Shearsman Books – förlag

Trilce is one of the greatest monuments of twentieth-century poetry, as important in Hispanic letters as The Waste Land and The Cantos in the Anglophone world. Full of neologisms and obscure symbols, the book remains just as radical in its experimentation with language as when it first appeared 100 years ago.This acclaimed translation by Irish poet Michael Smith and Peruvian scholar Valentino Gianuzzi is presented here in a centennial edition alongside the original Spanish. Aside from the canonical text, an appendix brings together the earlier versions of ten poems and an uncollected poem connected to the book. Also included is the preface to the first edition, here translated into English for the first time. This background material will allow the English reader to get a better grasp of the composition and initial reception of one of the key works of modern poetry.

"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 Gomez "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." -Jose Joaquin 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 Davila"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'." -Jose Javier Villarreal

This volume brings together poems from six collections originally published between 1990 and 2011. I have divided the selection into five sections that correspond, broadly, to the separate stages in which they were written. The final and briefest one includes five fragments from Perros en la playa [Dogs on the Beach], a miscellany of prose, poetry and aphorisms that I published in early 2011. In my opinion, a Selected should not solely contain poems that have been often anthologised or singled out for praise by critics and readers. It should give a more or less accurate view of the variety and development of one's output over the years. Therefore, I have not shied away from including some youthful pieces or the odd experiment-not to mention poems for which one feels an immoderate fondness, which no amount of critical scrutiny can ever hope to dispel. (Jordi Doce)

A retablo is a painting created in thanks for divine protection or a miracle. In this luminous collection, Michelle Penn transposes the art form into poems that explore aspects of the female experience. Her retablos capture moments of vulnerability, confrontations with politics and societal ideals, the struggle to construct a self, and the search for something to believe in when protection and miracles seem rare. A rich palette of images-from nuclear blast glass and an atomic Madonna to a sword-swallowing Pierrot and a muse-for-hire-creates a compelling picture of endurance, defiance, and ultimately, hope.

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.

In the first ten years of her Paris exile Marina Tsvetaeva produced far less poetry than when living in the Czech Lands, or in the tumultuous Moscow years between 1917 and 1922. The poetry was also different in kind. It came in cycles, prompted by the deaths of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Max Voloshin, or by passionate involvements with younger poets of the emigration. Rejecting totalitarianism on both the right and the left, she reached a high point with sequences to the different tables on which she wrote during thirty years, or to a bush (eliciting admiration from both Anna Akhmatova and Lydia Chukovskaya). In 'Yearning to get back home', comparing herself to a 'Kamchatkan bear with no ice floe', she expresses the full ambivalence of her attitude to the Russian homeland she had abandoned and where she would return, with tragic consequences, in July 1939.

After Russia (1928) is considered to mark the high point in Marina Tsvetaeva's output of shorter, lyrical poems. Tsvetaeva told Boris Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Breathtaking technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from the circle of human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life itself. The sequence `Trees' evokes the hills and woods of Bohemia where Tsvetaeva loved to roam, while `Wires' takes telegraph wires as the central image for the geographical distance separating her from Pasternak.

In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers long after his death, but has not hitherto been made available in the UK or the USA. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city - and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table...

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

Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950), more commonly known as Orhan Veli, was a pioneering Turkish poet and one of the founding members of the Garip (Strange) movement. His innovative poetics wore a unique signature of austerity and accessibility. With arresting insight and playful irreverence Veli's poems transformed the Turkish literary world. When he died at the age of 36, he was acknowledged as one of the most important Turkish writers of his generation. Now, at last, this edition of The Complete Poems makes the full breadth of his achievement available in English for the first time. It brings together poems from the five collections published during the author's lifetime, as well as uncollected material from newspapers and magazines, and poems only published posthumously. The Complete Poems includes an informative introduction, endnotes, and chronology, placing the poems in their historical context and touching on many of the themes which shaped Orhan Veli's distinctive voice.

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.

The mute-perhaps especially he-can be expressive too. That is one of the claims/assertions Lars Amund Vaage develops in these poems. Many of the poems concern work. Work can also be creation, language, initiation. But, in the great circle of life and death, work can also represent a loss of meaning. Love is a central theme, with its power to create.

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.

Serpentine: A mineral or rock consisting of a hydrous magnesium silicate, H4 M3 Si2 O9, and having usually a dull green color, often with a spotted or mottled appearance, resembling a serpent's skin. It occurs usually in masses, which are sometimes foliated, sometimes fibrous ... Presence of iron may give it a red or brownish hue. Precious, or noble, serpentine is translucent & of a rich oil-green color. Serpentine results from the alteration of other magnesian minerals, esp. chrysolite, amphibole, & pyroxene, and is frequently found in large masses ... -Webster's, 1914; from a note preserved in the author's papersSerpentine was first published in by Oasis Books, London, in 1985. It received little distribution and minimal notice at the time, somewhat to the author's distress, and the publisher's regret. It has never reappeared complete, although selections have appeared in subsequent compilations. A collection of experimental prose texts-although the author forbade such a definition from appearing anywhere in the first edition, presumably in case it frightened off potential readers-Christopher Middleton described it as being a series of texts "on the nature of evil".

"I'm not a prophet, but I believe you have written a great poem..." --Octavio Paz (from a personal letter)"The note on the back cover of the first edition of Avebury describes the book as 'a series of lyrical meditations, in which man's roots are rediscovered in the modes of perception of earlier cultures'. This is true; but it is also true to say that 'love defeating death' is a universal theme." --Jeremy Hooker "Avebury freely moves through time, from pre-textual history to descriptions of art and civilisation, in the same way that Olson's Maximus Poems and all of Eliot's poems in Four Quartets envision history as an event that is taking place now and always, past and present simultaneously existing." --Neli Moody"It was a welcome surprise to find Avebury, where I have walked among the stones so often, placed back meaningfully on the spiritual map." --Charles Tomlinson

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.

In 1931, while on holiday in Arcachon, Huidobro and the Franco-German artist and writer, Hans (Jean) Arp together wrote Tres novelas exemplares (Three Exemplary Novels - no doubt a reference to the Exemplary Novels by Cervantes, to which of course they bear no resemblance at all), a set of wild quasi-surrealist "stories". In 1935, Huidobro - once again living in Chile - offered the set to a publisher in Santiago, but was told that the book was too short. Accordingly he wrote two further stories on his own, and the whole volume was titled Tres inmensas novelas. Which are therefore, not three, not huge and not novels. This volume offers all five stories in a bilingual format, and the cover is almost a copy of the one used in the first edition.

Whitman and Truth is a set of reading notes intended to introduce third-year university students to Whitman's reading of war, with enlightening comparisons offered from the work Susan Sontag, Sir Philip Sidney, Mo Yan, Edmund Blunden, and others.

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.

Faust occupies a central place in German literature, as the magnum opus of its greatest writer, as one of its greatest dramas, and as an epic poem of the highest quality-for, although it was written to be performed, it may also be regarded as a dramatic poem, prophetic perhaps of Berlioz's hybrid musical adaptation in La Damnation de Faust. The Faust story caught Goethe's attention from an early stage and the first published results of his engagement with it was Faust. A Fragment, published in 1790. He had however written a dramatic treatment of the story in his 20s, a fact which only became apparent over a century later, when the papers of Luisa von Gochhausen, a lady of the court of Weimar, were found to contain a transcription of this work, since known as the Urfaust (Original Faust). This early work was published in 1887. Faust. A Tragedy, Part One was finally completed in 1808 and was later revised and published in a new edition in 1829. The third act of Part 2 appeared in 1827, part of the first act a year later, and the complete text in 1832, shortly after the author's death. The entirety of Faust, parts 1 and 2 together, was performed for the first time in 1875, in Weimar.The translation presented in this volume encompasses only Part One, which is usually performed without its cerebral pendant piece, and remains the keystone of Goethe's career.

Peter Larkin might best be described as an eco-poet. His work stretches the fabric of form and language in an attempt to come to grips with the despoliation of our forests, woods and countryside. The language of forestry and of agriculture, of botany and arboriculture is plundered in order to give the poems the tools they need to express their defiance. This collection consists of three long sequences that mix prose with poetry: Leaves of Field, Open Woods and Moving Woods.

These poems entwine round such matters as how roots move as they grow or how feet plant themselves, why a forest admits lanes and lines but obstructs them into shelter, how a tree might relate to all it isn't, what the hidden domains of nature can mean in and for trees, or the way in which trees cast the skies themselves into flight. The two last poems envisage a body language for trees, or how a dead upright tree remains a living nub of forest."Setting up an ecological orientation against habitual ways of reading and perceiving language, Larkin's poems offer scientifically descriptive close investi-gations of trees whilst implying an allegorical dimension. They do so by means of a range of registers that only gain their scarce value in relation to one another." -Katharina Maria Kalinowski"Peter Larkin's radically de-anthropocentrized poetry offers restorative glimpses of a possible 'dimensional commons'. Encroach to Resume continues that dedicated project, now branching beyond our Anthroposcenic 'gap in the planet baled out by tree-pumps' towards a hyper-extensive terrain of organic and poetic interrelation. Through metamorphic expressions of encroachment and resumption, congealment and bifurcation, collapse and recovery, these poems are saturated by thresholds of contact between things 'differently given, not / riven in difference'. The collection represents another landmark in Larkin's own conceptual forest, furthering the unique somatic-semantic plexus of his bewildering and vital body of poetry." -Dominic Hand

"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; like Machado, on the one hand, and Montale on the other, he is a companion, not a guide, always present with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way." -John Burnside"Unforgettable poems that, on the verge of tales and fables, drag the reader toward a universe of screened images, like 'pollen clouds in the slant evening light'." -Antonio Ortega, El Pais

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.