Coming soon from the winner of the Scottish Poetry Library's Julia Budenz Commemorative Prize and the 2024 Mallaig Book Festival Deirdre Roberts Prize
SIGNALS TO THE
DISAPPEARING SHORE
The title Signals to the Disappearing Shore embodies an ambiguity central to the poems’ care for the world we inhabit. Does the shore appear to disappear because viewed from a departing vessel – viewed perhaps by desperate emigrants or deportees; or is it literally disappearing, submerged or eroded by changes wrought by time and humankind? Are the signals waves of farewell, or urgent warnings?
From the start, the theme of migration is set in a deep historical context, a pattern extended widely in the long poem ‘A raga for Enheduana’, which ranges in time and geography from the ancient Sumerian poet-priestess who is the earliest individually known writer to the crimes of some contemporary political leaders.
Environmental threat is given sharpest expression in the central section of the book, eight poems drawing on the author’s long-held concern over nuclear proliferation, both weapons and power, the human costs and land destruction.
The book also includes the 12-part ‘Journal of a plague year’ written, as the title suggests, at the height of the Covid pandemic and the social restrictions that came with it, again drawing links between landscapes and events ancient, medieval and modern.
“Aidan Semmens’s poetic landscape is vast and I feel mountain-high as I read these enthralling, often topical and terrifying descriptions of the many peaks of human history. The poems picture destruction, far past and vividly present, using brilliant and subtle lineation, original phrases that stay with you. This is a poet who opens your mind with everyday settings and casual-sounding descriptions, then fills it with precisely the historic and scientific knowledge we need to grapple with today’s sociopolitical horrors.” — Claire Crowther
“If you are inclined to believe that the significance of the distant past is somehow remote or even absent from the contemporary world, then Signals to the Disappearing Shore is not for you. That deep history speaks in the present and Aidan Semmens articulates it for all its brutality and wonder in an uninflated, direct and referential poetry. With unblinking vision Semmens shows us how the same ‘spiritually ordained slaughter’ which in part shaped a mythology, also writes today’s headlines.” — Kelvin Corcoran
Signals to the Disappearing Shore will be published by Shearsman Books in July 2026
SIGNALS TO THE
DISAPPEARING SHORE
The title Signals to the Disappearing Shore embodies an ambiguity central to the poems’ care for the world we inhabit. Does the shore appear to disappear because viewed from a departing vessel – viewed perhaps by desperate emigrants or deportees; or is it literally disappearing, submerged or eroded by changes wrought by time and humankind? Are the signals waves of farewell, or urgent warnings?
From the start, the theme of migration is set in a deep historical context, a pattern extended widely in the long poem ‘A raga for Enheduana’, which ranges in time and geography from the ancient Sumerian poet-priestess who is the earliest individually known writer to the crimes of some contemporary political leaders.
Environmental threat is given sharpest expression in the central section of the book, eight poems drawing on the author’s long-held concern over nuclear proliferation, both weapons and power, the human costs and land destruction.
The book also includes the 12-part ‘Journal of a plague year’ written, as the title suggests, at the height of the Covid pandemic and the social restrictions that came with it, again drawing links between landscapes and events ancient, medieval and modern.
“Aidan Semmens’s poetic landscape is vast and I feel mountain-high as I read these enthralling, often topical and terrifying descriptions of the many peaks of human history. The poems picture destruction, far past and vividly present, using brilliant and subtle lineation, original phrases that stay with you. This is a poet who opens your mind with everyday settings and casual-sounding descriptions, then fills it with precisely the historic and scientific knowledge we need to grapple with today’s sociopolitical horrors.” — Claire Crowther
“If you are inclined to believe that the significance of the distant past is somehow remote or even absent from the contemporary world, then Signals to the Disappearing Shore is not for you. That deep history speaks in the present and Aidan Semmens articulates it for all its brutality and wonder in an uninflated, direct and referential poetry. With unblinking vision Semmens shows us how the same ‘spiritually ordained slaughter’ which in part shaped a mythology, also writes today’s headlines.” — Kelvin Corcoran
Signals to the Disappearing Shore will be published by Shearsman Books in July 2026
|
AVAILABLE NOW:
|
|
The Jazz Age
This startling collection is a sequence of surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past – sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings – make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations, or in episodes from times not their own. Incongruous and laugh-out-loud funny, the poems delight the reader, yet much darker elements are at play. “Textures that constantly engage and surprise and read as inevitably and unpredictably as a Coltrane solo” — Tony Baker “The Jazz Age is a terrific book” — John Matthias “laugh-out-loud funny” — Chris Hamilton-Emery |
There Will Be Singing
Aidan Semmens’s fifth collection of poems moves from the range of the world to the deeply personal, always placing the detail in historical context. “Learning is carried lightly, erudition not pushed at the reader but drawn into the lyricism.” — Kelvin Corcoran “thoughtful and stimulating ... a fascinating book which I’m sure you’ll want to read more than once” — Steve Spence “I devoured it in a single sitting. Now I'm reading it again, one poem a night, to savour what you have achieved.” — Brian Marley |
Life Has Become More Cheerful
A fragmented account of the Russian Revolution, the people it affected, and how it changed the world. “Aidan Semmens is a poet who has always been fearless in confronting the plight of the world with its disturbed ways and this volume is no exception... An essential read.” — Geraldine Monk “At each step we are given a poetry which examines the exact pathology of revolution itself conveyed in a series of highly charged, unattributed monologues.” — Kelvin Corcoran |
Uncertain Measures
“What runs through this book, like Brighton rock, is a traditional, yet questioning, and taut lyricism, a poetry of argument in the voice of smouldering outrage. The voice of these poems inhabits the place of post-industrial landscape in a way not as effectively revisited and examined since the poetry of Roy Fisher.” — Simon Smith |
A Stone Dog
Verse grounded in word-play and natural speech rhythms which engages death, complexity, and the Authorised Version, using language borrowed from news magazines, war diaries, popular science and psychology texts, and overheard phrases. A poetry of ideas and allusions, where, as in music or dream, any hinted-at narrative is liable to be subverted. |
The Book of Isaac
A sequence of 56 “distressed”, or damaged, sonnets in which Aidan Semmens aims to distil something of the Russian-Jewish experience from the history of his own family, in particular that of his great-grandfather, the economist, lawyer, journalist and socialist Isaac Hourwich. “One of the most fascinating books of poetry to be published this year” — Peter Riley |
