Bøker utgitt av Shearsman Books

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.

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.