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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 It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts.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
