Books published by Shearsman Books

Amorgos Notebook is a collection from 2007 that won for Elsa Cross Mexico's most prestigious poetry prize. Elsa Cross' work over the past several decades has demonstrated a fascination with Greece, and this sequence takes its departure from the island of Amorgos, in the Cyclades, home of remarkable ancient sculptures, and spectacular terrain.

The House of Leaves was first published in 1976, and was a significant statement of intent by Nathaniel Tarn - alongside his New Directions volume, Lyrics for the Bride of God - which set the tone for what he wanted to achieve now as an American poet after his emigration from England.

Manners was Gig Ryan's second collection, in 1984, and confirmed the impression she had made with her first book. It has been unavailable for some time. As Martin Johnston said of the first edition: "something new in Australian poetry: a deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative' in verse of hallucinatory vividness and continual wry wit..."

"Birchard's vivid, offbeat, casually learned and masterly language is refreshingly modest, individual-unfashionable. I'm not sure there's a poet with a better ear, and I'm also unsure if another has a feeling for how intelligence moves within and between lines that is any way superior." -David Miller.

Beast is the first collection in English from award-winning Catalan poet Irene Sola, a darkly imaged, startling and lyrically precise exploration of gender, identity, sexuality and multiple forms of desire.

`La suave patria' is often regarded as the Mexican national poem, an extraordinary tour-de-force that would change forever the way that poetry would develop in Mexico. It was one of the last works by Ramon Lopez Velarde, who died of pneumonia at the age of only 33 in 1921, and is the work for which he is most remembered today.

The second double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2017 contains poetry from around the English-speaking world and beyond, plus a number of translations.

"This remarkable poetry brings the long ago into nowness, if I can put it like that. It lights from far and also near, burning." -Mary Ann Caws

"Larkin indicates how one can only pay tribute to the rarity and uniqueness of the scarce by not appropriating it in a fraudulent poetic equivalence of pseudo-poverty, but rather by asymptotically approaching it, with genuine humility, from ever new angles." -John Milbank

Speaking in Song displays the poet's extraordinary range and musicality, conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world-and one's story, history, and place in it-in the context of hearing and memory, and in the form of song. Many of the poems have been set to music by composers from Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

After Russia is considered to mark the high point in Tsvetaeva's output of shorter poems. She told Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life itself.

A Deafening Silence is the first UK publication by one of Romania's leading contemporary poets. Selecting from over twenty years' output, this bilingual volume offers an ideal introduction to her work.

Isthmus was Jeremy Reed's first collection, produced in a finely-printed edition 1980. Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author struggling with a gamut of new influences and trying to find his way in a brave new world of poetry.

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley's first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has since reappeared in other guises, the entire book has not been republished and its structure - mixing prose and poetry freely - is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived.

Otherlands brings together a compendium of Harry Guest's translations from French, German, Italian and Japanese, although the largest representations are those of Cassou and Rilke, and runs from poets of the 16th century to our contemporaries.

Not Much to Say Really is an account of extended conversations with four elderly patients in hospital. Standing on the edge of their time they look back over their lives - these conversations show the reader that the most personally lived events and experiences are the most powerfully shared in the common lot of mortality.

This book records a sustained plunge into the imaginative elixir of a dream. The dream starts with a waking vision - 'the door of the train flew open' - and continues as reverberations in the sensorium, the seat of felt thought. With the sonnet as its anchor note, the symphony blends the machine's body and the garden, crash and after-sound.

These verses are from goshawk observations since 1955; my first experiences of the bird in the wild overseas -- I have used almost entirely only notes made at the time, in now well over 500 notepads, and diaries and letters; memory illumines only a narrow broken trail. (Colin Simms)

In Dear Mary Rupert Loydell writes about art and life and how they intersect. Fascinated by both renaissance and contemporary painting, he re-invents moments of annunciation in today's world, and revels in the colours and sunshine of Italy. This is a world where aliens abduct the Virgin Mary, and rock singers find themselves singing about her...

Join Simon Perril as he writes an ecstatically elastic 50th birthday poem bidding adieu to his 40s. Written on the skin of the moment, the membrane of occasion, these poems nod, wink, cajole, caress, proclaim and defame their way across 80 plus freewheeling stanzas.

"This collection is an essential delight; a `book resonant of a life / neither following nor in pursuit', gathering old and new work all equally fresh. Like Mayakovsky, John James has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness - and, like the Futurist, to weld the aesthetic to the social."

The EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet Rene Van Valckenborch. For his last project before his disappearance around 2010, Van Valckenborch supposedly asked one poet from each of the EU states to write him a poem. Of course, he wrote them himself... Each poem was then supposedly translated into Flemish via robot (online) translators...

Here the text or the poem is a swimming pool, a pool in which language or thought-as-body glide through cultural and or phenomenological spaces; fluid places for being, thinking or even swimming in the world. It is polyglot within English, let alone in relation to all the other tongues that are almost audible ....

The first issue of Shearsman magazine for 2018 features poetry by Geraldine Clarkson, Harry Guest, Jeremy Hooker, Ian Seed, Mark Weiss, among others, and translations of Du Fu into Scots and English by Brian Holton.

In The Masses the creepy-crawlies visibly teem. Adapting the sound-mutating technique Goodland perfected in Gloss, where well-known phrases are minutely changed to sly and comic effect, here the creatures which are usually only glimpsed, only imagined with a flinch, are foregrounded in phonic mutation.

The Paths of Survival explores the fragility of the written word; the ways in which it is destroyed and the ways in which, by each fresh miracle, it endures against all the odds. Tracing the few surviving fragments of Aeschylus's lost tragedy, Myrmidons, the poems' dramatic monologues introduce us to those who encounter that mysterious text.

Klange (Sounds) was Kandinsky's only poetry publication-a collection of prose poems, accompanied by 56 of his own inimitable woodcuts, 12 of them in colour. It appeared in late 1912, or early 1913 (the exact date is uncertain) from the Munich publishing house, Piper, and thus came at a crucial time in Kandinsky's artistic life.

"Avebury freely moves through time, from pre-textual history to descriptions of art and civilisation, in the same way that Olson's Maximus Poems and all of Eliot's poems in Four Quartets envision history as an event that is taking place now and always, past and present simultaneously existing." -Neli Moody

"She tries to conjure up places and situations which normal language does not reach, from which it has disappeared, and then let something unheard communicate with us across a distance for which we have no words. (...) What she adds is her fabulous gift of making her material physical." -Hadle Oftedal Andersen, Klassekampen

When Basil Bunting declared that 'Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write,' I imagine he had in mind the kind of exact and exacting poetry Ted Pearson has been steadily producing for decades. In The Markov Chain, Pearson presents a series of eight-line poems, each composed of four exquisitely crafted alexandrines.