Shearsman Books events are back!

Shearsman Books readings are back in their familiar and lovely Bloomsbury venue in London! Bridget Khursheed will be joining Josephine Balmer this April reading from The Last Days of Petrol and Ghost Passage. Tony Frazer is hosting the event.

The event takes place at the Swedenborg Hall on 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH on Tuesday 12 April 2022 at 7:30pm. Entry is free!

More information and more event news here 

The Last Days of Petrol out now from Shearsman Books

I am excited to say that The Last Days of Petrol is now out - or LDoP as I have taken to calling it in my head and to the very wonderful Tony Frazer editor at Shearsman Books.

As soon as the book came out, I got asked for an interview on BBC Radio Scotland.

Billed up above Andy Warhol but deservedly below Glasgow!

I found myself discussing topics ranging from the Dalkeith buzzard and its habits, writing poetry in the car, Soutra and the Borders speed camera vigilante with Grant Stott. I couldn't bear to listen back! And I think unless you know someone in the BBC - the interview is now tucked away for posterity. 

I had a great visit to my amazing local bookshop in Melrose - The Reading Room!

There are already a couple of very kind and lovely reviews from:

• Joyce MacMillan at The Scotsman here
  
  "sensual, vivid and at times heartbreaking poetry of Bridget Khursheed"

• Beth McDonough at DURA (Dundee) here 
  
  " Khursheed’s poems deserve revisiting and careful driving. The journey is far from over."

And of course you can also try before you buy on the Shearsman website online here or in your own favourite bookshops

More news on upcoming readings at StAnza in St Andrews, in London and back home in Melrose coming soon - if you would like to hear me read.

Or let me know and I will see what we can come up with.

Enjoy!

The Last Days of Petrol out from Shearsman January 2022

How does it feel? Living in the last days of petrol?

A new poetry collection from p&g is coming out in January 2022 from Shearsman Books.

When everything is water

How did we get here? The roads have gone
Once there was a network and we plugged into that

Buses came for school only to the road end
Now they are swept away by the waves.

We are the central point our island of barn and beasts
Three bairns and many thrushes.

There is nothing left to share.
Fodder all squared up.

Once the helicopter came like a bee
Drawn by the flowers still blooming by the door.

More here https://www.shearsman.com/store/Bridget-Khursheed-The-Last-Days-of-Petrol-p389203133

The book cover photo is a picture of Selkirk swimming pool in the rain

Locust and Marlin launch

Not one but two chances to attend the launch of JL William's new book Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014) : with support from poet Alasdair Paterson.

Locust and Marlin considers how "we tell our stories and locate the places where we live and love. ... In a world whose boundaries and pathways are increasingly difficult to define, how do we find our way home?"

The events take place in these venues at these times:

• London Tuesday, 18 February. at the Swedenborg Hall  from 7.30 p.m
• Edinburgh Thursday, 20 March 2014 at the Saltire Society from 7:00 p.m.

You can find more on the events here https://www.facebook.com/events/535778949853555/ and here https://www.facebook.com/events/690310301019811/ and on JL Williams here  ww.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk.

“The star of the evening was JL Williams, with a pitch-perfect delivery that had the audience hanging on every dreamy word.  Her poems were beautiful and mythic, conjuring evocative imagery that filled the room with magic.” Ever Dundas

Un crucero a las Islas Galápagos

Tony Frazer - to whom we send a big shout for publishing Spanish language poetry - from Shearsman is publishing this book from Antonio Cisneros the Peruvian poet who died last year: this is a bilingual edition too - thank you...this is what we like at p&g - and translated by William Rowe.

Shearsman describe it this way: and for a change I will include this in total because the book sounds irresistible

A Cruise to the Galapagos Islands was the last book published by Antonio Cisneros. The book has the subtitle, New Marian Songs (nuevos cantos marianos) and consists of 25 prose poems that invoke the Virgin as protector in danger, not in order to escape from fear but so as to traverse the zones of greatest anxiety, without turning the gaze away from catastrophe. The themes of shipwreck, illness, and death occur alongside intense alertness of the skin to the prick of an insulin injection, the feel of salt on things that flash through the slit of a skirt, or the body sensitized to the prickle of a woolly blanket on a hot night. This absolute physical aliveness causes the image of the Virgin to give way to a shipwrecked man’s vision of a bar with pints of beer coming towards him over the sea.

More from Shearsman and you can buy the book here http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/cisneros.html and find out more about Cisneros here http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Cisneros

Calling Spanish English translators, Cisneros has only in a stub on Wiki in English - p&g will try and get round to translating the substantial Spanish entry for him but busy over here at the moment so good oppportunity for our collection of geeks to try their hand at wiki-ing in the cause of poetry

Peter Hughes Selected Poems April 2013

A very tasty retrospective of Peter Hughes' poems "most interesting and unclassifiable" from Shearsman is out this month. Hughes is an English poet and painter who lives literally on the edge in East Anglia and editor of the Oystercatcher Press.

"...a mind in evidence in the poems that can constantly surprise itself in the turns of speech, that can dance in the syllables and still have world and experience in its sights." John Hall

More information here http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/hughesSP.html and on Oystercatcher http://www.oystercatcherpress.com/.

Shearsman reading 9th January 2013 London, England

A nice way to slide into the new year if you are in this big bad capital city. A free reading with an all-American female (and poet amongst many other things) line-up of Melissa Buckheit, Maxine Chernoff and Jaime Robles.

You may know Robles already from her work at Five Trees Press, an award-winning literary publishing house based in San Francisco which she co-founded.

This event is held at the Swedenborg Hall, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2TH. Did I mention already that admission is free?

You can find out more here http://www.facebook.com/events/548343065176737/