Bøker utgitt av Shearsman Books

'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.

Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated.

I chanced to see Old English verse in paragraphs like prose, obsolete characters redolent of atmospheres we are no longer encouraged to admit. An ancient tradition, reaching beyond us into new forms, frames what we might hand over or betray.