Collected Sonnets
Collected Sonnets by Gavin Selerie, published by Shearsman Books in 2019, spans 371 pages and is presented in English. This collection gathers nine main sequences along with extracts and previously unpublished pieces from a 50-year period. The work includes interpretations of poems from various languages and explores standard themes such as love, death, and time, all while offering a radical perspective that intertwines personal emotions with broader public significance.
Readers will find that Selerie’s sonnets engage with a diverse array of configurations, subject matters, and tones, reflecting his admiration for both traditional and modernist influences. The collection not only showcases the poet’s ability to describe urban and rural landscapes with precision but also highlights his experimental approach to the sonnet form. Through motifs that recur across individual sonnets, Selerie invites contemplation on the nature of poetic forms and their capacity to convey complex ideas and emotions.
Official synopsis Publisher
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 It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts.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
Author
Publisher
Topics
FAQ
What is “Collected Sonnets” about?
Who is the author of “Collected Sonnets”?
When was “Collected Sonnets” published?
What is the ISBN for “Collected Sonnets”?
What are the book details (language, pages, edition)?
