#Shearsman Books

[martyncrucefix]

Poetry in Translation Reading - Crouch End Literary Festival

Rather late notice – not wholly down to my own tardiness – but I will be reading work in translation at the inaugural Crouch End Literary Festival this weekend. Do come along if you can. There are plenty of other events scheduled in the Festival, but this one is at 4pm on Saturday 24th February in the Gallery upstairs at the Hornsey Library Haringey Park, London N8 9JA (see map on location and…

[kitchen-light]

As I recounted my admiration of Walt Whitman's little commented-on poem from "Leaves of Grass", 'Eidolons', I was faced with knowing full well that Whitman's poem is doing what Woolf implies in her essay: to avoid consolation in welcoming the future and to know that every future rises as a ghost of the past, caring little for the lives of individuals, satisfying a whole picture only. Whitman writes '... ever the permanent life of life, / Eidolons, eidolons.' The eidolon, in Whitman's poem, is the enduring shadow into which life is subsumed and the force from which life springs eternal.

Sandeep Parmar, from her essay “Afterword: ‘Under Helen’s Breath’”, published in “Eidolon”, Shearsman Books, 2015

[contremineur]

So our words let them reach then flicker into brightness.

Ruth Wiggins, from Lark-tongued (in The last book of Barkynge, Shearsman 2023)

In her debut collection, Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe.

text from here

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield Presents:

Lisa Samuels - Adam Piette - Ágnes Lehóczky& the launch of three new poetry collections

An in person event to celebrate the release and launch of three latest collections. Join us for three readings and three book launches, from 6:30pm.

Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, and is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He co-edits the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. Adam will be launching 'Nights as Dreaming' (Constitutional Information, 2023).

Lisa Samuels works with experimental writing, multi-modal art, and relational theory in transnational life. She is the author of fourteen books, from The Seven Voices (O Books 1998) to Breach (Boiler House 2021), many poetry chapbooks, and influential essays on theories of power, interpretation, and the body. Samuels regularly collaborates with composers and movement artists, edits literary work, and performs internationally. Her novel Tender Girl is newly published in Serbian as Mekana Devojka (2022, translator Milan Pupezin), a new poetry book, Livestream, is out in 2023 with Shearsman Books, and a book of her selected essays, Imagining what we don't know: creative theory and critical bodies, is forthcoming with punctum books. Samuels is Professor of English & Drama at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Ágnes Lehóczky's poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box Publishing, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box Publishing, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman Books, 2014) and Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017). She has also three poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015). She is the author of the academic monograph on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance (2011). She was winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2011. Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House in May 2017. She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology; Poems from the City Imagined (Smith / Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette and recently The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2017) with Zoë Skoulding and Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch. Among other collaborative projects, she recently worked with The Roberts Institute of Art, London. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Programme Convenor of the MA in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. Her new collection Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies, part of a larger project, was published by Crater Press in 2023.

Location and Timings10th of May – 6.30pm (book launches): Diamond, - LT 5, University of Sheffield

Please note we will be launching three new collections by the three writers; books will be on sale during the evening (alas, no cards).

This is an event designed to be in person so we would love to see you there. If you can't travel, an online link will be available (see below). I

f you attend online, please do log in on time (by no later than 6.25pm so we can start the reading and recording smoothly and on time):meet.google.com/qho-ssxi-yxm

[verdemusgo]

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

What do I think about the world? I have no idea what I think about the world! If I get sick I’ll think about that stuff.

What idea do I have about things? What opinion do I have about cause and effect? What have I meditated on God and the soul And on the creation of the world? I don’t know. For me thinking about that stuff is shutting my eyes And not thinking. It’s closing the curtains (But my window doesn’t have curtains).

The mystery of things? I have no idea what mystery is! The only mystery is there being someone who thinks about mystery. When you’re in the sun and shut your eyes, You start not knowing what the sun is And you think a lot of things full of heat. But you open your eyes and look at the sun And you can’t think about anything anymore, Because the sun’s light is worth more than the thoughts Of all the philosophers and poets. Sunlight doesn’t know what it’s doing So it’s never wrong and it’s common and good.

Metaphysics? What metaphysics do those trees have? Of being green and bushy and having branches And of giving fruit in their own time, which doesn’t make us think, To us, who don’t know how to pay attention to them. But what better metaphysics than theirs, Which is not knowing what they live for Not even knowing they don’t know? “Inner constitution of things ...” “Inner meaning of the Universe ...” All that stuff is false, all that stuff means nothing. It’s incredible that someone could think about things that way. It’s like thinking reasons and purposes When morning starts shining, and by the trees over there A vague lustrous gold is driving the darkness away. Thinking about the inner meaning of things Is doing too much, like thinking about health when you’re healthy, Or bringing a cup to a spring.

The only inner meaning of things Is that they have no inner meaning at all.

I don’t believe in God because I never saw him. If he wanted me to believe in him, I have no doubt he’d come talk with me And come in my door Telling me, Here I am!

(Maybe this is ridiculous to the ears Of someone who, because they don’t know what it is to look at things, Doesn’t understand someone who talks about them With the way of speaking looking at them teaches.)

But if God is the flowers and the trees And the hills and the sun and the moonlight, Then I believe in him, Then I believe in him all the time, And my whole life is an oration and a mass, And a communion with my eyes and through my ears.

But if God is the trees and the flowers And the hills and the moonlight and the sun, Why should I call him God? I call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moonlight; Because if he made himself for me to see As the sun and moonlight and flowers and trees and hills, If he appears to me as trees and hills And moonlight and sun and flowers, It’s because he wants me to know him As trees and hills and flowers and moonlight and sun.

And that’s why I obey him, (What more do I know about God than God knows about himself?), I obey him by living, spontaneously, Like someone opening his eyes and seeing, And I call him moonlight and sun and flowers and trees and hills, And I love him without thinking about him, And I think him by seeing and hearing, And I’m with him all the time.

— from The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro (translated by Chris Daniels), Shearsman Books, 2007

[m58]

A triptych from 'Digits After Orph' by Chris Gutkind

L-R '1:19', '1:21' and B: '1:25' (click to expand)

Chris Gutkind was born in The Hague, raised mostly in Montreal, and lived mostly in London since 1988 and worked as a librarian. Books are Inside to Outside (Shearsman), Options (Knives Forks Spoons) with artist Trevor Simmons, and a privately printed collection What Happened. Some poems from his Shearsman collection can be found at poetrypf, more recent poems are at Pamenar and in Writers Forum e-zine. More of the current project published here, Digits After Orph, can be found in Datableed, theHythe, Berfrois, Erotoplasty, Firmament, Shearsman, Otoliths, Ludd Gang. It is a series of 55 poems gridded atop Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus and in book form all will have options for selected words or lines on facing pages. It is forthcoming from Veer. Anthologies: The Stumbling Dance, Disease, Hilson Hilson, Corroding the Now, Kruk Book, Wretched Strangers. A photo-project, Isolation Collaboration, done during the UK covid lockdown can be seen at Permeable Barrier, and a poetry collab from the time, Gravity Bubbles, done with Marcus Silcock and Callie Michail, is printed in the 2021 Prototype annual and online at Babel Tower Notice Board.

[dradny]

New book of poems published by Shearsman Books out now! Thanks as ever, to Tony Frazer at Shearsman for his belief in the poems.

For further details see: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Andrew-Taylor-European-Hymns-p654905007

[londonpoetrybooksthings]

Multicultural Book Fair

Conway Hall Red Lion Square WC1R 4RL Saurday 14th Sept 2024

This book fair is a fantastic celebration of diversity, of voices and stories. It’s an inspiration to see so many different cultures and perspectives represented on the shelves.

Publishers And Booksellers

PNR Arachne Press Sidekick Books Smokestack Books Peepal Tree Press Ignition Press Black Spring Press Group IF P Then Q Tall.Lighthouse Polari Press Room and books Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers Paekakariki press Cheerio Publishing Power Mouth Assemblage Collective Rebecca Ronane Pushkin House Bookshop Colossive Press

Jasmine Kahlia Tosin Akomolafe Elida Silvey Boukman Academy Etrusscam Press Cckriolas Publishers Peter’s Bookshop The Poetry Translation Centre David Lee Morgan Prototype Press Henningham Family Press ZIMZALLA Shearsman Books Aurora Metro Books Romancer Books David Simon Canary Ryland London Poets London Poetry Life

Free Tickets

[prosetung]

David Chaloner, Delight's Wreckage (Shearsman/Oasis Books, 2021)

[limejuicer1862]

54 Poems by John Levy (Shearsman Books)

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Counting by Dan Bellm

ADVANCE ORDER: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/counting-by-dan-bellm/

In the title poem of Dan Bellm’s Counting, a circle of rabbis in Talmudic times confess to each other ruefully, “I have never in my life prayed with intention.…” “I have been counting chickens….” “I have been counting the layers of stone in the wall….” These poems, on a seeking-and-straying spiritual quest of their own, count and recount the layers of days in a life, ranging widely from yearning, elegy and political outrage to passion, devotion, and gratitude.

Dan Bellm lives in Berkeley, California. He is the author of four books of poems: One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999), which launched the California Poetry Series; Buried Treasure (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999), winner of the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America and the CSU Poetry Center Prize; Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), winner of a 2009 California Book Award; and Deep Well (Lavender Ink, 2017). His translations from Spanish and French include Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo (Flower Song Press, 2023); Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé (Shearsman Books, 2017), and The Song of the Dead, by Pierre Reverdy (Black Square Editions, 2016), completed with the support of an Artist’s Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught literary translation and poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, at Mills College, and at New York University, and he serves as an interpreter for immigrants and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland, California. www.danbellm.com.

PRAISE FOR Counting by Dan Bellm

Dan Bellm honors the practice of counting: counting time down, counting time forward. And he engages his readers in the practice of marking our moments, and our moment, with unaccountable grace.

–Forrest Hamer, author of Call & Response, Middle Ear, and Rift

Counting offers us Dan Bellm’s deft conversational tone and his blending of the deep and the quotidian, with mesmerizing cadences that carry us further into ourselves and further into the wider world, both accountable and accounted for.

–Molly Fisk, author of Listening to Winter and The More Difficult Beauty

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry #spiritual #life

[martyncrucefix]

New review of my translation of Peter Huchel's 'These Numbered Days'

When Shearsman Books published my translations from the German of Peter Huchel’s 1972 collection These Numbered Days (Gezählte Tage), we were still in the early days of Covid restrictions and so launch events and so on were very difficult. I was pleased when the book was recognised in 2020 by winning the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from German awarded by the Society of Authors. The…

[kitchen-light]

On the note of government surveillance―I was struck recently by how much material is being archived that has little or no relevance to narrative purpose, our telephone calls or email subject headings or web searches reveal a totally misconstruable version of ourselves and this, too, is a kind of effacement via a glut of information. The fear was that only after the fact of suspicion or arrest can these records be revisited in order to build an evidential base for the foregone conclusion of guilt. This does not seem so dissimilar to the achrontic violence done to Helen, arch criminal in a labyrinth of beauty offered and beauty withheld. I am interested, too, by the spectral nature of democratic systems, their own labyrinths.

Sandeep Parmar, from her essay “Afterword: ‘Under Helen’s Breath’”, published in “Eidolon”, Shearsman Books, 2015

[billherbert23]

Following recent posts here of things which should have already been posted, here’s a link to Martyn Crucefix’s excellent blog where he posted this kind note on The Kindly Interrogator back in November. - TKI being the volume of translations from the Persian on which I worked with the poet Alireza Abiz, initially as part of his PhD thesis, and latterly because we had the strong sense we could produce a good (in the sense of internally coherent selection) from a couple of volumes of his work.

In the course of his judicious assessment of the book, Martyn had a couple of textual queries about the intro I should answered more promptly and publicly - to the extent that this site is public.

Firstly the unascribed intro was co-written by Alireza and myself: he contributed the succinct history of modern Persian poetry, while I attempted a description of the unique flavour of his work. To give a flavour of that attempt, here’s a paragraph: ‘His work has what feels to an English language reader like a unique but not entirely unfamiliar texture which you could classify as a dialled-down or even buttoned-up surrealism. Extraordinary, terrible things appear to be happening - his speakers move between life and death, and between victim and torturer or even murderer - but no-one, least of all the poet, seems to draw attention to the fact. The impact of his work depends on this extreme tension between the calm of its surface and the unfathomable uncertainty revealed to occupy its depths.’

This division of labours should have been seamless and unambiguous, except I failed to knock out a couple of quote marks around the following paragraph: 

'The book is illuminated by the, properly, tragic insight that, in a world constructed along lines of absolute right and wrong, while it can become tragically clear at any moment who is the perpetrator of oppression, the corrupting influence of dogmas is so insidious that no-one remains entirely innocent, or, if carried along by the paranoias of ideological purity, should be considered completely guilty. It is an insight of immediate relevance to the polarising factions of liberal democracy, which presume themselves capable of right and even righteous thinking, but who are therefore lulled by the seemingly permanence of their governing structures into imagining themselves immune from precisely this temptation toward unequivocality. Our humanity, it implies, lies in our doubt, and, most especially, in our self-doubt.’

Oh well, hopefully it bears repetition here... A few instances of the key thing, the poetry, can be sampled in a PDF here.

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics: Remembering the Logoclast - Alan Halsey

4th May 2023, The Diamond, University of Sheffield

A fond farewell to the beloved poet, artist, composer, publisher, editor, bibliophile, logoclast, scholar, humourist and staunch toper Alan Halsey (1949-2022). Alan Halsey ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye for almost twenty years before marrying fellow poet Geraldine Monk and moving to Sheffield where he continued to work as a specialist bookseller. Collections of his poetry include Five Years Out, Wittgenstein’s Devil, Marginalien, Not Everything Remotely, Term as in Aftermath and Even if only out of. From 1979-97 he ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye and edited West House Books 1995-2011. Five Seasons also published The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995) and Lives of the Poets (2009). As poet and graphic artist he published collaborations with Karen Mac Cormack (Fit To Print, Coach House 1998), Gavin Selerie (Days of ’49, West House 1999), Kelvin Corcoran (Your Thinking Tracts or Nations, West House 2001, and Into the Interior, Shearsman, 2022), Steve McCaffery (Paradigm of the Tinctures, Granary 2007) and others. He edited Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ Death’s Jest-Book for West House in 2003 and The Ivory Gate, a collection of Beddoes’ later work, for ReScript Books in 2011. He later edited Bill Griffiths’ collected poems in three volumes for Reality Street. His text-graphic work included Memory Screen, shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005, and In White Writing (Xexoxial 2012). He co-directed the antichoir Juxtavoices with Martin Archer and the group’s album Juxtanother antichoir from Sheffield appeared on Discus Records in 2013. His final full-length publication was Remarks of Uncertain Consequence (Five Seasons Press, 2022) shortly before his death. Other recent publications included Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman and Winterreisen, a collaboration with Kelvin Corcoran, Knives Forks & Spoons. He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

[mariastadnicka]

Coming on Tuesday, 25th August 7.30 pm, British zoom time

Coming on Tuesday, 25th August 7.30 pm, British zoom time

You are cordially invited to join us on Tuesday 25th August at 7.30pm for a poetry reading like no other: Kelvin Corcoran with The Republic of Song (Parlor Press, 2020), Aidan Semmens with There Will Be Singing (Shearsman, 2020), Maria Stadnicka with Somnia (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2020).

There Will Be Singing: Aidan Semmens’s fifth collection of poems moves from the range of the world to the…