Collected Sonnets

<p><em>Collected Sonnets </em>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 It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts.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 <em>The Observer </em>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.</p><p>“‘What are forms?’ asks Gavin Selerie teasingly towards the end of his <em>Collected Sonnets</em>. 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 <em>Reality Street Book of Sonnets </em></p><p>“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 <em>Shadowtrain</em></p><p> </p>