Bøger udgivet af Shearsman Books

Rob Goddard knew he shouldn't be travelling during a national lockdown, but it was Xmas and he headed West to see his family anyway. At Waterloo, the train seemed completely empty; perhaps it was, but an exploratory walk revealed at least four other passengers. All dead. They were ghosts. People he'd known; people who had died far too young.At first a convivial reunion, the journey's mood changed when four more travellers embarked, mutating further when two of them hatched into enormous dragonflies, meganeura, extinct for hundreds of millions of years. Rob, a poet, was reminded of the dragonflies that 'draw flame' in Gerard Manley Hopkins' famous sonnet. But these angelic giants possessed many different powers. Also, ominously, it had begun to snow heavily.Snow Bees is an apocalyptic novel with a difference, a roller coaster to the end of the night, a story in which hilarity rubs shoulders with death, and poetry rescues memory: a world apparently charging headlong towards oblivion in the plot of heaven.

"Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in The Orphic Voice, describes as ...a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward. That could serve as worthy blurb for And And And. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a prima poieia, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn't define, doesn't categorize, doesn't lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other..." -Dan Beachy-Quick

These pieces are selected from a steady series of essays and reviews I found myself publishing in the late aughts of the still early century. It was a period in which I was translating poetry, not so much as a specific translation "project," but as an extension of writing poetry. And as an interactive means of reading poetry. My impetus for writing prose on translated poetry was explorative, not didactic. During that period, I eventually published three translation collections from three very different cultural periods. In 2012, the 91 extant poems of Luxorius, a sixth century C.E. Latin epigramist, writing in Vandal-occupied North Africa at the dawn of the Dark Ages. This segued into a multi-year delve into Martial, and culminated in a good-sized, 2018 selection. And, concurrently, beginning with a chapbook in the late '70s, I'd been translating Rilke, finally publishing an extensive selection in 2020. One can happily and productively write poetry without too much theorizing. In fact, at least in our era's thinking, the best poems spring from need not theory. Even successful formalists utilize form as vehicle, not inspiration. But when you find yourself wanting to translate poetry into poetry, you can also find yourself in an anarchic unmapped landscape, navigating a cliff's edge in the fog between languages. When translating established classics, "do no harm" isn't a concern. But "don't do anything stupid" is a prime directive. All other rules spring from that. The "translation police" exist, but they're not so much to be feared as one's internal gestapo. So, many of these pieces served as negotiations with myself for permission. Some make repeat visits to the poets above for multiple looks. But from somewhere over the years, Catullus also kept showing up. I welcomed and re-welcomed those visits. (Art Beck)

This new poetry is saturated in folklore and myth. The glass paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the pedlars who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins. This volume is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance.Comments on On the Margins of Great Empires (2018):"For the last 30 years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible."-Kevin Nolan "Andrew Duncan [is] a writer whose poetry, criticism and magazine editing must make him one of the most vital and questing of today's authors." - David Hackbridge Johnson, The High Window"Andrew Duncan's selected poems from 1978 to 2003 [is] an excited, hugely wide-ranging poetry soaring from the star and jewel riches of the Asian margins down to the brick offices in which are fates are problematized. Quite cryptic but never shirking the open and articulate cry." -Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review

Félicien Rops (1833-1898) was a Belgian artist, primarily a print-maker. He was a friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarmé and Péladan. His work - symbolist and decadent in tone - retains its shock value over a century later. In a sequence of poems inspired by Rops' etchings and peppered with ill-translated fragments plundered from old exhibition catalogues, Hackbridge Johnson wrenches the daring reprobate into the 21st century where he is surely needed to puncture the hypocrisies of a discredited age.

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

'The intersection of theology and poetry is a charged zone of encounter and, if I may say it, discipline. Yet there's a generosity and a lightness to Milbank's verse: a concinnity both within, and within, the now, the lyric moment of generous apprehension, which aligns these taut lyrics with the sensibility of Traherne. "Ripeness rustles," but it is brightness that reigns here, among "alien and yet familiar creatures," a jackdaw, an escaped jaguar in a wood, a white cat in autumn, "beech-mulch" that "sings silently." These radiant poems overflow with creation and gratitude.' -G.C. Waldrep

Comments on previous work by Peter Hughes:'a poet who stands at the very forefront of twenty-first-century lyricism' -Ian Brinton, P.N. Review 'Peter Hughes personalises and modernises the Romantic lyric mode of address, blending it into the stratum of practical everyday living with its hassles and clutter, and the conversational speaking voice. He plays with the inheritance of the European love poem as a renewal of it, sometimes seeming to undermine it and then folding it back into his purpose. This is a poet working very much in his own way, and breaking the rules of just about all current schools.' -Peter Riley'Peter Hughes has persevered in the face of everything that conspires to stop you doing it. This is now a measured poetry of the everyday, an intense clarity produced from a steady gaze and replete with respect for the otherness of people, place and things. It is immanent with the numinous which moves towards the surface and sometimes manifests itself in a startling cognition.' -John James'I turn the new page and am in bliss with the pertinence and grace of the living language.' -Kelvin Corcoran'Read it, in the expectation of any number of lyrical pleasures, for the ear, for the play of line against continuous movement, for its celebration of remembered pleasures, for its good will and for its wit. By this last, I mean a mind in evidence in the poems that can constantly surprise itself in the turns of speech, that can dance in the syllables and still have world and experience in its sights.' -John Hall

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

David Jaffin's 'Simply Living Life' is his first book for 2023. He is one of the world's most prolific poets.

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.