New From Shearsman

Two new books by Robert Sheppard from Shearsman.

Berlin Bursts

£8.95 / $15, Shearsman, 2011 (Paperback, 96 pages)

ISBN 9781848611351

These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act. At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.

When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry

£13.95 / $22, Shearsman, 2011 (Paperback, 218 pages)

ISBN 9781848611368

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O'Sullivan.