Books published by Shearsman Books

Many of the sequences begin in the geography of the Essex salt marsh: here the condition of spiritual inanition, which has so frequently been attributed by the West to the non-West to legitimise aggression whilst masking its real objective, finds objective representation. It is the aggressor himself, not the victim, who suffers from inanition...

"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

Incorporating a breathtaking sweep of international literary and philosophical influences and drawing deeply from the great European poets of the 20th century, this is a poetry collection for our time.

A new collection of poems exploring the fine line between abundance and apocalypse.

Past Futures is the long-overdue Collected Poems of an Australian poet who always seems to have more appreciated outside his homeland than within it, perhaps because his poetry was more in tune with his American contemporaries. It brings together his five previous collections, together with a large group of uncollected poems.

This volume contains the complete text of the great Hopkins poem, together with Nigel Foxell's introduction and his copious notes, touching on nearly every line in the poem. An indispensable reader's guide to one of the great poems in the language.

As a said place gathers together poems written since Keepsache (2011). The book is shaped around 'I'm on the Train', a sequence prompted by and on a repeated train journey from home to work through parts of Devon and Cornwall. It returns to the spirit of John Hall's early book, Days.

This volume brings together poems from six collections originally published between 1990 and 2011, and attempts to offer a more or less accurate view of the variety and development of my output over the years.

By the time of his death at the age of 41, Riley had achieved a poetry whose importance is not circumscribed by the concerns and trends of its day. His finest poems are an embodiment of integrity and vision: precise observation and wit co-exist with an extraordinary beauty of image and rhythm.

Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950), more commonly known as Orhan Veli, was a pioneering Turkish poet and one of the founding members of the Garip (Strange) movement. His innovative poetics wore a unique signature of austerity and accessibility. With arresting insight and playful irreverence Veli's poems transformed the Turkish literary world.

Poetry. "By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal--Joe Doerr's TOCAYO contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime." --John Phillip Santos

On 13 November 1943, Jerzy Feliks Urman (known as Jerzyk) killed himself, thinking the Gestapo had arrived. He was eleven and a half. He and his family were in hiding in Drohobycz, during the German occupation of East Galicia. A year earlier the family had quit Stanislawow in the wake of brutal round-ups and deportations of Jews.

Geraldine Clarkson lives in the Midlands. She comes from a family of ten, and her poetry is influenced by her roots in the West of Ireland, and years which she spent in monastic life, including three years in the Peruvian desert. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and has received commendations in the Arvon International and the UK National Poetry Competitions. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, and the Magma Editors', Ver Poets and Anne Born Prizes. Declare is her first chapbook.

Our Lady of Pain is the first selection of Swinburne's poetry to focus precisely on what his early readers found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its 'normal' and 'perverse' varieties. Swinburne's treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock.

Serpentine was first published in by Oasis Books, London, in 1985. It received little distribution and minimal notice at the time, somewhat to the author's distress, and the publisher's regret. It has never reappeared complete, although selections have appeared in subsequent compilations.

The Return of Pytheas is a study of poetry and poems through and across two language traditions - Greek and English. While the main focus is recent and contemporary, exchanges reach back as far as Aeschylus and the Iliad. The book thus investigates Christopher Logue and Homer, as well as Greek influences on contemporary English poets.

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principal motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, ghost in and out of the poems.

"The world within Urn and Drum is a cornucopia of shapes, colours, and objects, fashioned almost as a gleeful, surreal picture-book; a playful naivety that leads to serious questions of what it means to exist and feel in the world." -Rachael Allen

Line and curve evolve and collide in varied forms in Anna Reckin's second collection. Paintings slip into landscapes, rooms slide into pattern, a Chinese jade cup is pool, blossom and branch; an orange tips into a knife, a space station makes a gash in the sky. These are poems that balance precision with fluidity.

The delight of Ian Seed's brilliantly droll poems is that they are not entirely droll. They look and sound normal, like brief prose anecdotes told in a bar but the apparent normality is edged with disorientation, menace and anxiety. We slip over the edge in an instant and look to recover our balance but can't quite.

"beautiful and sharp, critical and concise observations... gestures towards a neglected conversation between poetry and cultural studies in Australia." -Tim Wright, Cordite

"There is nobody writing prose poetry in any way close to Lucy Hamilton's. Of Heads & Hearts is an intricate and rich collection that riffs on the interconnectedness of human relationship with the deft movements of a musical score. Of Heads & Hearts becomes more and more rewarding with each re-reading..."-Kaddy Benyon

Dawn Songs consists of three essays on music. A short one on Derek Bailey as heard in 1970; a moderate-size one on surviving west gallery choral pieces performed in pubs of the Sheffield Moorlands area at Christmas, called `Mass Lyric'; and `Dawn Songs' itself, which concerns a genre of Transylvanian village music and forms the bulk of the book.

These poems were written on the way to work, walking the two and a half miles from near Saltwell Park in Gateshead to Newcastle. The journey took me through Gateshead's residential streets and over the Tyne. I'd try to write something in my head every day before I got to work. Sometimes a whole poem, at other times one or two words or lines ...

Barry Hill's Grass Hut Work is, like Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, both a travelogue of Japan and a journey inward, into what we'll call the Soul-for lack of a better word. He sees with fresh eyes the merger of history and presence, and presents us vital insight at every turn.

Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways. The mordantly titled Life Has Become More Cheerful is a chilling quote by Stalin after the horrors of the Great Purge in 1938 and sets the tone for what is to come.

Since Robert Pinsky picked her chapbook, Night, Relative to Day, for publication ten years ago, readers have been eagerly awaiting Gearen's first full-length collection. With its arresting imagery and its sonic surety, Some Perfect Year does not disappoint.

Hagit Grossman's poetry hovers through the city streets like a floating camera, observing the outcasts and scanning them in wavelengths that are usually beyond the range of our perception. The poems in the book shake us and cast us, with honesty and courage, toward the intimacies from which we prefer to avert our eyes.