Shearsman Library – serie

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 1979, spliced together with Tarn's Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was limited, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney's first collection, vanished from view. Also, although it was a valuable expansion of Tarn's anthro- and eco-poetics, this hardly registered in the wider world, whether in Alaska or in the lower states. The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche, and will soon be joined by some other long-out-of-print Tarn volumes. Although some 40 years old, this book has scarcely aged, and its themes are as apposite today as they were in the 1970s.

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".

At the Western Gates was first published by a small press in New Mexico in 1985, and consisted of five powerful long poems that exemplify the best of Nathaniel Tarn's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this new edition, they are joined by another long sequence, `Birdscapes with Seaside', originally a one-off issue of Sparrow magazine in 1976, which fits well with the rest of the contents. 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

Manners was Gig Ryan's second collection, in 1984, and confirmed the impression she had made with her first book. It has been unavailable for some time although parts have reappeared in her New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, and Sydney's Giramondo). As Martin Johnston said in a blurb for the first edition: "it marks... something new in Australian poetry: a deeply coherent 'discontinuous narrative' in verse of hallucinatory vividness and continual wry wit, lacerating without self-pity, demanding without pretentiousness or condescension. No one will find it comfortable reading. Ryan's craftsmanship is impeccable, her vision bullshit-proof." "Gig Ryan... develops and extends the strengths of her first collection The Division of Anger. Like that book, Manners of an Astronaut is full of verbal energy... She doesn't give up the concerns her first book was a direct combative response to. Instead of using the language of feeling, she explores its discontinuities. This makes her work more poignant and sophisticated." -John Forbes, Scripsi magazine

"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

Isthmus was Jeremy Reed's first collection, produced in a finely-printed edition by Asa Benveniste's Trigram Press in 1980. Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author struggling with a gamut of new influences - some of them provided by Benveniste - and trying to find his way in a brane new world of poetry. The book has an American theme, and shows much American influence, albeit undigested in places, but Reed's individuality brings it all together.

The Desert Mothers was first published by a small press in Mississippi in 1984, and contained several important poems from Nathaniel Tarn's early '80s period. This new edition revives the original chapbook, adding to it three other long sequences from the same period, as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

The House of Leaves was first published by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara in 1976, and was a significant statement of intent by Nathaniel Tarn - alongside his New Directions volume, Lyrics for the Bride of God - which set the tone for what he wanted to achieve now as an American poet after his emigration from England. This new edition repeats the entire original volume and 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.

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley's first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has reappeared in other guises, in Paravane and also in Shearsman's own Myne (2006), the entire book has not been republished and its structure - mixing prose and poetry freely - is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived. This edition gives the work a little more air than in the original - avoiding run-on texts - but is otherwise unchanged.

The Red and Yellow Book was published by Textures in 1986, the imprint of Penny Bailey. My recollection is that little from the book had been published elsewhere previously. This was partly because it was written and published very quickly. Its writing was accelerated by the personal events which at first appeared to interrupt my initial ideas about what I thought I was doing. The interruption became the real subject in various guises and my first introduction to such parabasis. The Red and Yellow Book was my second book to be published but in one sense it was the first. It was the first I wrote as a book rather than as a collection of poems. - Kelvin Corcoran

Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon, which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island."Smith's version [of Maldon] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English." -Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949-2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer: "calm, intelligent, long-lined verse letters that engagingly bring us to a world where the 'sea-dusks are sea-dusks flowing far inland'", as Nigel Wheale pout it when reviewing the first edition for the London Review of Books."Harrison should be read as substantial Australian poet. His poetry is something new, something that opens up what poetry can be." -Petra White, Cordite Poetry Review"This notion of work runs throughout Harrison's poetry. There is a sense that each poem is a hard-won moment of perception even while offering to the reader an enviable translucence, a clear vision of the world in its contingency and temporal flux. At the heart of these profound and ever-meticulously crafted poems, this long meditation into the mechanics of conception and perception, is the warmth and flesh of the complexity of life and being plainly spoken." -Michael Brennan

Tell Me No More and Tell Me, first published in 1981 focuses upon the poet's immediate surroundings, the Essex marshes and the small black timber framed cottage he lived in at the time. Looking back, after such passing of time, and the changes that naturally ensue, these poems capture the exactitude of the poet's daily life and contemplations. They remain indelible of that formative period.Ralph Hawkins' poetry is yeasty and written where the meanings are made rather than assigned. Its impulse is towards the immediate, apparently unsynthesised event where thinking occurs moment by moment. The aesthetic bears some resemblance to close mic techniques, we are drawn near to the experience and all distractions are removed for the intricacies of pure resonance. It produces a poetry as tricky as consciousness itself and its rewards are some considerable distance from the prefabricated commonplace expression of lyrical epiphany. Here is a poetry that is expansive, often humorous and always anarchic. In Tell me no more and tell me Ralph Hawkins' refusal to whistle along with the sanctioned doggerel of English poetry and its returns is startlingly evident, as it has been throughout four decades of creativity.Tell Me No More and Tell Me was published by Grossteste Press, and was the author's first full-length collection. Here it is again on its 40th anniversary.

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

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.

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published in New York in 1971, and in London in 1972, with the material collected in it dating back to 1969. A major staging post in the author's career, it remains one of Nathaniel Tarn's most significant publications from the 1970s. 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 exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and Cesar Vallejo. This sequence and 'Choices' were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlan 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'.

Gustaf Sobin's Uncollected Poems brings under one set of covers some fugitive pieces that did not make it into his official posthumous Collected Poems (2010), together with some occasional works and two full-length volumes that stood outside the normal trajectory of his poetry: Articles of Light and Elation and Sicilian Miniatures, the former published in a bibliophile edition and the latter never distributed commercially. This Uncollected fills out the picture of the author's work more fully than ever before."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

Gustaf Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable now for some two years. Given our long association with the author - his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published three chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s - we are delighted to be able to bring this major volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, amongst his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard."I can't think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse." -Michael Palmer "Sobin is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed." -Robert Duncan"Gustaf Sobin is sui generis, one of the deep figures of recent times. He is one of our dark and scintillating stars, his poetry a gift to our art now when there is a dearth of beauty and of myriadness of intelligence." -Michael McClure"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"This expatriate American poet is a national treasure." -Rain Taxi