Bøger udgivet af Shearsman Books

A guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors written by the author whose typescript of the book was discovered amongst his papers after his death.

I've played, watched and loved football all my life. So I thought I'd write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. The poems here are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. (Steve Ely)

Model City answers its own inaugural question 'What was it like?' in 288 different ways. The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism.

This book contains 162 poems: the 154 canonical Collected Poems, presented by year and within each year's order of composition and/or first printing, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems interspersed chronologically among them. Only one of his rejected, early poems has been included, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street,' used here as a kind of overture.

"Luis Miguel Aguilar's work is a conversation, between the past and the present, between the educated and the lay person, between useless details and essentials, between erudite data and vital impulses. It is not a spur of the moment conversation, but one that arises from the serenity of an extended, long-term approach, tying up loose ends and giving rise to complete, complex and exalted theories." -Juan Manuel Gómez "Aguilar's poetry is unlike any other from Mexico in recent decades. Perhaps such a deliberately isolated position is even arrogant. It is a superior option in contemporary Mexican literature." -José Joaquín Blanco"There are poets who are born mature, broad-browed and clear of vision. Luis Miguel Aguilar is one of them. Each book is a gift full of surprises, riddles and enigmas that invite the reader to reread, piece by piece, to savour them: there is an erudite, cultured, referential voice; then there is a more melodic, simple voice that recites ballads and popular songs; and finally there is the intimate monologue, which deals with the familiar terroir and tries to decipher the meaning of life, with all its furies and its sorrows." -Arturo Dávila"His is a work and a voice that, as part of contemporary Mexican poetry, gives it weight and horizons that cannot be refuted. As a reader, I am grateful for this 'difficult minute' that Luis Miguel Aguilar has had to live through, which he says is between the vehement minute and the cowardly minute, adding: 'poetry is the difficult minute'." -José Javier Villarreal

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one's ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what's happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers - the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." -Martha Ronk

"Indelible and deeply resonant, Linda Black's Interior demonstrates a poet at the peak of their powers. This collection constitutes a wondrous neo-Cartesian studio evoking an ars poetica that emphasizes language as both trace and palimpsest. Here, Black explores the intersections of writing, desire and creativity in marvellously fragmented and Frankensteinian ways. In haunting poems, the poet-artist is resur-rected as defamiliarizing and uncanny: 'I rest / my hand outside / myself & draw'. Interior gives priority to improvisation and bricolage, and a questioning semiotics, as it lightly and powerfully sketches the body's relationship to the world. Black employs compelling dualisms to engage with both the breakdown and articulacy of an utterly contemporary language fully attuned to the ineffable: 'In my heart my two loves merge. This is all I can tell you.'"-Cassandra AthertonComments on Then"'Time is of the effervescence', the opening poem of Then, reads like a surreal poetic credo with its oblique imperatives: 'Tolerate the unknown, the intimation'. It reminds me of Kenneth Koch's credo 'Fresh Air' and his insistence that we should 'glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop'. Like Koch, Black also celebrates the 'new poem of the twentieth century', now made fit for the twenty-first. Then is a wow." -Frances Presley, Stride"I simply love this book and could quote from it endlessly. Split into nine sections it's playful yet serious and seriously playful at the same time. These are poems which sing and suggest, slip from idea to idea, confuse your thought processes yet delight the eye and the brain with an abundance of energy, skill and sheer brilliance. There is rhyme and assonance in abundance, all the traditional tricks of the trade yet done in such a way as not to overstate the case and even when this is the case to do it with such bravado and gusto that the reader is helplessly in thrall." -Steve Spence, Tears in the Fence"Then is a collection which speaks to the past, present, and future... Then is multi-faceted in its pictorial, tightly constructed, and lyrical manipulations of language. Black's writing asks its reader not to overthink or attempt to untangle the tricksy language it engages with, but rather to immerse oneself in words and 'Browse for/the time being'. Then offers honest insights into the joyful and traumatic moments of life, emphasising the emotional depth, creativity, and skilfulness of Black's writing." -Eilidh Henderson, Dundee University Review of the Arts

'Across an already diverse and courageously experimental body of work Cave has proved herself a poet and artist always worth anticipating with excitement. The Book of Yona is possibly her most extraordinary collection yet. A dizzyingly erotic, stricken and compassionate queering of the Song of Solomon which channels a displaced voice with hallucinatory clarity. As lucidly framed as it is, I experience a different collection each time I read it: sometimes deeply funny, the way true intimacy resolves into a kind of laughter of astonishment; sometimes quiet and moving in its hymnody and the sense of love as sacred ritual; sometimes burning with its conviction and the anger of the marginalised or censored. The poems draw so naturally on the hysterical-sublime and heightened expression of the Biblical text, juxtaposing this with perfectly pitched contemporary and everyday points of reference which never jar, but enhance the timelessness and force of the emotion. A stunning poetic, theological and erotic achievement, and a collection I know I will return to again and again - for inspiration, permission and insight - for the rest of my career.' -Luke Kennard'Witty and sensual, The Book of Yona invites us into intimacies of the feminine, queer and sacred with a holy jouissance. With verbal elasticity and playful fusions of time and geography, Sarah Cave traces a via negativa through secret truths that were there all along in the half-light of cedar branches, the archives, the anchorage... read and be drawn into companionship, divine encounter, love.' -Phoebe Power'Sarah Cave's collection is, by turns, sinuous, troubling and sensuous. Its central conceit - that Jesus's sister Yona is cursed to live until his return at the Apocalypse - is certainly ambitious, but is handled with real tenderness and humanity. Indeed, Cave interrogates the registers of queer desire, of faith and of bodies without ever losing sight of what Donne calls "Love's mysteries".' -Rachel Mann

From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya's first birthday to the Tsar's abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnók and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.

Colours Nailed to the Mast is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may be obvious. More so than some of what I seem to recall here, sharing the dream quality that has most intrigued me - a conviction my dreams have been annexed by another consciousness with a history and range of knowledge I cannot claim.

This volume includes the 4 chapbooks published in 1917-18 and presents, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have El espejo de agua, written in 1914-16, first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not distributed until 1918. Horizon carré(see below) follows and then come Ecuatorial (written in Spanish), Poemas árticos, Hallali and Tour Eiffel, the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period, Hallali and Tour Eiffel-both marked by textual experimentation-were very important for the rising wave of the Spanish avant-garde. In this second edition, we have added an appendix containing the French version of the title poem, Équatoriale, which is at least partly translated by the author, an early version of Tour Eiffel as published in the magazine Nord-Sud, together with a Spanish version of the finished poem.

Poetry. The world's most prolific poet? Retirement agrees with David Jaffin, as he presents his second volume of trademark short lyrics for 2016.

Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022) was a major Scottish writer from Skye. He composed poetry, songs, journalism, scripts, librettos and translations. Among Gaelic-speakers he was known as Aonghas Dubh - Black Angus. Among his many accolades, he won the 1997 Stakis prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, and also received the Saltire Society's Premiere Award for contribution to the arts in 2005. His New & Selected Poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A' Chloc, was published by Polygon in 2012.Aonghas grew up in a croft in Uig, on Skye. His first encounter with the English language was at school: while Aonghas spoke Gaelic at home, English was his language of education, and the first language that he wrote poetry in. While studying at Glasgow he became part of Philip Hobsbaum's famous Glasgow Group of creative writers, alongside Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. He became involved with the Poetry Society while working as a housing officer in London: he later became the writer in residence at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on Skye, and this reinvigorated his desire to write in Gaelic also. Latterly Aonghas became famous as a Gaelic-language writer, though in fact he composed work in all three native languages of Scotland. He was a founding member of the Scottish Poetry Library.

Toby Olson began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master's Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts.The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady's Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young's Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity's Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions. The period covered is 1969-1984.

Toby Olson began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master's Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of his efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 he found he had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while he continued with fiction, he also found he was writing poetry, and since then he has managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, contains the collections Human Nature (New Directions), Darklight and Death Sentences (both from Shearman Books), and See / Saw, published here for the first time.

Petra White is a distinctive voice in Australian poetry. That Galloping Horse is her sixth collection, and the first to introduce her to UK readers. Written while living in Melbourne, London and Berlin between 2017 and 2023, this new collection includes 13 elegies that mediate a spiritual anguish through a delight in language and the physical world. White's characteristic, often dark playfulness is also abundant in this collection, with short mysterious lyrics that build layers of irony, and raw narratives that traverse the Nullarbor Highway and the atomic cloud of Maralinga. In its flexible and changeable styles, That Galloping Horse catches many thematic concerns, including proximity to the Ukraine War, domestic life in the reality of planetary demise, the strangeness of post-pandemic Berlin, modern work, marriage and the possibilities of familial love.Comments on previous collections:"This is a very accomplished and very complex first book by a poet who can be said to be, already, of considerable importance." -Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, on The Incoming Tide"Among our poets, I was moved by Petra White with the intense inwardness attained in her near-collected A Hunger." -Chris Wallace-Crabbe, The Sydney Morning Herald, Books of the Year 2015"'How the Temple was Built' is not an easy poem to describe. Suffice to say that it has something in common with Arthur Boyd's biblical paintings and, arguably, with Ted Hughes's book-length poem Crow... it is satisfyingly physical and meta-physical at the same time." -Geoff Page, The Australian, on Reading for a Quiet Morning "Petra White's 'Ode on the End' is hectically imperilled - 'He gives/you the necks of your enemies/(fear must have foes)./He draws up a battle/where perhaps there was only a soul'. Her work is often Rilkean internal interrogation, with emphatic alliteration, but there are also finely executed portraits such as 'Older Sister' - 'chore-hungry and chore-fed ... Her fingers fly, her eyes are stone'. -Gig Ryan, The Sydney Morning Herald, on Thirty Australian Poets

"I go to Ian Seed's poetry whenever I need reminding of the possibilities or a good slap in the inspiration. A master of the prose poem and the unexpected lyric. There's a beautiful, painterly logic to these compositions and a perfect balance between the elevating magical and the crushingly disappointing. His narrators speak for all of us, at work, in transit, in family, memory, or continental cities. Grief-stricken, erotic, silly, embarrassed or baffled, but somehow determined to live 'joyously and seriously' against the inexplicable, the obligatory and the mundane at whatever damn cost. Night Window is shot through with melancholy, wit, absences and bookshops - it deserves legions of readers." -Luke Kennard "Exquisitely voiced and deeply beguiling, Night Window explores impermanence in uncanny, liminal and provocative poems. Often set in the transitory spaces of trains, buses, cafés, markets and trattorie, narrators confront their nostalgia and self-imposed exile in a series of threshold moments foregrounding 'obsession', 'unspeakable desire', erotic remembrance and quotidian encounters. The motif of fenestration heightens the fusion between neo-Gothic outsiderness and modernity's transcendent flaneurism in poems which are often mordantly humorous and sardonic. In self-reflexive, Calvino-esque moments, Seed reveals, 'I have to find a way / to free the text to yield its story' and reminds us, 'It takes a stranger to see the beauty'. Gertrude Stein once said Max Jacob had a 'poet soul'. A translator of Jacob's poetry, Ian Seed in Night Window, uncovers his own poet's soul and cements his reputation as one of the finest contemporary proponents of the prose poem form." -Cassandra Atherton Comments on previous books: "As a collection, The Underground Cabaret is more precise, more tightly structured than even its predecessors (which were themselves masterpieces of concision). It is compellingly readable, funny and at times filled with an eerie menace; all of which should appeal to the general reader. If there were any justice, it would be a bestseller." -Joe Darlington, The Manchester Review of Books. "In general, I tend to think of surrealist poetry as being grounded in a kind of contorted analogy, incongruent images welded together to create a kind of irrational logic, but Seed more or less eschews analogy. He shows us the world as it is, but it's not quite this world. All the elements seem quite familiar: parents, houses, streets, hotels, tourist attractions, partners and ex-partners, workplaces. However, they act and interact in ways that are disconcerting, just slightly off centre [...] The great strength of Seed's writing is that its apparent simplicity can encompass such multiple dimensions of reading." -Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements. "The Underground Cabaret is a series of sophisticated prose poems. The poems often give a surreal, dream-like picture of small incidents in charged, mysterious contexts. They are written with an easy elegance which underpins the surrealism and draws the reader into a world which feels real and whole, somehow. One of the blurb comments suggests that these pieces are actually about 'what it means to be human', and there is a lot of truth in that. In part, that sense is a result of Seed's skill as a writer, in part too, it is the element of embedded realism which gives the pieces their foundation; an air of normalcy that runs through even the 'weirdest' of the pieces." -Ian Pople, PN Review.

In his fourth collection from Shearsman Books, Alasdair Paterson ranges as widely as ever - from the bewilderments of a Scottish childhood to the mixed messages of later life, from gnarly nature notes to an A-Z of lines salvaged from lost Russian novels. The spirit of Mercury - bringer of messages, patron of tricksters, keeper and crosser of boundaries - hovers invisibly and a tad unreliably overhead.Critical responses - "You can take the boy out of Leith but seemingly you can't stop him writing poems about it. Take a telling, pal!" -Leith Literary Gazette"In this latest brazen provocation, the great Russian literary tradition is alphabetically disrespected. Needless to say, there will be consequences..." -Kamchatka Hints and Tips"Here's a city boy's take on the glories of the natural world. On the evidence of this, we have to ask: Mr Paterson, did you ever stand in a field of cows with the wind in your face?" -Forfar Farmer

On Light Sources and Landing Rights: "Decidedly prolific bite-sized, brief, crisply restrained and profoundly philosophical."¿The Chicago Review¿"I was moved, deeply moved by David Jaffin's collections of verse, by their sensitivity, their loveliness, their honesty."¿Chaim Potok"David Jaffin's work is consistently refreshing and innovating, his is a most welcome contemporary poetic voice. And his keen, sensitive observations make for precise, sensuous and elegant poetry. It is thus not surprising that he is also a connoisseur of Franz Joseph Haydn's chamber music. I warmly recommend David Jaffin's books." -Wolfgang Binder, University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany"Everything about these books underlines the classical nature of his art ... Jaffin's work, it seems to me, represents the area from which any poetic revival will have to start ... Jaffin's language is highly abstracted, sharp and original. This is not easy poetry: it is the product of American energy and a Judaic sensibility, it is intelligent and demanding." -The late Michael Butler, University of Birmingham, England"Dream Flow is a substantial collection of David Jaffin's poetry. At 311 pages, it's an inexhaustible well in which one can gaze and dip at one's leisure, bringing reflective waters to the lips. To say these poems reveal the extent of the intricate word-play and the shimmer of meanings. And the more one sees and says the more the subtle gifts keep coming." -Jessie Glass, Mekai University, Tokyo, Japan"On Dream Flow David Jaffin is a prolific American poet whose work uses the minimum possible means of expression in order to reach for essentials in his subject matter ... The limpid texture of his work resists quotation or excerption; his deceptively simple surfaces use the tensions inherent in the vocabulary to open up new horizons. Delicate creations, his poems tend to be wonderfully light lyrics."¿-www.bogpriser.dk, Denmark

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with César Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing a large number of books in the period 1917-1925. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris. He reached his poetic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two master-pieces: the long poem, Altazor, and the book-length prose-poem Temblor de cielo (Skyquake). Two further collections would follow during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today. Ver y palpar is one of the two volumes published in 1941, its sister being El ciudadano de olvido (Citizen of Oblivion), released in this series in 2021. The two books contain some the author's finest poetry but are not generally part of the debate on Huidobro's work. These translations seek to correct that error.

Focusing on experiences of dislocation and on the importance of image and translation, That Nostalgia records John Mateer's travels and his witnessing of the inequities and pleasures of life in many parts of the world, from China and Japan, South-East Asia and Türkiye, through Portugal, and then, further west, to Mexico and the USA. Central to his poetics is an awareness of the artifice of the Imperial, or, as he coins it, "Empire, that Nostalgia". As the first European power to lose its global empire, Portugal plays a special role in Mateer's imagination; with its continuing connections to Asia and Africa, and its own cosmopolitan life led among the ruins. Having spent his youth in South Africa, Mateer's sensitivity to politics in all its forms allows him to make of that nostalgia various kinds of irony through which he can carefully observe the present world. Throughout the work he is attentive, not only to language itself, but also to its internalized practices, cultural and spiritual. That Nostalgia is more personal than Unbelievers, or 'The Moor' and more historically engaged than João: (sonnets). Its invitation to readers is to have them question their own subjectivity, their own unknowing, to reconsider the elusiveness of deep experience in a vast, often chaotic, contemporary world. The book collects poems written between 1995 and 2016, uniting work from publications that have appeared in Australia, Portugal, Macau, Sumatra, Japan, South Africa and the UK, most now out-of-print and rare, and it does not include work from the author's other Shearsman titles.

"These miraculous poems of everyday matter magnified by forty reveal our world in all its pristine glory - reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's household odes, but stranger. Her sketches of waterfalls are extraordinary, as if we are witnessing the birth of water and every inch hallucinatory. Her magnifying eye probes the roots of matter and spirit, where they intertwine and dance with light. Tsvetanka Elenkova has a mystic's eye, an inventive vision honed with surgical precision." -Pascale Petit "In Magnification Forty, Tsvetanka Elenkova turns her piercing poetic intelligence upon the small things of the world. She lifts them up to us in all their revelatory and spiritual power. Elenkova is a visionary, who makes quietness speak and who reminds us that the miracle of embodiment is realised not only in the exceptional but in what's humble and quotidian. This deeply mindful book is a call for us to pay attention to what we experience. It's also a masterclass in the lucid and economical poetics that have made Elenkova into a leading European poet." -Fiona Sampson

Satyr is Huidobro's last novel, published in Santiago in 1939, at a time when little of his work was in print in his native land. While that situation would be rectified two years later, with the release of two major poetry collections, this volume is his final work in prose, and one that has mostly escaped attention since. Closer examination of the text reveals however that it contains a number of the author's literary, social, political and philosophical preoccupations, with many themes from his poems, essays, and manifestos re-occurring in the book, the protagonist of which, Bernardo Saguen, may be regarded on one level as a failed artist. This would-be writer is one that goes to the bad, and whose mental collapse - he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - and moral disintegration seem to parallel the kind of disintegration seen in some of the author's later poems. Written at a time when Huidobro was unsure of his literary position in Chile, the book is much concerned with the idea of poetic creation, while also worrying at the concept of reality, whether artistic creations are part of reality itself, and whether the artist himself is part of reality. As the novel proceeds, Saguen finds himself increasingly untethered from that reality as he has a nervous breakdown, only for his return to a measure of sanity and composure to coincide with horror, and then total mental collapse. The reader's sympathies lie with him at the outset, but we have only his word for the events that transpire; his unreliability as a narrator becomes ever more obvious, and clues begin to mount. Have we, as readers been deceived by a monstrous and amoral egoist, or have we really observed a total mental breakdown, as it was happening? Nothing is clear at the end, apart from the horror.

"Thurston's poems always danced, as the early writings here demonstrate, in line and spacing, long before dance as a practice became his poetic focus and his ethical metaphor for other modes of action and introspection. They always measured a world to be moved into, fine lines across fine distinctions. His texts become cues for performance, in performance, but just as important is the insistent voice of the poem as it becomes increasingly the voice of the poet: restless, relentless, carrying us with it. This is all for us: 'in dancing your own rite you don't/ do it for yourself.' This is crystallized in the culminating triumph of the lockdown sonnet sequence, 'A Hard Grief'; it reaches out from our shared resignation and hope. We're all 'searching/ for the shapes that shadowed the meaning/ until the flow showed up', and Thurston is our invaluable lead." -Robert Sheppard'Lyrical meditations on selfhood which are powerful and well-crafted' -Luke Kennard on Hold'A poetic inquiry that is ethical, cautious and defiant at once ... a beautiful, unique book' -Jennifer Moxley on Internal Rhyme'Alive with pace, dance and wordplay' -Sarah James on Of Being Circular 'Deeply human and affecting ... reminds us of what poetry is capable of when put under pressure' -Ian Davidson on Reverses Heart's Reassembly'Lines of grace, rawness and wondering; this is poetry and reflection rich with exploration' -Sarah Kelly on Poems for the Dance'Metaphysical dialogues between the dancing and linguistic self' -Amy McCauley on We Must Betray Our Potential'A distinctive form of synaesthetic experimentation' -Hazel Smith on Phrases towards a kinepoetics

When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it's related to images - the ekphrastic relationship - I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there's a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton's Viewer / Viewed, the answer is a resounding Yes. First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. The photomontage method is in a tradition pioneered by the German photo-montage artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) and later by the contemporary British conceptual artist John Stezaker's Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) series, though Hamilton's are not so surreal. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems to accord proportion notmeaning not even aesthetic value | to invite the tugof juxtaposition |"The tug of juxtaposition": the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process - for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process - results in the poems' extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding. -Robert Vas Dias

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2023 features poetry by Serena Alagappan, Wendy Allen, Mark Byers, Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell, Peter Dukes, David Dumouriez, Marie-Louise Eyres, Dominic Fisher, Mark Goodwin, Amlanjyoti Goswami, John Greening, Finn Haunch, Neal Hoskins, Fiona Larkin, Peter Larkin, Rupert M Loydell, Valeria Melchioretto, Eliza O'Toole, John Phillips, Amber Rollinson, D'or Seifer, Natalie Shaw, Robert Sheppard and Judi Sutherland; plus translations of Kjell Espmark (by Robin Fulton Macpherson), Attila József (by Agnes Lehóczky & Adam Piette), Lutz Seiler (by Stefan Tobler), and Roelof Ten Napel (by Judith Wilkinson).

"Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog's ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of a finch, or in finding herself a holidaying bystander in 1968, witnessing tanks enroute to the invasion of former Czechoslovakia. This acutely-assembled collection is rich in such telling intersections, and her narrative energy is flawless. She follows threads of thought and memory and imagination with exact insight and compassion. She reminds us that unless we give honour and attention to the past, we are lost. Her poems are rich in those qualities that we require of poems, so that we may better comprehend and celebrate our human lives." -Penelope Shuttle

Sleep guardians, unstep yourselves. Turn towards the outside. Recall his speaking look, the only sound in a city of whisperers where hurt is cradled in the palm of a hand. Cuts traced along ink lines, words like milk and pleasure and pain turned inside out and shaken from these pages. Rest your head upon that bosom. You are marooned on a pale island, lapped by gentle voices, careful footsteps, confidences. Pine Island is an experimental memoir written in the form of a series of letters to an unknown recipient. The book chronicles a year in the life of the author as she navigates family illness, bereavement and motherhood while honouring and cultivating the poetic life she has created. Weaving family interactions and personal reflections with observations of the natural world and accounts of the weather, the book creates an intimate space in which the reader becomes a participant in an evolving present."Lucy Sheerman's elegantly filigreed poems act as open letters in complete sentences and somehow dwell in a completely emotional, existential space between a kind of fairytale allegorical world and one that's personal and thoroughly modern. Whether 'Dearest' is lover, friend, child or some other kind of intimate other, these poems carve out a strong craving for saying the things one usually can't-except by way of poetry." -Lee Ann Brown

One evening in 1961, in the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Surrey, 20-year-old Chris Torrance - solicitor's clerk with novelistic ambitions - encountered a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians. For Torrance, this was "the most important day of my life". Dazzled, he was soon joining in their activities: wild weekends in the country, his first scary public readings, and, from 1963, co-editing the poetry and jazz magazine Origins/Diversions. In literary terms, Torrance's greatest influence from the group was Bill Wyatt, who introduced him to "useful short forms" like haiku, and to William Carlos Williams' Paterson. Wyatt, later a prolific poet, translator, naturalist, and the first Zen monk ordained in Britain, remained a life-long friend and ally. Origins/Diversions connected Torrance to other 'underground' writers and publishers, including Tina Morris and Dave Cunliffe in Blackburn, and, through them, Lee Harwood in London. In June 1964 Harwood came to Carshalton for a walk around Torrance's patch. Reciprocal visits followed, with Torrance cycling to the East End, where Harwood was writing his long poem Cable Street. They were very different people, Torrance focussed on his local area and his local friends, Harwood a cool, elegant but friendly cosmopolitan, feeding Torrance the exciting new writing via his job at Better Books in Charing Cross Road. Torrance now began finding his own voice as a poet, and, through Harwood's encouragement, placed work in the Cambridge magazine, The English Intelligencer. One of its editors, Andrew Crozier, published Torrance's first two books. In the spring of 1965 Torrance gave up his 7 year career in solicitors' offices, and joined the local Parks Department as a labourer. As the title Green Orange Purple Red implies, he wanted a more sensual take on the world via his writing - a Keatsian ambition. About then he found a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry, and embarked on a lifelong 'love affair' with those writers and that energy. In particular, the enormous presence of Charles Olson, seemed to confirm that - in terms of big ambition and local detail - Torrance was on the right track with his writing. Validation came in July 1966, with 'The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision'. Torrance was cutting the grass outside the Laundry, when his vocation was revealed to him: 'I'm going to be a poet'. It wasn't a 'vision'; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed ("I accepted it completely"). As The Voice diminished into the clatter of machinery and the chatter of the laundry girls, the path ahead lay clear. In the autumn of 1967, Torrance and his partner Val settled in Bristol, with Torrance working as a Parks Dept. labourer again. His near-3 year stay in Bristol was a transitional time, with a tendency in his writing towards psychedelia and a broader spirituality becoming more evident. In June 1970, Torrance moved to a cottage in pastoral/industrial South Wales, to 'chew the lotus in peace', as John Wieners has it. He was to stay there for 50 years, increasing the range and depth of his poetic vision, but much of the foundations and shape of his future writing are here in this early work: inspiration from his locality, from geology up; the prosodic links between music and words; a positive faith that anyone - taking himself as the model - could and should be creative; and, importantly, the idea of larger cycles of writing - as in The Carshalton Poems - culminating in his life's major work, The Magic Door.-Phil Maillard