Ulteriori informazioni
Collected Sonnets gathers nine main sequences, along with extracts and fugitive pieces, from a 50-year span. It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts. Praised by Peter Porter in The Observer for richly re-working Elizabethan elements, Selerie's sonnets have appealed equally to readers with a modernist bent. Standard themes-love, death, time, in land- and sea-scape-are given a radical slant. These poems grapple with emotions and ideas, shaped to give the personal public force. Motifs that emerge in individual sonnets also weave through the whole.
"'What are forms?' asks Gavin Selerie teasingly towards the end of his Collected Sonnets. Long an admirer of American examples by the likes of e.e. cummings, Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer, Selerie re-injects a distinctive English intelligence and sensibility into the sonnet form, working staunchly through a plurality of configurations, subject matters and tones. What are sonnets? 'Only a frame and skin for the beating', 'a stretched square' or 'what's filled with moving'. This is a major and hugely rewarding book by one of the UK's most singular poets."-Jeff Hilson, editor, Reality Street Book of Sonnets
"Selerie is a poet of place, describing urban and rural settings with accuracy and craft … he's a poet of relationships, creating tender lyrics … and he's a restlessly experimental writer, always wanting to expand what a poem can do." -Ian McMillan, Shadowtrain
Info autore
Gavin Selerie (1947-2023) was born in London. He taught at Birkbeck, University of London for many years. His books include 'Azimuth' (1984), 'Roxy' (1996) and 'Le Fanu's Ghost' (2006)-all long sequences with linked units. 'Music's Duel: New and Selected Poems 1972-2008' was published by Shearsman in 2009. This includes a good deal of fugitive material, besides more widely available work. Selerie collaborated with the writer and artist Alan Halsey, notably in the book 'Days of '49' (1999). His work appeared in anthologies such as 'The New British Poetry' (1988), 'Other: British & Irish Poetry since 1970' (1999) and 'The Reality Street Book of Sonnets' (2008). His poems generally involved a layering of voices through history and landscape. He wrote extensively about London, reflecting his roots (an Italian family in Soho and an English family of wood-carvers). He has been a core member of the London poetry scene since the 1970s. His final large-scale publications were 'Hariot Double', which juxtaposes renaissance and modern elements, and 'Collected Sonnets' (Shearsman Books, 2019).
