Bücher der Reihe Shearsman Library

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949-2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer.

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.

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.

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..."

"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

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.

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.

This is a new edition of Kelvin Corcoran's second collection of poems, from 1986.

Tell Me No More and Tell Me, first published in 1981 focuses upon the poet's immediate surroundings, the Essex marshes and the small black timber framed cottage he lived in at the time.

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is revived here 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 Nowhere for Vallejo was first published in the UK 1972, and was a major staging post in the author's career, the penultimate volume to appear from a UK publisher before we issued the selected edition, Palenque, in the 1980s.The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both of them exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and 'Choices' were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the 'October' sequence, which ends with the moving "in memoriam" poem 'Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel'.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest poems brought together in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems."Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson