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 It includes takes on poems from other languages and a large number of previously unpublished texts.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

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko. Edward Dorn's TWO INTERVIEWS brings together two largely unseen interviews from 1971 and 1981, conducted in Vancouver and London, with Tom McGauley, Brian Fawcett, John Scoggan, Stan Persky, J. H. Prynne, Ralph Maud, and Gavin Selerie. Published alongside the interviews are uncollected extracts from Dorn's Day & Night Report (1971), extracts from his unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1981), and three uncollected poems from 1981. Along with Justin Katko's preface to the book, which focuses on Dorn and Prynne's 1971 trip to Vancouver, and an extended introduction to the 1981 interview by Gavin Selerie, which deals with Dorn's geographical and linguistic alignments, particularly those relating to his first period in England, this book includes unpublished photographs, and a bibliography of Dorn interviews.

"Music's Duel" gathers work from across the Gavin Selerie's career, combining major sequences or extracts with a range of less available material, some previously unpublished. Placed together for the first time, these texts form an extended record of self and world, their focus twisting to reflect thought and language process. From a complex weave the book yields clarity and beauty, as in the treatment of landscape, death and desire. It is possible to see a development from heady, romantic pastoral to more satirical, closely-wrought urban texts, although continuities of concern and technique are evident. Distinguished by metaphysical wit and wordplay, Selerie's poetry excites both ear and eye. Genres and devices are torqued so as to enable the lyric tradition to operate within a fragmented sound and social context. Born in London, Selerie has long been involved with the city's network of experimental writing and performance. His charting of territory has parallels with that undertaken by Iain Sinclair, Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher, and this exploration, through an overlay of voices, fuses past and present in a distinctly different way.Gritty, brash terms jostle with more polished expression, while jumbled syntax retains elements of fluent discourse. Awareness of the poem as construct tempers but does not erase an emotional base which drives the areas of engagement.