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The Tang dynasty (618 - 907 AD), is celebrated as the greatest moment in Chinese poetry, a time when poetry was highly rated, and some of China's most famous poets were writing. Du Fu (712-770 AD) is widely regarded as the greatest of these. He himself wrote that he aimed to startle his readers, and in some of his more avant-garde poems he combines and contrasts images in a way that has an almost modernist feel to it. On the other hand, he also enjoyed and celebrated the simple pleasures in life, and his (apparently) lighter poems about friendship and his natural surroundings show this clearly.

A True Story Based on Lies is a remarkable novel dealing with universal issues of class discrimination, male oppression and female servitude through spellbinding dual narratives. Set in contemporary Mexico, the book examines the fallout from a sexual relationship between Leonora, a domestic servant to the wealthy O'Conner family, and the master of the house. When a child, Aura Olivia, is born from this relationship she is brought up as the daughter of the house. As the novel unfolds, the "true" story gradually emerges. We are delighted to reissue Clement's first novel, which was a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and has been taken to the stage by Mexico's National Theatre Company as well as being staged in France and Italy.

Having been deserted by her mother as a baby, Emily now lives with her father in Mexico City, and works in the local orphanage. When a mysterious cousin, Santi, appears on their doorstep, he brings with him family secrets, and soon Emily finds desire and temptation have overturned her straightforward life forever. The Poison That Fascinates is an alluring fable forged in sensuous prose. Jennifer Clement conjures a world heavy with the weight of Mexican superstition, mythology and faith, where saintliness and mortal sin sit side by side. With this novel, Shearsman brings to its collection a unique work praised for Clement's prowess in creating a literary crime novel.

Diana's Tree is an important book - written in Paris, where she lived for four years - and the first really mature work (1963) by Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), increasingly recognised as one of the major poetic voices of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America. "Reading Anna Deeny Morales's incisive translation of Alejandra Pizarnik is like experiencing Walter de Maria's Lightning Field - not in the New Mexico desert, but inside you. Psychologically strained and emotionally saturated, Pizarnik's poetry has electrified readers for more than sixty years. As gnomic, dreamy, passionate, and dark as the originals, Deeny's translations leave you singed- and glowing. " - Forrest Gander

This extraordinary collection brings together the entirety of his work up0 to 2003 that Trevor Joyce wishes to preserve. Founder of the seminal New Writers' Press in Dublin, Joyce is Ireland's most stimulating late-modernist poet, unrepentantly engaging the global modernist tradition at a time when it would seem to many that Irish writers, whether in the Republic or the orphaned north, prefer to hunker down and be parochial. The book includes the early collections Sole Glum Trek, Watches and Pentahedron and the splendid re-working of of the Buile Suibhne epic The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine, as well as the later masterworks Stone Floods and Syzygy, the former nominated for the 1995 Irish Times Literary Award for Poetry, the latter a formal tour-de-force previously only available as a limited edition chapbook. The volume concludes with more recent uncollected work of great power and ambition. This is the second edition, in a slightly larger format, of a book first published in 2001 with the ISBN 0-907562-29-9.

"Do you think there's too much archaeology? Too many people need to dig things up and find them out. It's not necessary to some people and more than necessary for others. There's an industry around it ...It's the doing that's important, not the knowing about the doing. Because that's second. So, obviously some poets are more articulate than others, but articulacy can hide things ...There's a lot about, sounds impressive but misses the point, floundering around. Maybe that's not what you should be looking at. So I'm not really interested in an archaeology of understanding..." Ralph Hawkins, from an interview with Ian Davidson

This is his fifth collection of poetry, containing work written over the last six years. As well as editing an anthology of South Asian literature, 'Stories from South Asia' (Oxford University Press, 1988), he has contributed articles reflecting his personal experience of breakdown and psychoanalysis to 'Poets on Writing' (Macmillan, 1992) and more recently to various journals, including the London Review of Books, fragmente, Scintilla and others. A number of the poems in 'The Eastern Boroughs' likewise express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing.

Of this collection the author explains in his Afterword, "This book is in six parts. The divisions are porous and the parts bleed into each other. The poems were written using a variety of procedures; from a daily journal, from logs of specific journeys, from following the progress of a road being built, from archaeological digs, from the experience of a body in space, from translation across time and place and through the use of particular forms. Some are located in specific places; most move between places and some remain in between. As I re-read these poems there may be too much landscape. Living in north Wales between the mountains and the sea that's hard to avoid. But I do seem to have tried to detail the way a local inter-relates with the global, how locales and locals can talk to each other and how speech and writing might jump from place to place and terminal to terminal."

This is the first large collection of poems by Harriet Tarlo, and showcases all of her shorter poems from the 1990-2003 period. Her work is best described as "radical pastoral", and readers with an interest in English landscape will find Ms Tarlo's unusual approach a breath of fresh air in what has become a moribund area of contemporary poetry.

is Australian poet MTC Cronin's tenth book and her second British collection. A compositional tour de force, the sequence consists of one hundred poems, the line-count arcing from a single line in poem 1 to fifty lines in poem 50, and thence back down to a single line in poem 100. Like many forms, self-imposed or otherwise, Ms Cronin uses this apparently restrictive structure to support a wonderfully original unfolding of verse. Ms Cronin's work has been attracting enormous interest in both Britain and North America, and this volume will reinforce her burgeoning reputation.

Shearsman magazine has been running in a pamphlet-sized format for 15 years, and this double-issue marks a move into perfect-bound paperback format. Frequency moves from quarterly to half-yearly at the same time. Issue 63/64 includes work by Frances Presley, Lisa Samuels, Sarah Law, Robert Saxton, John Seed, Gad Hollander, Sam Sampson, Philip Jenkins, Spencer Selby, Gordon Kennedy, Rupert M. Loydell, Giles Goodland, Gaston Baquero (translated by Mark Weiss), Alberto Blanco (translated by Joan Lindgren), plus translations from the German by Christopher MIddleton, Harry Guest and Tony Frazer.

"Otters and Martens" brings together 150 poems concerning those members of the mustelid family, written by a poet who writes in the line of Basil Bunting, but whose work is not as well know as it ought to be, owing to the fact that the majority of his publications have been from small presses, where distribution has often been limited. The poems, gathered from over 40 years of activity, demonstrate a spectacularly gnarled language that owes a debt to much older forebears, to exemplars such as Bunting, and to north-country dialect. They are poems for lovers of poetry and of mustelidae alike.

Christopher Middleton, long a resident of the USA, is one of Britain's finest poets. He was writing (not for publication) his 'Nocturnal Journal' during the two years prior to his retirement from the University of Texas at Austin, where he had taught German and Comparative Literature since 1966. The journal appears here in conjunction with conversations tape-recorded by Marius Kociejowski in London during October 2002 and June 2003. In both areas Middleton attends eloquently to his concerns as poet, translator, and essayist: values intrinsic and peculiar to poetry, the fundamental human aptitude (and craving) for aesthetic expression, and the reading of sign-systems usually deemed haphazard (e.g., a Turkish sea-mew, a soccer match, the aprons of waiters, rubbish in the Paris Metro, and a fresco in Cappadocia). Also included here, by way of introduction to the volume, is a brief but entertaining reminiscence of his first encounters with Christopher Middleton by Marius Kociejowski.

In 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns set off from Edinburgh, with the aid of a travel grant from the Scottish Arts Council, to visit Leipzig. Tessa investigated the poetry scene, and translated five of the poets whose work she admired, while Joyce drew portraits of them and took photographs. The poets featured here are Wulf Kirsten, Thomas Rosenlocher, Elmar Schenkel, Andreas Reimann, Uta Mauersberger, and Tessa herself. An anthology with a difference.

Catherine Walsh is an Irish poet whose work owes more, in formal terms, to American models than it does to the Irish poetic tradition. Her work is experimental, and questing, and operates over large spans. 'City West' is a long poem, the most recent of her works in this vein to be completed. Shearsman Books will publish another long poem, "Optic Verve", in 2006.

The largest collection of original writing yet by this talented British poet, painter, editor and publisher. "Loydell is a poet who, in painting a Steinian portrait of himself, tells us he is 'interested in several sounds at once, he is withdrawing into the museum of improvisation'. There appear to be two aspects of these several sounds: tightly drawn lyrics that speak to his most intense experiences, and texts that improvise into predetermined structures, from other texts, whose reading is a different kind of intense experience. In the end, the distinction is a false one. What this book contains is a substantial collection from one of the most interesting writers around. Everything is in his voice, wherever it has come from. Even if it our own voices we hear, strangely othered, something angelic amidst our animal grunts." - Robert Sheppard

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

Every word in this book by John Seed is drawn from Henry Mayhew's writings on London, published in the 'Morning Chronicle' from 1849 to 1850, then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, 'London Labour and the London Poor' between December 1850 and February 1852, and then again in the four-volume work of the same title. From the thousands of pages of Mayhew's investigations, John Seed has selected a few hundred extracts from those passages where he attempted to record the voices of London's working people. He has cut and rearranged the source texts, and has re-set them as poetry, splitting the lines in such a way as to make them both more easily readable and less easily, or quickly read, in an attempt to get closer to the original voices. The author likens this process to a sound engineer editing a tape to try to get rid of interfenernce or distortion. The final shape of the poem-sequence, and the form of the poems themselves, show the influence of American models such as Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams, who both attempted to record common speech.'Pictures from Mayhew' is published simultaneously with a large collection of John Seed's original poetry, most of which has been oput of print or hard to find for many years. John Seed lives in London and has published four collection of his poetry since the 1970s. His work was also featured in the seminal anthology 'A Various Art' (ed. Crozier & Longville, Carcanet 1987).

This collection of John Seed's original poetry, most of which has been out of print or hard to find for many years, is published simultaneously with the companion volume, 'Pictures from Mayhew'. Besides bringing together his four previously published collections, the book incldues a substantial amount of uncollected work from the 1990s and 2000s. John Seed lives in London and teaches History at Roehampton University. His work was featured in the seminal anthology 'A Various Art' (ed. Crozier & Longville, Carcanet 1987).

This is John Muckle's first poetry collection. The book's main feature is the long title poem, in which the author imagines that the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin escaped death by his own hand on the French-Spanish border in 1940 - his revolver misfired - and has survived as a kind of wanderer and witness. After the war he returned to Paris, but later moved to London where, in the 'now' of the poem at the age of 120, he is recalling some of his ideas - and confessing - to a nurse, whom he imagines might also be a student of his work. The poem is a personal view of Benjamin, and the author hopes that any reader unfamiliar with his writings might begin with 'Illuminations' and embark on a long journey with one of the great radical thinkers of any century. The remainder of the book features many of Muckle's trademark narrative poems.

'The Waters of Marah', subtitled Selected Prose 1973-1995, brings together the best of the author's non-poetic output. The prose here however mostly includes work that the author classifies as prose-poetry, as well as the longer work 'Tesserae' which could be better described as experimental (and poetic) fiction. These pieces tend also to have verse interludes, which further confuses the definition of which category they actually belong to. In the end however, categories are irrelevant, and the work can be read on its own terms, be it prose, be it prose-poetry, be it fiction, be it unclassifiable. This is musical work that explores the parameters of the sayable in a manner that does not repel the reader but rather draws him/her in as a participant in a remarkable enterprise. Contemporary poetry enthusiasts and lovers of cutting-edge prose will all find this work answering to their requirements.

The poems in "Paradise for Everyone" transact embrained feeling and transform, via belief, possibilities of reference. Here, and here, the person becomes language, and language is an actor fully fleshed, whose words and bodies name and rearrange the poem's conditions. The book's sections are organized to suggest movement, not so much a narrative or progress as a cycling through of events, of compulsion, vision, desire, ruin, multiplicity. Each poem has an ongoing urge to self-difference as it dreams, travels, and exchanges attributes with locales and objects. That urge generates the intermingling of self and word in this particular paradise, language here on earth. Lisa Samuels teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published essays and edited work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property issues in the humanities, and on practices of literary criticism.

Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949 and lives in Brisbane. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry in Australia, as well as a volume of cultural history "Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939" (2001). "The Ash Range", originally published by Picador Australia in Sydney in 1987, won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award that year, and is a major milestone in the author's career. The book is a long work that mixes prose, poetry, reportage and illustrations - somewhat in the manner of William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" - to narrate a history of the settlers' engagement with Gippsland, an area of south-eastern Victoria State, the narrative runnning through until the latter half of the 20th century, ending roughly when the author himself left the area. Like "Paterson", which concerns itself with small-town New Jersey, "The Ash Range" is not constrained by its locality, but instead finds the universal in its examination of the local.While the work is enormously ambitious in its mix of materials, the whole is welded into a solid structure that facilitates communication of the theme, even to an audience that has never heard of the territory it celebrates. This second edition of "The Ash Range" is published simultaneously with the author's Selected Poems 1971-2003, "Compared to What".

Dirk van Bastelaere (born 1960) is regarded as one of the leading poets in Flanders. He came early to prominence with his first collection 'Vijf jaar' (Five Years, 1984), which was awarded the prize for the best first collection. In 1988 he published 'Pornschlegel en andere gedichten' (Pornschlegel and other poems), one of the most hotly debated collections of Flemish poetry in in recent times, and a volume that was to win for him recognition as the most important postmodern poet in Flanders. His work has been strongly influenced by American poets such as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery and makes many references to contemporary art and culture, a fact which has led some critics to attack his work for its perceived intellectualism. The younger generation of Flemish poets, however, looks to him as mould-breaker. In 2000, the volume 'Hartswedervaren' (Happenings of the Heart) appeared, and is widely regarded as his finest book to date. This volume won the Flemish Culture Prize. Dirk van Bastelaere has also written essays on such philosophers as Lacan, Barthes and Kristeva. His latest collection, 'Zapruder Stress', will be published in Amsterdam in 2005.The translations are by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons and Francis R. Jones.

All of Elaine Randell's earlier books are now out of print, and this volume serves to give an overview of her entire career, from 1970 to today, covering her early lyric poems to pastorals and to searing documentary poems, often in a speaking voice, that are drawn from her professional life, where, as a social worker, she deals with children at risk.

Cesar Vallejo is one the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, his monument being the book-length sequence "Trilce" (a translation of which is published simultaneously with this volume). After the publication of "Trilce", he published numerous essays and a didactic novel, but did not collect any of his subsequent poems for book publication. Since his death, these poems have usually been referred to as the Posthumous Poems or, collectively, as the "Poemas Humanos" after the title of one of the posthumous collections. This volume brings together all of the post-"Trilce" work that has been identified by the latest scholarship and included in the most recent Peruvian edition of the author's works. The Spanish texts have benefited from a number of corrections, as compared to previous publications, and the poems are presented chronologically - in so as far as the chronology can be ascertained. The book offers the most complete version yet of this magnificent body of work. The translations are by the award-winning Irish poet-translator, Michael Smith, and the Peruvian scholar Valentino Gianuzzi.

Tom Lowenstein's work as poet and as ethnographer (specialising, above all, in the Inuit of Alaska) has always been interpenetrative, the poetic work deeply informed by the scholarly. This volume selects poetry from his whole career to date, concentrating on the faultline where his ethnographic concerns meet his poetic concerns. Poems have been selected from 'Filibustering in Samsara' and 'Ancient Land: Sacred Whale', as well as from more recent uncollected work. 'Ancestors and Species' makes it clear that Tom Lowenstein is one of Britain's most remarkable poetic voices, at the same time fascinating, and impossible to categorise.