Introducing Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard reading at the Costa Coffee Poetry Venue in Liverpool (photo courtesy Tim Power), recording the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics CD at Edge Hill, and reading at the Liverpool Tate Gallery Credit Crunch reading (both photos courtesy Andrew Taylor).

I am a poet-critic, and recent volumes of poetry include Tin Pan Arcadia, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2004,

Complete Twentieth Century Blues from Salt as well, and

Warrant Error from Shearsman.

My critical work includes The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents Liverpool University Press, 2005)

and Iain Sinclair (Northcote House, 2007).

I am editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry {link to http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry } and this blogzine.

I also edited the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, and most recently The Door at Taldir: The Selected Poems of Paul Evans.I am also an advocate for the way writers write about writing, a speculative discourse that is often misread as literary criticism or as autobiographical writing, but which is really a mode of writing quite distinct. I encourage students to read it and produce it, and I am working on a study of this. Part of my thinking on this may be read on PORES journal as ‘The Necessity of Poetics’ .


Poems from Warrant Error, may be read here

Complete Twentieth Century Blues was reviewed by Todd Thorpe. Read the review here

Warrant Error has been reviewed by Alan Baker. Read his review at www.leafepress.com/litter2/litterbug02/litterbug-sheppard.html

I can be seen reading my poems from Twentieth Century Blues at

http://otherroom.org/videos/%e2%80%94-or-2-june-2008-videos

as part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continues on the second video.)

If any of these links are broken, this one isn't: here!