New book British Standards completes the 'English Strain' project: all 3 books available

 

All three books of 'The English Strain' project are now published - and available. They are (in order) The English Strain (Shearsman 2021), Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons 2021) and British Standards (Shearsman 2024); two pamphlets, Petrarch 3: a derivative dérive, (Crater 36, 2017) and Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch, (Knives Forks and Spoons 2018) were collected in The English Strain.

The poems mainly take on sonnets from the English sonnet tradition (Wyatt, Surrey, Milton, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Drayton, Wordswoth, Shelley, Mary Robinson, Keats, John Clare and others), and transpose them into poems (again, mainly) plotting through brexit and Covid to the eve of the Ukraine war, although the first section 'Petrarch 3' is having serious Oulipo fun with one of Petrarch's sonnets. Another section is an attempt to 'write the self' (I failed, deliberately). 

They probably took me as long to write as did Twentieth Century Blues. 

Anyway, all three books are available. Here's where:

The English Strain and British Standards are both published by Shearsman, and my page on its site, will show you to it: Sheppard, Robert (shearsman.com).

Bad Idea is available here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages.

I've just checked and all three books are available in the same place at the same time: on AMAZON (UK). 

Unusually for me many of these sonnets were posted temporarily on this blog and there are many posts that relate to the many stages of composition (with videos; sonnets take about a minute to read, the limit of my videos!). I think I'll now offer links to one post per book, and a summary one for the project, now it's completed: 

The English Strain: Pages: My THE ENGLISH STRAIN is published today by Shearsman (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

(This was the cover not used, an amalgam of all the poets transposed, PLUS me. I was one face too many, and was removed for the real thing: image by Patricia Farrell.) 

Bad Idea Pages: Robert Sheppard: links to all SIX Bad Idea poems (Drayton versions) on Stride (with Drayton's originals)

(Patricia's design for the cover of Bad Idea, featuring an ice-cream guzzling Britannia and a grumpy Michael Drayton.)

British Standards: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) (It wasn't actually the end!)

Patricia's image for the cover of British Standards.

The Project as a whole: Pages: Celebrations: the final poem of The English Strain project (the last of British Standards) is published today (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

This is me reading 'Petrak 1401' from 'Petrarch 3', right at the start of the 'project'. Here's how it all started, as an offshoot of my critical book, The Meaning of Form: Pages: Robert Sheppard on The Petrarch Boys: Peter Hughes and Tim Atkins