Recently published are:
Peter Dent: Handmade Equations.
Handmade Equations collects over eighty poems written since the
beginning of the new century, and exemplifies Peter Dent’s quiet but
forceful lyric voice, which is both engaged with and yet distanced from
the empirical world.
“Peter Dent is one of those poets whose concern with the act of writing
is clearly central to his method and purpose and yet this aspect never
intrudes in a cluttered or mannered way. His quiet lyricism is exact
and satisfying even when the subject matter appears vague or the
approach is oblique ... the mixing of the abstract with descriptive
simplicity is overt yet so right, the shift between thought and
feeling, between observer and the ‘nature’ being described so well done
in so few words that you wonder at the skill of it.”
— Steve Spence, Terrible Work
“Dent’s technique is precise, demanding but above all functions to
present a shifting tenuous reality as it slips through the mind’s
fingers. His writing is intensely personal and a personal response on
the part of the reader is not only justified but what’s demanded.”
— John Couth, Shearsman
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5" x 5.5", ISBN 0-907562-65-5.
Retail price £8.95 in the UK, $14 in the USA.
Lisa Samuels: Paradise for Everyone
A first UK, and second full-length US collection for this talented
young American writer, who teaches literature, poetic theory, and
creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition
to poetry, she has published work on modernist and contemporary
writers, on intellectual property in the humanities, and on critical
practices.
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.
“The wonderful poems in Lisa Samuels’s Paradise for Everyone have about
them the alertness and vivacity that belong to the world of the newly
discovered (and the newly discovering). It is Samuels’s great gift that
she can find realities anew at every phrase, and her own position among
them curious. She examines distinctions — the features that make things
different. She makes certain (however briefly) that what she cares
about still exists. She reminds us, her readers, that anything that can
recur is amazing. This is a deeply intelligent and lovely book — a book
of encounters that may also serve as a manual for encountering.”
— Lyn Hejinian
Paperback 92pp, 9" x 6", ISBN 0-907562-67-1
Retail price: UK £8.95 / USA $14
UK trade orders via Bertrams Books or Gardners Books.
US trade orders via Ingrams or Baker & Taylor.
Also available direct from the press and from online outlets such as
Salt Publishing's webstore.
___________________________________
Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511
http://www.shearsman.com/
___________________________________
|