Mark Goodwin

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, Layers of Un marks another stage in the development of Mark Goodwin's radical landscape poetry.

"These poems disclose a poet's rich relationship to the natural world by stripping away, by letting a raw objectivist lyric scrape off any rhetorical surface to discover the details beneath. This happens in almost every line, every phrase-so much so that finally his individual words seem to do it by themselves. The result is that /nature/ here ticks and clicks as though it were trying to find a halfway-house language between itself and the writer. Illusion of course, the trick of poetry, and Mark Goodwin is the magician." (Tim Allen)

Read a sample poem for free - just click the Extracts tab above. When Sidney Realer experiences a moment of revelation in the supermarket aisles, it sets him off on a pilgrimage through a frighteningly familiar contemporary landscape. With narrative roots in the biblical, mythological and folk traditions, Shod is a twenty-first century parable, spirited and dark in equal measure, taking place in the clone-town wilderness, fearlessly singing the songs of our all our wrongs. Winner of the East Midlands Book Award." Raw, distinctly voiced, and edgy, Shod is a Twenty-First-Century allegory that doesn't disappoint. Sidney Realer, the Shoe Messiah, and the apocalyptic cast of characters he encounters, stays with the imagination long after the poem has been read. With echoes of popular song, religious tracts, and consumer culture, Shod has overtones of the dissenting art of William Blake. But this is Blakean work which is very much for today, as Sidney moves between the blank-walled supermarket and broken-rural hinterland of a town's outskirts. This is disturbing, savage, and memorable poetry, with something uncompromisingly human at its heart." Deborah Tyler-Bennett"Rich in folk tale, oral history, classical myth and religion including Nike as all too convincing goddess, AZDA as an underworld of sorts. Like Berryman's Henry, Goodwin has created a combined muse, foil and antihero in Sidney, at once everyman and every troubling crazy dream. He writes with an elegant, engaging strangeness, always anchored fast in our world through something that unites us all and keeps us all walking unhobbled. Shod's shoes are firmly on the ground, but its mind is tearing through the micro- and macro-verse with allusive abandon. It's an inspiring, extraordinary ride." Luke Kennard"Mark Goodwin's Shod takes us for a walk on the wild side of poetic adventure and it's a treat." Geraldine MonkMark Goodwin's third full-length collection is Shod. He has previously published two collections with Shearsman Books, Else and Back of A Vast; and also a chapbook entitled Distance a Sudden with Longbarrow Press. He has been fascinated by religions and mysticism since he started writing; being much inspired and informed by the works of Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle. Mark lives in Leicestershire where he works as a community poet.

A first collection for Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. "It's thrilling to welcome a new poet into the company of our seriously exciting younger nature writers such as Kathleen Jamie and Robert Macfarlane. Mark Goodwin is a poet whose surround-senses are as alert as an animal's, and whose writing is exceptionally grounded in so many of the complexities of being fully human." (Catherine Byron)