Search results for ""Shearsman Books""

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

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Showcasing some of Michael Smith's more unusual translations, this volumes features a version of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, together with translations of two long 18th-Century Irish poems, The Death of Art O'Leary and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen, and 250 cantes flamencos.

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Rupert M Loydell's third Shearsman collection shows him continuing his forays into collage and experimental writing, but always with a lyric turn.

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Sailor's Home is a miscellany (or anthology) of poems by six poets who came together for a private festival in London in October 2005. The poets are Arjen Duinker (Netherlands), W.N. Herbert (UK), Uwe Kolbe (Germany), Peter Laugesen (Denmark), Karine Martel (France) and Yang Lian (China), whose idea the festival was. Each poet takes the phrase "Sailor's Home" and builds a work from it in his or her own language. The festival, featuring the six poets and invited guest, and the book as a record of the event, demonstrate how the poets interact acroos languages and cultures. All the poems are presented in their original languages and in English translation. While the festival was a one-off event, the poems remain, and the book stands testimony to the creative impulse amongst friends whose poetry can cross borders. A fascinating document.

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The first double-issue of Shearsman magazine for 2021. Poetry by Charlotte Baldwin, Linda Black, Melissa Buckheit , Charlotte Baldwin, Susan Connolly, Harriet Cooper-Smithson, Claire Crowther, Amy Crutchfield, Jane Frank, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Christopher Gutkind, Mandy Haggith, Jeremy Hooker, David Johnson, Norman Jope, L Kiew, Peter Larkin, Mary Leader, Carola Luther , Robin Fulton Macpherson, Olivia McCannon, Peter Robinson, David Rushmer, Maurice Scully, Aidan Semmens, Lucy Sheerman, Hannah Cooper Smithson, Agnieszka Studzińska, Scott Thurston, Anannya Uberoi, John Welch, Petra White, Tamar Yoseloff & translations of Marta Agudo (by Lawrence Schimel), Kjell Espmark (by Robin Fulton Macpherson), Kinga Tóth (by Annie Rutherford) & Virgil (by David Hadbawnik). With this issue, Shearsman magazine marks 40 years of publication.

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Epic Series brings together three long poems by Eléna Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. Gathered here are Wale; or The Corse, Unknowne Land and The Wait; for Homer’s Penelope. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where place is continually shifting, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories— histories of conflict, translocation and injustice. “Eléna Rivera’s Unknowne Land is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape—a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of history quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera’s writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched . . . . We are given a contemporary Dantesque work of unique elements held together by spiritual accident and intention—its paradox explored and revealed through the book’s architectural underpinnings and entirely unexpected vision.” —Kathleen Fraser, judge of The Frances Jaffer Book Award “. . . this is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in Unknowne Land are only the most literal manifestation of this tension.” —Elizabeth Willis, The Poetry Project Newsletter “Quotation or paraphrase are inadequate to the range of emotional reference in Rivera’s book, in part because the emotion accumulates bit by bit—or element by element—as the pain becomes more pronounced (“To reduce the impact, I curl / my body forward”). By allowing that ‘each piece has to be stitched together,’ Rivera advocates a careful reading of the work in its entirety; in this way, her emotional argument gains force and momentum.” —Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Chicago Review “‘Who bears a record of the world?’ Rivera asks as the beginning of the text’s first section ‘Fire,’ and we hear immediately not only the impossibility of a project of such breadth being ‘borne,’ but also the impossible weight of such a responsibility, given the horror of that record. . . . Hers is a language rich with elegiac illumination, ever testing the edges of the illusory. Rivera questions the possibility for any meaning to adhere, even as she entrances us with the ‘rhythm of the pencil’ in her attempts.” —Rusty Morrison, Poetry Flash

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"In House At Out, Mark Goodwin steps beyond the physical landscapes of Back of A Vast, into a new topography: a world that is a "wild's inf i nite b its" approached through the gaps and hollows in the word. The holes are apertures as we zoom into language, crack open word hordes and find worlds of association, "hole keys" with which we open kinetic lands as nimble as "music thinking of water". Here are poems that "house and home // and hone a mind of sky-leaf sheets." Step out with this book and relish the trip elsewhere." -Simon Perril

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In these mercurial poems, real and imaginary events combine with overheard, quoted and misquoted voices to produce a slippery and unreliable series of opinionated poems. What appear at first to be heartfelt confessions reveal themselves to be exercises in ventriloquism, argumentative fictions that seek to subvert and surprise the reader. This poetry is a different kind of beast to what you might have expected.

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