Bücher veröffentlicht von Shearsman Books

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'.

In this book, eighteen authors from a dozen countries interpret Richard Berengarten's Changing (2016), a large-scale poetic mosaic written in honour of the I Ching, the first of the Confucian classics of ancient China.Changing is a work hewn out of the accrual of presence and a sagacious response to our anxious age. -MIKE BARRETT // Isn't this book's ultimate aim to contribute to a change in how we think ourselves and our world? -PAUL SCOTT DERRICK // Changing blazes a new path for cross-cultural dialogue between Eastern and Western poetry and poetics. -MING DONG GU // The tone is rich, mature, and generous, but also personal and personable. -ELEANOR GOODMAN // In Berengarten's words, we must plant our feet deeply and firmly in "this here now." -TZE-KI HON // A major contribution to modern English poetry -JEREMY HOOKER // An ongoing revolution occurring in the depth of one's heart in the reality of the present -SOPHIA KATZ // Every poem a microcosm -LUCAS KLEIN // A life-path book -HANK LAZER // A sustained outpouring of captured and contemplated moments. -OWEN LOWERY// A visionary poem and an ars poetica -RODERICK MAIN // Commonplace light becomes transformative, radiant, miraculous. -PASCHALIS NIKOLAOU // The Book of Changes continuously inspires fresh insights. Berengarten continues this great tradition. -GEOFFREY REDMOND // Patterned on the combined constancy and delicate fragility of the human heart. -HEYONG SHEN // Richard Berengarten is the latest in a long line of distinguished writers who have looked to the I Ching for creative sustenance. -RICHARD J. SMITH // It makes sense to read the Yijing-inspired poetry of Changing in the light of the Jewish prophetical tradition -RICO SNELLER // Steeped in the Chinese classic's wider, deeper and higher spheres of influence. -TAN CHEE LAY // A sound boat in which to cross the Great River called Change. -ALAN TRIST AND BOB DEVINE

The earliest poem in this book ('The Sleeper's Blue Shirt') is from 1972. The most recent poems are from 2022. Ken Bolton edited this selection, drawing from five books and one chapbook."John Levy has a magical deftness that makes world upon world appear out of nowhere. He marvels at the most ordinary circumstances and things (waiting for a bus, wrong numbers, accordion straps, a hammer, the letter K) and when he does so, there is nothing else in the universe. The work is meticulous, precise yet always unlabored. The poems come from Paris, Kyoto, Greece, Tucson, Edinburgh (among other places), and the poet has worked as a public defender. Reading Levy's wondrous poems, I say to myself again and again, "so this is how it's done!" His book is like no other."-John Martone"Ranging from haiku-like concision to freewheeling improvisation, from Kyoto to Tucson, Greece to Brighton, accordion straps to the letter K, John Levy's poems delight in renewed amazement at word and world. The characteristic mode of address is that of a letter writer, writing from love, friendship, encounters with strangers, not least a goat, with whom the author once had 'a longish,' and surprisingly significant, 'talk in Goatish'. Shot through with humour, enjoyably unafraid to 'digress', embracing grief as well as sheer happiness, these are thoroughly hospitable poems, which we, too, can 'open up within'. The tone is conversational, the subject matter unpretentious, in the tradition of William Carlos Williams. Poetry as playful and refreshing as this, yet also showing such care, is a rare and precious thing."-Philip Rowland"Levy is a special sort of magician, hypnotist, sleight-of-time trickster...inviting everyone to the world inside his poems, he invites them to play, to live it out like a tapestry of how it could be. Levy isn't afraid of the big question so death strolls in and out of the pages just like in real life...Collectively these poems have a strong effect on the reader...This is marvellous poetry... Everyone should read some John Levy." -Michael Dennis

In this new book of poems Rupert Loydell writes about the world he now finds himself living in, questioning the damage caused by time, memory, lockdown, aging, politics, lies, neglect and disinformation. Whether grappling with social history, corrupt data, road-building, Grenfell Tower, urban graffiti, faith and fine art, or 'the fickleness of language', these damaged prayers and disbelieving explorations are 'configured for maximum twitch'. And despite the resigned conclusion that 'we are only ever likely to have a clear backwards view', and even though 'it is totally absurd to expect answers that might help explain our world', Loydell clings to the way that 'memory is all about being able to change the past' and notes that 'the future is here right now'.'At times hard-hitting, at times biting, Loydell's poems pull beauty from the broken contexts of a rudderless society. It is poetry of rebellion and of urgency that underscores the need for poetry, art, conversation, and friendship in what is rapidly becoming an alienating, contextless world.' -Andrea Moorhead'Rupert Loydell's world is strangely beautiful, or beautifully strange, but it's also strangely familiar. What I like about Loydell's work is his commitment to a kind of truth, not to experience so much as to language.' -Magma'Loydell explores how we navigate the world around us, seen and unseen; how we might wonder, explain, and start to understand.' -Between'[...] brilliantly surreal, acutely observed and funny.' -Ambit

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.

David Hadbawnik's astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid first appeared from Shearsman Books in two volumes, in 2015 and 2021, in both cases with extensive illustrations. We now offer an un-illustrated, single-volume edition of the whole epic, in a more affordable format."David Hadbawnik has made Virgil our guest in ways that other translators of the Aeneid have not. He has recast the poem in contemporary verse, in poetic forms that are innovative and visually compelling. Moreover, he has used form to offer insight into the action of the epic and into the minds of its actors. Through Hadbawnik, Virgil speaks in our modern American idiom." -John Tipton, Chicago Review"...Hadbawnik's ironic wit brings Virgil's text to life for a contemporary readership even more impatient than its historic counterpart with the potential longueurs of traditional epic. [... his] version is fresh, irreverent, and radical.[...] In sum, this is a startling and stimulating version of Virgil's great epic for a twenty-first century readership which will engage student attention and has some interest for Translation Studies. Its lively irreverence reflects the way in which classical reception now (at last) feels able to tackle one of the central texts of Latin and European literature with up-to-date brio and gusto. Its in-your-face tactics will surely bring new readers and enthusiasts to the Aeneid, and has something to say to old ones too." -Stephen Harrison,Translation and Literature"...the pleasure Hadbawnik derives from Virgil's Latin provides a lesson in how readers might attend ancient storytelling from our perspective today. Translation for Hadbawnik is a site of poetic play and textual investigation, and such an approach enlivens our ability to listen across time and culture as a way to better inform our own. - DaleMartin Smith"Few narrative poems have possessed the Western imagination like Virgil's twelve-book epic written during Augustus's triumphant consolidation of the Roman Empire. [...] This volume goes a long way toward moving the narrative into the hands of contemporary readers, drawing out a playful understanding of the ancient story while exhibiting modern preferences for poetic interaction and inquiry into the history and terms of poetic form and translation. Hadbawnik shows the fun to be had in language's etymological resonance, and he delights in scenes of dramatic fulfillment and failure. His translation distills the essence of the narrative by directing a reader's perception of the tale." -from Dale Martin Smith's Introduction, 'The Warrior Ag¿n'.

A major event, this volume presents some 40 years of work."Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller's gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song... Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness." -David Wevill"Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist." -Frances Leviston, The Guardian"Kelvin Corcoran has allied a strikingly individual intelligence to a genuinely musical sensibility." -Don Paterson, The Observer"The 'straight music' of the English lyrical tradition drives these poems that are honed, hard, elegant and economic. Then, suddenly, brilliance flashes out against the grain, in the flaws. It is 'the ripped voice makes us free'." -Rosmarie Waldrop"Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present." -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence"Kelvin Corcoran's recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition." -Peter Riley, PN Review

"Larkin's way of pulling language up by the roots - literally, as we have frequently to go back to the root meanings of words to understand his unorthodox grammar - does not make it easy for the reader, but he is a rewarding and deeply original poet." -Isobel Armstrong"No poet has ever given so much to trees - his thought, his attention, his invention - which lets him then, in turn, give these trees to us, and in ways that highlight the complexities of their architectures and their contexts, their interactions with the myriad communities in which they participate. This new collection branches out toward grasses, seeds, electricity ... all propelled by a wonderful tanglework of sound that reflects the environmental networks in which trees play such a crucial role. This book is a sheer gift - of trees and to trees, and above all, to readers who love them." -Cole Swensen

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's new book of poems, Book of Rahim, is his first collection of new poetry in twenty-five years. It contains extraordinary records of the everyday, as well as a frequent reimagining of history that makes it as commonplace as a relative or a piece of furniture, and all the more strange and unrepeatable because of that. These involve Mehrotra inhabiting the voice and time of an ageing Ghalib (author of a memorable diary reflecting on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857); his revisiting Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (1556-1627), a Baharlu Turk, an important figure in the Mughal nobility during the reigns of Akbar and Jehangir; and his discovery of objects and letters from his family home in Lahore. The result is a frayed immediacy that hefty historical novels find difficult to achieve. (Amit Chaudhuri)

In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and editor. Since 1973 his home base has been in Norway and in the decades since he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian. His A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960-2010 (Marick Press, 2013) was described by Carol Rumens in The Guardian as "a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond." John Glenday, in Northwords Now, referred to the book as "a real treasure of a collection, a weighty, important reminder that Fulton Macpherson is a prominent figure in Scottish poetry... His poetry is enduring as granite. It will weather well", while Peter M. McDonald, in Rain Taxi, felt certain that "A Northern Habitat will stand the test of time. It is arguably the most important book yet from a Scottish poet in this new millennium."Ancient Light is his third Shearsman collection, following 2020's Arrivals of Light."Many of these [ poems in Arrivals of Light ] consist of just a few lines but they're suffused with a remarkable keenness of eye and, especially, freshness of thought and phrase. The very title ... speaks to a sense of continuing revelation, or more accurately revelations." -Chris Powici, Northwords Now

In her fifth book, Janet Sutherland explores journals written by her great-great-grandfather, George Davies, as he travelled to Serbia with his Queen's Messenger friend, Mr Gutch, in 1846 and 1847. She writes her own journals during a trip to Hungary and Serbia in 2018 and after her cancer diagnosis and treatment during the first Covid lockdowns of 2020. Poems, journals, letters, messenger regulations and other testimony, both imaginary and actual, question, answer and echo each other in a radical collage. All the writers are grappling with uncertainties. Sutherland is intrigued by what these testimonies reveal and hide. Part history, part poetry, part travelogue - these journals, poems and other writings interweave the then and now, the observed and imagined. What do we know about these messages and their messengers? What secrets and possibilities might these words carry? What can they tell us about ourselves? Andrew McMillan writes: "A poetic, kaleidoscopic compendium of diary, letters, photographs, facts, and poetry, as is said within the book "the text unhinges from story, fragments link and unlink". This is a space where 'everything's in motion' - the tectonic plates of varied forms and lives moving deftly across each other."

Livestream is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. Livestream's poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is Livestream's constant ecology. The photographs are resonators, and witnesses.

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2023 features poetry by Martin Anderson, Nora Blascsok, Melissa Buckheit, Stuart Cooke, Carrie Etter, Amy Evans Bauer, Alec Finlay, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Daniel Hinds, Emily Tristan Jones, Norman Jope, Kenny Knight, Mary Leader, Rob Mackenzie, James McLaughlin, Eliza O'Toole, Michelle Penn, Sophia Nugent-Siegal, Peter Robinson, Jaime Robles, Maurice Scully, Aidan Semmens, Nathan Shepherdson, Maria Stasiak, Cole Swensen, G.C. Waldrep, Carl Walsh and Petra White, plus translations of Anna Akhmatova (by Stephen Capus) and of Merece Rodoreda (by Rebecca Simpson).

The Enchanted Isles begins with a dream in which Oh, the narrator, returns to a voyage he made to the Galápagos - known as enchanted because of their danger-ous currents, which lured seamen to their deaths - ten years earlier. It was to be a voyage of enchantment, a lovers' voyage, an eight-day cruise paid for by a magical win at roulette, the number eight coming up eight times in a row. But in the meantime, Ah and Oh have separated, and so the memory dream is shot through with regret and also with a sometimes nightmarish vision of the ugly black volcanic islands where Darwin, observing mutations in finches, first came up with the idea of evolution. In a multi-themed jazz rondo form, extracts from Darwin's writings, geo-metry, chance and fate, giant tortoises complaining of human depredation, iguanas, jellyfish, blades of grass, extinct volcanoes, scuba diving and tender tourist conversation dance round and round. Occasionally the music breaks down and stutters: we hear dissonance as well as secret harmonies. This is a work of great lyricism, teasing humour and complex originality, a poem of everything."A radical experiment in poetics, a world that is both real and unreal." -Miguel Casado, La Vanguardia, Barcelona"One of the best books in Spanish of the past 20 years." -Francesco Tarquini, Ispanoamericana, University of Roma La sapienza

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that is the European Avant-Garde of the early twentieth century. In the accompanying memoir to his English translation of Seated Woman, Timothy Mathews gives a wide-ranging account of the ways Apollinaire interacted in his life and art with Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and the subjective as well as social experiences involved in urban modernism. In its scattered but controlled composition and the multiplicity of its tones, Seated Woman, published posthumously in 1920, is a powerful counterpoint to the multi-faceted poetry for which Apollinaire is often better known. In playing the music of violence as well as the generosity that characterised the Great War, it is a story of its time, for our time and any time. Apollinaire's writing as a whole is a living testament to the extraordinary creative energy he both witnessed and produced, but also his understanding of its vulnerability to exploitation and decay. This book in turn seeks to honour that understanding, its persistent calls to the imagination, and the wit, vision and honesty that await readers of Apollinaire's unique voice.The book includes a memoir by Timothy Mathews in which he discusses Seated Woman and his translation, as well as Apollinaire's aesthetic generally and its crucial part in the development of European modernism. The book contains further texts in which Timothy Mathews responds to Apollinaire's writing through translation, as well as critically and creatively. "A remarkable testimony to the 'on-the-go-ness' of Apollinaire. Having plunged into his poems for years untold, I discovered this Seated Woman (My God, she is that and more) through Timothy Mathews's rendering, I won't just say 'translation' - this is a kind of miracle of wit, facetious wording, and over-the-top, beyond the pale Beingness. Think upon this, Picasso!" -Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

In her debut collection The Lost Book of Barkynge, Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe. Barking was one of the most significant abbeys in Britain and a centre of learning for women, it offered space to the devout, the bookish, and those who simply did not fit anywhere else. These poems introduce some remarkable characters: poets, visionaries, washerwomen and queens, and range from the sacred feminine to the protofeminist. Whether one reads The Lost Book of Barkynge as a series of monologues or as a sequence evoking time and place, what emerges is an excavation of forgotten stories. Here the lost voices of the women of Barking are restored in poems that voice the power and poignancy of their lives - So our words let them reach then flicker into brightness."Ruth Wiggins' book demanded to be written. Channelling the voices of the abbesses of Barking, she leads us through the years 666 to 1539, the years their abbey thrived then declined by the marshy riverside of the Thames. Closely researched yet freely written in a rich diversity of forms, you should read this to understand our history, sacred and secular, but also for the story of our layered and watery landscape. It's a tale gleaming with the passionate intensity, intelligence and intimacy of nuns holding safe their little piece of land and learning in a world of princely power and avarice. Intermittently, local women interject in counterpoint. The pleasures of Ruth Wiggins' historically enriched language carefully wrought into the space of these elegant pages will draw you in, a rapt listener to this wonderful polyphony." -Harriet Tarlo"This is a wise, ambitious and beautifully written book that speaks with and through the nuns, allowing us a new intimacy with them in time and space. Wiggins movingly, and with great care and imagination, deftly, gorgeously, brings women's voices and lives back into history." -Deryn Rees-Jones

A rottenness at the heart of things, mapped onto England - London and other cities, the Midlands - and various narratives, manifests via apocalyptic omens and curses, and things being upside-down; an underworld and stasis. The aromatic and romantic Medlar (Mespilus germanica, a member of the apple and quince family), is considered inedible until 'bletted', allowed to rot. The collection touches on themes of xenophobia, Brexit and hypocrisy, as well as dallying in the English hedgerows, lanes and forests, sometimes with the English poets, in pursuit of the regenerative chaos and mischief present in nature. There is a fugitive hope of flow and change, breaking out of old patterns; a quest for sweetness.

Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments fluctuating between dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the bleakness of ageing, and accompanying the loved one through a long and debilitating illness. The continuity of mood and imagery gradually melds the fragments into a single poem. The poet stumbles confusedly as through a labyrinth of feeling and sensation. Who or what is the mysterious master of distances of the title? Time? Language? Oneself? The answer is a radical experiment in poetry and a new departure for this fine lyric poet."Jordi Doce is one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure. He brings all his faculties to the rich task of being; his voice inhabits the names, not just with wonder, but with new possibilities; [...] he is a companion, not a guide, always present with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way."-John Burnside"One of the most striking elements of We Were Not There is that feeling of collaborative concern, that awareness of commonality, the record of experiences that permits us to recognise our common humanity." -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence "Few modern poets are better able to make us rethink our everyday purposes and perceptions."-Brian Morton, PN ReviewPraise for Master of Distances"The book is further evidence of Doce's deeply personal lyrical journey, blending realism and metaphysics, an attention to the visible and lived with the imaginary and symbolic, the many faces of emotion with the bristling edges of thought."-Manuel Rico, El País

In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the concept of xenia - Greek for 'hospitality', later adopted by the Romans as a category of 'still-life' painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.'Anthony Caleshu has come up with a huge holiday of a book. Not only ambitious and thought-provoking but also (a rare combination) fun. From the tricksy introductory 'Epigraphs' to the 'Endnotes', he keeps us on our toes (if your brains are your toes?), the references and jokes flying every which (witch) way. We begin in the company of basketballs and cheese-plants, rollerchairs, and dinosaurs - and other things not often met with in poetry, in my experience, and go from there. To give you some idea of the mood: Caleshu quotes Epicurus's description of friendship as 'the most important means by which wisdom acquires happiness' - you could say the same about Xenia etc., as a means by which wisdom acquires happiness. What's not to like?' -Selima Hill

Craig Watson was a man of many talents, interests, and skills. He launched what would become a multifaceted career first in professional theater as a stage manager, producer, and manager of public festivals, concerts, theater productions, poetry readings, and more. He then led the global communications efforts for an international technology company, taught college literature courses, and served as literary manager and associate artistic director at a Tony Award-winning regional theater. And throughout his life, he served his communities first as a volunteer firefighter and then as emergency management director. But the work that sustained and nourished him was always in the creative arts, especially as a writer, poet, and mentor to others. Craig was a unique and dynamic voice in a fascinating, contentious, and multi-layered community of artists. While he indulged his passion for music and expanded his creative endeavors through painting, collage, and sculpture in later years, he never abandoned his love for and fascination with words. Described as "one of our most original and compelling poets," Craig Watson makes his long-awaited return to poetry with Apologia, his thirteenth book. It is being published posthumously following his passing in January 2022 at his home in Jamestown, Rhode Island.

'How do you get mortal harmonyout of a stone box into the moving air?With ash and ink, and sing a lyric air with passion.'"Proof..." asks and answers this question in 27 short poems as only poetry can. It is an account in the simplest, declarative language of the wren's song, the life in transit of the refugee, mortality, the poet's task, the fall of Constantinople, the Manchester Insurrection and the forgotten books. "Proof..." brims with the temerity to suggest that all these lives, all these events, matter, that they are all connected and that poetry is the medium of this vision. 'And it is throughthis hole in the night that the wren sings.'--Kelvin Corcoran

Shadow Box originated with a single piece, 'The Curiosities of Dr Hunter', a poem which gathered together many objects from Glasgow's Hunterian Museum in an investigation into the nature of eighteenth-century collecting; but the museum holds so many objects to catch the eye and imagination - cultural artefacts from across the world, scientific instruments, medical specimens, objects of the natural world - from which so many kinds of poem might be written. Here then are poems caught between the perfection of a single thing and a necessary enquiry into how the object came to be here, what its meanings might be, and who comes to be an observer here.

A collection of monologue poems by characters from the New Testament, viewed from the perspective of their Jewish background. Thinking his way back into situations depicted in the stories of the New Testament and what their Jewish legal and social context probably will have been, Atar Hadari places the voices of different characters, finding the tension between what the reality would have been and how such a voice would sound in today's world. Echoes of today's religious thought and language intertwined with the details of the past locate occasionally biting humour in these poems. These are the Jewish voices which often escape the gospel narrative. They do not mock the Apostles - they were human beings who were also there. They saw things which, as the android tells the bounty hunter at the end of Blade Runner, you would not believe."The unheard voices of the past from the people around Bethlehem's most famous son arise, and curl, and reach out bracingly into the present through Hadari's pages. There is something visceral and strong, yet only hinted at, in these poems regarding the shadow side of connection between the Jewish faith and the Messiah they do not take." -John Siddique"In his delightfully surprising dramatic monologues, Atar Hadari, who believes in miracles, accomplishes something miraculous, wittily yet respectfully recasting the stories of the Gospels from a Jewish perspective - and in one case from the perspective of a 'poor donkey.' His convincing portraits, limned in lively, musical lines, teach us that no human experience is impenetrable to a curious, sensitive mind, and that no single point of view can reveal all. As his 'Doubting Thomas' discovers, 'There are some things you can't own / However hard you grasp it'."-Boris Dralyuk

" 'Fear is the liquid state of / pain as a wound is the solid state of / fear.'Mariano Peyrou's pulsating and mesmerizing meditation on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which 'two parallel lines meet / in your eyes.' If parallel, how can these lines meet? The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because 'Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.' Peyrou's Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an inspired ode to self-recognition." -Marjorie Perloff

"A Man of Heart, the second part of A Presentment of Englishry, is the story of Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain. It is also a story about story-telling. It continues to follow the narrative trajectory of Läamon's late 12th-century version of The Legendary History, the foundation myth of Britain. By the 12th century this had very little in common with 'History' as we understand it in the 21st. Attempts to resolve the discrepancies or reconcile Läamon's version with what we currently know about the period are futile. Nor is it possible to rationalize the chronology. There are anachronisms, contradictions and inconsistencies in my text. It is not a modern novel." -Liam Guilar"The deconstructionist view of there being no single attainable truth about the past is worth bearing in mind as we become immersed in Liam Guilar's moving reconstruction of the land called Britain in the long-gone world of the 11th and 12th centuries: there are merely the histories which people tell to empower themselves in the present. This is of course applicable both to history and to memory since everything we see is filtered through our present-day mental lenses and we interpret the past in the light of what we have now become.[...] Liam Guilar's reconstruction of the foundations of our past is a con-vincing sift of details that offers the reader a 'morning familiar as cold stone' with 'Rain drifting through the smoke hole in the roof'." -Ian Brinton, Long Poem Magazine

Lee Harwood's work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice, speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from complex cut-ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.From his earliest pamphlet title illegible (1965) to his last collection The Orchid Boat (2014), New Collected Poems assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in pamphlet or book form, in broadly chronological order, fashioned upon the ordering of Harwood's own 2004 Collected Poems. Some excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected material from the end of his career completes this rich body of work.'This new collection is a generously considered gathering of resistant and supple fragments, hard evidence of a life truly lived. We are the beneficiaries of these dazzling transfusions of personality and circumstance. Of remembered and newly encountered detonations of affect. "The clarity of such moments," Harwood confesses, can never stay still, even when that seems to be the required task. Love moves and shifts. Through repeated acts of making, it coheres and continues.' -Iain Sinclair'Lee Harwood's English is like American English in that it lacks a strong sense of possession. At the same time it has a pearly, soft-focus quality one rarely sees in American poetry [...] The "great" poetry I like best has this elf-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to consider itself.' -John Ashbery'Harwood's work returns to local habitations and names, the lives of family, elegies for friends, to direct communication among intimates. These vividly rendered, plain-style evocations, intercut with speculation and emotion, construct improvised holding environments where the home world and the safety of loved ones is primary' -Peter Robinson, Times Literary Supplement

From the Purgatorial state of the epigraph and an opening sequence that riffs on the epic Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, through November's titular birds flitting in and out of existence, to the trawler that seems determined to find some sort of escape at the collection's finale, the poems examines various ghost-states on which life and death, light and dark hinge.Then there are encounters with Armstrong returning form the Moon, Virginia Woolf entering its tides, and a badger hinting at a hidden life up there; and there are moments of light, as a pig makes a tapestry, Ireland's forgotten handball alleys are recast in gold, and Lear grows antlers.