Books published by Shearsman Books

The design of a coin is an act of succinct aggrandisement. Bare George explores the coinage of power through a far more famous numismatic image: created in 1817 for King George III and his son, the Prince Regent, by Benedetto Pistrucci, it pictures young St. George lancing a dragon.

Spanning a period of fifteen years, these five 'Inter-views' with Richard Berengarten explore the many facets of his writings. Hospitably and expansively, they yield insights into the work of a poet of our time, his methods, motives, and patterns of thought.

Abandoned Gardens is a powerful and essential distillation from this poet's three collections, plus a substantial volume of new work. Locales range from the poet's native America, to her family roots in Greece, and to the UK. Letting go of places and people is a key theme.

To counterbalance the hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a presumed lost golden age ... That phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that the gods do not love us...

Theodore Enslin (1925-2011) is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. He said, "I like to be considered as a composer who happens to use words instead of notes." Enslin moved to Maine in 1960 and its landscape forms an integral part of his poetry. To an Unknown Shore contains his final poems.

This volume gathers carefully chosen texts from Peter Robinson's nine books of poetry, to which is added a newly completed tenth collection. They include early experiments in northern social realism, dialogues with Italian poetry, and encounters with Japan, all in relation to the vicissitudes of his home country, and a much-revisited Liverpool.

The Book, Behind the Dune is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty, eroticism and the reality of evil. Already translated into French, Italian, Czech, German and Arabic, The Book, Behind the Dune is presented here for the first time in English.

A history submerged in the ever-shifting currents of the ocean emerges in this debut collection by Richard Georges. These poems craft narratives of long forgotten migrations, shipwrecks, and the personal with a vivid and sensual aesthetic that is located in the contested spaces between the sea and the shore.

Elaine Randell's writing was jump-started early by the outpouring of experimental poetry and publishing that accompanied the emergence of pop art. That movement drew attention to the art/life divide by reducing it to sharp but casual edginess. Randell's subsequent career in social work and psychotherapy has found her firmly on the side of life.

At Large contains a series of personal essays, many of which also involve literary commentary, along with literary essays that retain the flavor of memoir. The book contains two interviews, the author's with Larry Siems, former free-speech trouble-shooter for American PEN, and Joe Francis Doerr's three-part conversation with the author.

In 1939, at the age of six and just before the outbreak of the war, the author was uprooted and tossed into the political and military cauldron of South East Asia to face the turmoil of wartime in the Philippines - first on the run in the jungle from the invading Japanese, then in an internment camp where, still a child, he came close to death.

This is a translation of Chavez's prize-winning Mexican volume from 2013, a book of poems that deals with life on the border, its dangers, its delights and its peculiarities.

Kenny Knight's second collection offers more explorations of his Plymouth childhood and the absurdities, as well as the joys, of his adult years. He is still amazed by the fact that Lobsang Rampa was a plumber from Plympton, by the roster of bands he saw at the fabled Van Dike Club, and by the vibrancy of the more recent local literary scene.

Born in 1973, Ron Winkler is one of the leading poets of his generation in Germany. This is the first book-length translation of his work into English, and presents his second german collection, Fragmentierte Gewaesser, complete.

In the opening section of this volume the west coast of Ireland is recast as a kind of Burroughsian Land of the Dead, with the ghost-lights from defunct lighthouses mixing with those of the automated in a sequence that slowly allows itself to be decoded.

Em Strang's poems are shamanic, in that they restore to us abandoned mythologies. Nothing is stable in this very real world, where houses can become birds, where the animal lies shallowly below the surface of the human, where poems are haunted with what is unsaid.

Fascinated by strangeness that's made in the U.S.A.-its beliefs and organization, its affinity for violence and its elusive relationship with the past-Strange Country lyrically addresses itself to defining American landscapes/dreamscapes, and to their unaccountable beauty.

This book is John Matthias's first collection since his three-volume Collected Poems. Ending with the title sequence about being forced to confront some of the very neurological problems in fact which have in many earlier poems been something of a theoretical pre-occupation, this book also foregrounds his more experimental work.

This is a poet's journal with a difference. After suffering a stroke in 1999, the author kept a diary of his experience in hospital and of the subsequent recuperation at home, which ended shortly after January 1, 2000. As in his other journals, he observed the life around him, with notations of the living moment giving rise to reflection.

Ancestral Lines is a sequence of poems about 'the river of desire' that flows through the lives of a family. In these poems Jeremy Hooker recalls his parents and grandparents, and an elusive great grandfather. He both honours the mystery of personal identity, and celebrates the oneness of life through the 'lines' of generations.

It is not a book of poems. It is not a long poem. It is not a novel. Nor a volume of short stories. It is not a work of philosophy. It is not an object - like a stone. Yet it drops into the well of nothingness and is never heard of again. a book with no name fuses the optimism of Beckett with the hyperrealism of Stein.

"Devoted in its irreverence and gently ferocious in its devotions, Less Like a Dove presents, in Joanna Chen's attentive and attuned translation, a robust selection of the work that has brought Agi Mishol to the forefront of contemporary Israeli poetry." -Peter Cole

Pablo de Rokha was one of the great trio of Chilean modernist poets, along with Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda. De Rokha is the least well-known of them, and this volume offers an introduction to this astonishing body of work in the first book-length selection in English.

First published in 1978, this volume turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism.

A new collection from award-winning poet Will Stone, whose poems have been described as haunting, beautiful, savage, lyric and visionary, inventive, searing yet poignant, mesmerising and original.

Stigmate / Vrage appeared in a bilingual edition in 2002 and here receives its first complete English translation. "My identity is Gezim, my body is my fatherland," says the author.

Alfred Celestine was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and came to London in 1977, remaining there until his death in 2009. He published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turner (The Many Press, 1978) and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003).

In these poems, words are a scalpel that probes the shifting sands of meaning. Themes of identity, communication, love, loss and isolation are peeled pack to reveal, with devastating precision, both the deficiencies and the power of language: words that can heal or save; words that paralyse and attack.