The Burning

'The lyric poem works both to slow down our world teasing out the many disparate elements of our experience and to reorient it by exposing an entire universe of instincts paradoxes and mysteries beneath all that we know or think we know. In these poems by Anna Selby human beings are always gravitating from earth and air towards water. It is as if the transcendence they seek (the desire to leap/hot out of your own life) requires a physical departure from the very medium they inhabit. Selby's ringing titles evoke not just a subject but a sensibility and her versatile forms and deftly run-on lines very persuasively re-enact the thrill of sense experience and the shape of thought.' Chandrahas Choudhury