of reality and perception...

Flying School is a book of beautifully crafted poems about the contrivances by which we attempt to enrich or repair our lives. One dominant image is flight and, more specifically, parachutes - reflecting an aspiration to come to terms with our hardest challenges, including the reality of death. The book ends with a series of heartbreaking elegies for the poet's father, unflinching in their grief-stricken gaze. Poems about Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer musing on their art and subversive pastorals on our loss of biodiversity extend Saxton's focus into new areas. ere are dramatic monologues too - a returning cosmonaut disappointed not to be more generously treated; a Polynesian ambassador in Venice in the time of Casanova; a young man who falls for a girl in the American 'Neverglades' and serves with her brother in Viet Nam. Themes include love savoured, compromised or lost; identity, being and nothingness; and faith versus unbelief. In this dazzlingly various collection, plain-spoken storytelling is set against more oblique or lyrical voices, while sonnets, sestinas, villanelles and 'triplets' (juxtaposing conventional and consonantal rhyme) offer the pleasures of accomplished form. The common factor is a vividly observed aliveness, often inflected with wit. Saxton has conjured a teeming world of phenomena, ideas and emotions that never fails to surprise, as well as entertain or move.

Square Horizon is Huidobro's first book in French and is heavily influenced by the work of Apollinaire, but it marks the author's definitive arrival on the avant-garde scene in Paris, and kicks off a frenetic period of two years in which he published two full collections and four chapbooks.

Skyquake is a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had not previously produced, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism. A book-length prose-poems on the thermos of love, sex and death.

The Year of the Crab tells the story of an endless seaside summer. It is a musical interplay of emotions and ideas, with recurring motifs and characters, often very funny, often profound, with a sense of childhood discovery remembered in maturity, an idyll with the background voices of fear, illness and death never far away. It is a magical poem.

This book is an exploration through a wandering mind in the middle of external chaos. The poems trace private and public histories, from Lincoln mythos to serial killers, tied together through contorted bodies, whipped lungs, one eye firmly on the abyss, and one hand reaching back from it.

After Russia is Marina Tsvetaeva's last collection, published in Paris 13 years before she died. Containing many poems addressed to Pasternak, the book also, towards the end, contains many references to Russia-studiously avoided in earlier poems - making the final obeisance to a Russian peasant woman and to Pasternak in Moscow a fitting close.

Surely it's time to write a poem according to John James. Two quatrains please, written to the opening of A Theory of Poetry."And so the request went to 29 friends and collaborators of John James, 28 poets and one artist. John James published his New and Selected Poems, Sarments, with Shearsman Books in April 2018, but passed away a month later."Surely it's time to write a poem according to John James. Two quatrains please, written to the opening of A Theory of Poetry." The collaborators are Kelvin Corcoran, Simon Perril, John Hall, Peter Riley, John Temple, Alan Halsey, John Wilkinson, Ian Patterson, Andrew Duncan, Denise Riley, Karlien van den Beukel, Peter Hughes, Gavin Selerie, John Goodby, Simon Smith, Geoff Ward, Anthony Mellors, Anthony Barnett, Lyndon Davies, Tony Lopez, Nick Totton, Chris Cornwell, Linda Kemp, Cliff Yates, Robert Vas Dias, Mark Leahy, J.H. Prynne, Romana Huk and artist Bruce McLean.

In May 1926, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German-language poems as a possible manuscript; most date to 1924, but the collection also included material from a recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems from his last two years. This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke set down in 1926.

This is the missing volume in Andrew Duncan's compendious survey of British poetry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An overview of trends during a period of more than 30 years, and a consideration of some individual poets whom Duncan feels deserve greater attention.

Being an account chiefly of events which transpired during the first year of the Japanese occupation of The Philippines.

Through these poems set within a major south east Asian city Anderson weaves, against the rotting entablatures of monumental imperial ambition, slowly degraded aspirations of native and non-native inhabitant.

A reproduction of Herrick's only publication during his lifetime, seen through the press by the author himself in 1648. The book contains more than a thousand poems by one of the great lyric poets of the Caroline era. This edition reproduces the original spelling, in all its quirkiness, and copies the layout, albeit in a larger page-size.

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley's collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the 1960s to today. Volume 2 covers the period from the late 1990s to 2015, covering books such as Excavations, Alstonefield, Two Setts and Coda, The Glacial Stairway, and Due North. It also contains a large number of uncollected poems.

A major event, the publication of Peter Riley's collected poems in two volumes covers his work from the early 1960s to today. Volume 1 covers 1962-1997.

The second issue of Shearsman for 2018 contains poetry from the UK, the USA and Australia, plus translations of three Lithuanian poets.

In 1977 and 1981, Martin Booth published two collections of work about Knotting, the Bedfordshire village where he then lived: The Knotting Sequence and The Cnot Dialogues. The books were published in limited-run editions by The Elizabeth Press, and few copies came across the Atlantic. Here we have spliced the two together, otherwise unchanged.

This `sampling' covers some of the usual suspects, epigrams, verse tags, scurrilous and otherwise, but it also includes a number of poems from the Liber Spectaculorum, the Book of Spectacles, devoted to poems on the Games at the Colosseum and, often, in praise of Caesar.

This was Lee Harwood's first major collection after his remarkable sequence of Fulcrum volumes had established him as one of the most interesting younger poets in the England. HMS Little Fox shows Harwood striking out in new directions, some of which were not be further developed, but it also shows evidence of his mature style.

This most recent experiment with words on the page continues the duet-passage between J.H. Prynne and the possibilities of lyrical transformation, subsequent eventually to Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).

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.

A nexus of rivers and streets, rooms and gardens, family relationships, food, bodies, creepers, dreams, and song, emanating from one house whose psychic resonance dominates the poems in this selection.

John Seed has pioneered a form of documentary poem using found texts and concentrating on historical events. Previous volumes for Shearsman Books have included two volumes based on the reportage of Mayhew, and another based on the London Blitz. Here he uses reports of tragic deaths from nineteenth-century newspapers: melancholy occurrences, indeed.

Desire Lines presents work drawn from across the author's writing life, and brings close to 400 pages of his work back into print. Drawing on archives and extensive bibliographic resources, this volume collects the majority of MacSweeney's poetry not included in Wolf Tongue (2003), together with an introduction and notes by the editor.