Böcker av Robert Sheppard

'Enraptured by the versioning bug,' Sheppard confesses of his variations of Petrarch 'I was off on one.' With comic verve, he refunctions some fine sonneteers: Petrarch, and those of The English Strain: Wyatt and Surrey.

Taking only the sonnets Wyatt 'translated' from Petrarch, but adding a few of his own, Robert Sheppard merges the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration. His world fluxes between Henrician terror, administered by Cromwell, and something like our own reality. These sonnets are from a larger grouping called The English Strain.

Robert Sheppard's selection draws on every book of his poetry since Returns (1985) through to Words Out of Time (2015), and is designed to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and their restlessly changing forms.

A dozen essays on some of the most influential poets of the British post-1960 avant-garde: Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, John Hall, Maggie O'Sullivan, Iain Sinclair, Ken Edwards, and Bob Cobbing, together with reflections on the mid-70s Poetry Society coup and counter-coup.

These new poems use tense couplets and other 'centrifugal' forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem.

Includes poems that play with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or attention poem by poem. This title wonders whether compassion is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the poems call the human covenant against human unfinish.

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets.