Tag Archives: Shearsman Books

Two books by Ian Brinton from Shearsman Books

Two books by Ian Brinton from Shearsman Books

Thrills and Frills, Selected Prose of Andrew Crozier edited by Ian Brinton: Michael Schmidt once wrote that Crozier ‘is a magnificent critic, moving with the certainty of a glacier, gathering everything.’ This collection of Crozier’s prose contains work that has never been reprinted since its initial publication in magazines from the 1960s to 1990s as well as material that has never been published at all. It is very much a companion volume to An Andrew Crozier Reader (Carcanet 2012) and nothing from the former volume is repeated here.

 

‘An intuition of the particular’, some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes edited by Ian Brinton: these essays and interviews are by a range of critics and friends and they give a wide-ranging perspective on the work of this important contemporary poet whose work is going from strength to strength. The Knives Forks and Spoons Press has just published Snowclone Detritus, Hughes’s take on Petrarch’s sonnets 97-116. ‘This is terrific work’ says John James. Peter Hughes’s Selected Poems will form a highlight of the forthcoming Shearsman reading at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury on Tuesday May 7th at 7.30. for further details see the Shearsman website.

 

The Shearsman books are available from www.shearsman.com

Snowclone Detritus can be got from www.kinivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

 

 

Andrew Duncan

Andrew Duncan

Two new books from Shearsman bring some lost or uncollected work of Andrew Duncan back into the public eye and both are startlingly immediate to the eye and mind.

 

Threads of Iron is Andrew’s lost book: not because it was never published, but because it never appeared as intended. Instead, the original was split into two and was published in two parts by Reality Street Editions (in 1991) and by Shearsman Books (in 2000). Another part of the manuscript was cut and became Sound Surface; this latter manuscript is part of In Five Eyes, published simultaneously with this volume.

 

Three of the poems from Threads of Iron were first published in Grosseteste Review 15 (1984-85), Tim Longville’s last issue of the finely produced magazine that he had started along with John Riley and Gordon Jackson in 1968. ‘The Poet and the Schizophrenic’, ‘Visitors to Art Galleries Considered as a Branch of the Fine Arts’ and ‘Turkish Music’ appeared alongside work by William Bronk, Tom Lowenstein, Andrew Crozier, Nick Totton, Philippe Jacottet, Rosemarie Waldrop, Stephen Rodefer, Ian Patterson, John Wilkinson, Peter Riley, Peter Robinson, Michael Haslam, Rod Mengham, Roy Fisher, Anthony Barnett, John James, David Chaloner and more…and more…

 

and they were followed by ‘A letter to Andrew Duncan’ by J. H. Prynne, a short extract from which appears on the back cover of this Shearsman publication:

‘Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly.’

 

As a matter of further interest and connectedness it is worth noting that the first issue of SNOW is due out on Friday:

SNOW 1 is published on Friday and will be sent out to contributors and those

who have already bought the issue by Saturday.

SNOW is 80 pages. All contributions are previously unpublished.

Prose and poetry by Michael Haslam, Rosa van Hensbergen, Peter Hughes,(Petrarch), D S Marriott, Alistair Noon, Joseph Persad, Denise Riley,

Peter Riley, Keith Sands (Mandelstam), Nick Totton, Juha Virtanen,

Nigel Wheale, James Wilson.

An etching dated 1975 by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; a 1983 letter by J H Prynne

substantially about Paul Celan and translation; music scores by India Cooke,

the late Leroy Jenkins, Dave Soldier; film, photography and other work by

Sung Hee Jin, Alexis Nishihata, restaurateur Alex von Riebech, Aya Toraiwa;

a drawing of Hélène Cixous reading at the 1979 Cambridge Poetry Festival.

 

SNOW is available only direct from the UK publisher. Issue 1 is priced at

£10 incl. mailing or euro12 or US$19 incl. airmailing. Payment can be made

to PayPal ID ab@abar.net or by sterling cheque payable to Anthony Barnett.

 

SNOW

Anthony Barnett, Ian Brinton, eds.

Allardyce Book

14 Mount Street, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1HL

ab@abar.net

http://www.abar.net

 

Hughes & Corcoran new from Shearsman

Hughes & Corcoran new from Shearsman

Kelvin Corcoran’s For the Greek Spring consists of a selection of his poetry about Greece, combining new work with poems from his previous collections. An air of presence and mystery; a roadside shrine:

 

‘As if by arrangement four figures are spaced evenly in the foreground of the photograph; a road sign, an old man seated on a bench, an empty bench and a shrine. The road runs around the southern slopes of Parnassos. The view drops into the deep river valley, make one mistake and you die. Beyond, the mountain wall of silence rises out of the frame as you stand with your back to Delphi….

You stand with your back to the sanctuary. The road is empty on a morning in Spring. scattered with scrub and gorse, the white mountain rises.’

Interviewed by Andrew Duncan, published in Don’t Start Me Talking (Salt 2006), Kelvin Corcoran referred to the importance of Greece for him: ‘…spending time in Greece, visiting sites, and wanting to know something about the timetable a few thousand years before, which has led to patterns of behaviour we see as political now, I think it’s all prefigured, I don’t think that much has changed.’

For the Greek Spring gives us an ancient presence in 2013.

Peter Hughes has his own Greek poems of course and they appear in the newly published Selected Poems. As with Kelvin Corcoran this poetry explores the geography of living presence and in the selections from The Summer of Agios Dimetrios we can feel ‘the feral sea-nymphs nudging the rudders’ and note ‘the darker sound / of the sea far below which almost gasps / almost continuously & so it should / carrying for miles & years through the scrub / of this old basket of litter & stars.’

 

 

Peter Hughes & Petrarch

Peter Hughes & Petrarch

Two splendid new publications of Peter Hughes’s on-going project are now available.

 

Soft Rush (The Red Ceilings Press, www.theredceilingspress.co.uk) contains English versions of Petrarch’s sonnets 67-96:

 

‘this endlessly rescripted history

of radiant unsuitability

has reached another disastrous milestone

it’s sixteen it’s beautiful & it’s mine’

 

Quite Frankly (Like This Press, www.likethispress.co.uk) is subtitled ‘After Petrarch Canzoniere 1-28’:

 

As Peter Riley puts it on the back cover ‘Quite Frankly makes a kind of sausage of Peter Hughes’ skills as a poet—minced, compressed, stretched out in equal lengths and wrapped in a 14th Century skin. As is to be expected, a kind of kaleidoscopic verbal defiance keeps false and narrowed versions of living away, and as the sequence progresses, for all the ironic modernisation and free-play it enters deeper and deeper into a sincere realisation of the modern love-poem.’

 

References to both these volumes will be found in the forthcoming Shearsman book, An intuition of the particular, some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes edited by Ian Brinton. This volume is expected in April to stand alongside Shearsman’s Selected Poems of Peter Hughes. The appropriateness of this timing is wonderful since Petrarch asserted that he first saw Laura at Easter Mass on April 6th 1327.

 

 

Tom Lowenstein’s notebooks & fantasies

Tom Lowenstein’s notebooks & fantasies

From Culbone Wood—In Xanadu

 

New from Shearsman

 

The late Roger Langley wrote of this book ‘A major work of the imagination. In no previous genre. Creates its own genre.’ Tom Lowenstein’s new publication is a riveting account of the world of Porlock and the world of Coleridge, ‘the discord between Somersetshire now and the timelessness of Xanadu’s appearance before me.’ This is a book to have on the shelf next to John Livingstone Lowes’s 1927 publication The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination.

 

Tom Lowenstein refers to the travel writings that so influenced Coleridge, Purchas His Pilgrimage, in terms of the early seventeenth-century writer’s fascination with small details: ‘shrunk as the wax in a dried old hive—lie golden cells of honey.’ Some of these cells will be looked into on the coming Tuesday, February 5th, at 7.30 in the Swedenborg Hall when Tom will be reading. Not to be missed!

 

 

 

 

The Many Cafés of John Welch

A new publication from John Welch’s The Many Press has just appeared. Cafés by Abdulkareem Kasid is the first extensive publication of this Iraqi poet whose work is well-known in the Arab world. The café as a site of sociability and meeting place for writers features prominently in literary life in Iraq and the sequence of lyric pieces here gives an insight into a world of lightness underpinned by a depth of focus which makes one want to read them over and over again.

 

Copies of this delightful chapbook can be obtained from The Many Press, 15 Norcott Road, London N16 7BJ priced at £3.50 post free.

 

A new collection of John Welch’s own poetry has also appeared from Shearsman. Its Halting Measure covers a range of themes but there is a constant preoccupation with the problems and ambiguities surrounding the making of poems, “our words like scented gardens for the blind.”

Jeremy Hilton will be reviewing this fine new collection in Tears in the Fence.

 

 

On the Cusp of Shearsman

Shearsman has recently published a wonderful book of reminiscences, autobiographical fragments and sheer feats of memory:

 

CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition

 

The Preface by the book’s editor, Geraldine Monk, sets the appetising tone:

This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or “cusp” I’m concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed.

 

The series of short pieces, each 8-10 pages long, by writers who were on the front-line of the small-press-magazine-poetry reading world around the country is simply a delight to read. It is a narrative of a world where there was a shared sense of excitement and bravado and its underlying thrust is always that ‘Poetry Matters’. Contributors range from Jim Burns and Peter Riley to Chris Torrance and Kris Hemensley; from Tony Baker and Peter Finch to Paul Buck and Nick Johnson. And more and so many more: Roy Fisher, Hannah Neate, Gillian Whiteley, Connie Pickard, Tom Pickard, John Freeman, Peter Hodgkiss, Alan Halsey & David Annwn, Fred Beake, Glenda George, John Seed, Tilla Brading, Tim Allen, Chris McCabe, Frances Presley, Ian Davidson, Anthony Mellors and, of course, the book’s editor Geraldine Monk.

 

Laurie Duggan will be reviewing this book in issue 57 of Tears in the Fence

 

And a new arrival from Oystercatcher: Peter Hughes’s excellent renderings of Petrach, Regulation Cascade. Twenty poems are presented in that familiar Oystercatcher style: attractively imaginative cover holding in 20 pages of clear white paper on which the poems sit firmly-framed in white space. As the first poem suggests, idea becomes object becomes love becomes laurel tree becomes thought becomes

POEM

 

Peter Hughes’s Selected Poems will be published by Shearsman next year, together with a volume of responses to his work, edited by Ian Brinton

Gael Turnbull on Poets & Poetry

Gael Turnbull on Poets & Poetry

This new publication from Shearsman is a long overdue collection of reviews, essays, memoirs and journal pieces by Gael Turnbull, a figure who is central to the world of 1960s Anglo-American poetry.

There is a section on Basil Bunting which includes an account of how Turnbull helped to bring about a meeting between Bunting and Peggy (she of ‘Fifty years a letter unanswered; / a visit postponed for fifty years’) as well as his own account of his visit to the poet of Wylam in the Winter of 1965.

There are essays/articles on Carlos Williams, Corman, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Burroughs and an excellent short piece on the publication of the Stuttgart edition of Olson’s Maximus Poems 1-10. Charles Tomlinson obtained his copies of the two Jonathan Williams volumes from Gael Turnbull as he records in his autobiographical sketches reprinted by Carcanet as American Essays: Making It New.

There is a section on British poets which includes essential work on Roy Fisher whose major poem, City, was first published by Turnbull’s Migrant Press in May 1961.

To register the Anglo-American connection within Turnbull’s work it is worth looking at issue 8, the last of his Migrant journals. It contains work by Edwin Morgan, Charles Olson, Anselm Hollo, Michael Shayer, Larry Eigner, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Roy Fisher.

As Jill Turnbull makes clear in her introductory comments Tony Frazer is responsible for the footnotes in the volume and they are absolutely spot on: unobtrusive but highly informative.

Sea Pie, a Shearsman anthology of Oystercatcher poetry

Sea Pie, a Shearsman anthology of Oystercatcher poetry

This is a terrific anthology of poetry and if I were still teaching I would buy a set for my Sixth-form without thinking twice. There is a flavour of excitement in this ‘Sea Pie’, a newness that is neither obtrusively academic nor mundanely accepting: these are the sort of poems which wake one up to the echoing sound of language in which experience is both personal and yet recognisably ‘other’. If real thought is ‘man in his wholeness wholly attending’ [D.H. Lawrence] then these poems reflect exactly that.

Peter Hughes places the anthology emphatically and with modest care in his fine introduction:

‘In the spirit of the best English poetry of the past, these poets have opted to move on. They make it new without resorting to gimmicks, make it aesthetically potent rather than merely decorative, and make it contemporary rather than modish. When you are dealing with the very new, as we are here, the merit of individual works of art is bound to be disputed. Some will be ignored, some dismissed, especially by those still relishing the styles of 1956. But, to paraphrase John James, it wasn’t like 1956 in 1956 either.’

This essential volume for those who want to taste the new recipes with the old ingredients can be purchased from Shearsman Books: www.shearsman.com

Martin Anderson & Ken Edwards

When the second volume of The Hoplite Journals appeared from Shearsman two years ago I wrote a brief account of it for Todd Swift’s EYEWEAR. What had struck me then was the writer’s awareness of the palpability of a past which haunts our present and a first reading of this lovely new volume of selected poems, Snow, confirms that view. As Paul Ravenscroft’s blurb comment says: ‘His form of vision allows experiences to interpenetrate in an imaginative space and emerge in new and original patterns.’

 

Ken Edwards’s Bardo is a modern rewrite of the Bardo Thodol, the devotional work known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, intended to be read to dead people, to help them in resisting reincarnation. The illusory gods and demons haunting the original have been translated into modern equivalents, while the original colour scheme of the seven days has been retained. This version has the port and old town of Hastings as its backdrop.

 

Snow is available from Shearsman Books at www.shearsman.com

Bardo is available from The Knives Forks And Spoons Press, 122 Birley Street, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, WA12 9UN