Gavin Selerie

MUSIC’S DUEL: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Gavin Selerie, 328pp, 9x6ins, £13.95 / $25. Shearsman Books. www.shearsman.com

Shearsman is one of my favourite presses because not only do they seek out new and exciting work from all over the world but, like Salt and Carcanet, (and many others) they present us with reconsiderations of older writers, poets who’ve been publishing for many years but whose work has often slipped under the radar of that odd and unclassifiable beast, the general poetry reader. Gavin Selerie is one such writer: he’s been active since the 1970’s, mainly in the London poetry scene, and his work reflects influences from the metaphysical poets via Black Mountain and popular culture and found language.

In an essay in Jacket Magazine about two of Selerie’s collections, Roxy and LeFanu’s Ghost, Robert Hampson describes him as ‘probably one of the most obviously scholarly of contemporary British poets’ and it’s true that collections like Roxy are the result of years of research and rewriting, in Roxy’s case ten years from start to finish, and the collection takes in the history of cinema, Selerie’s own life in London, and historical and political events that occurred during the book’s gestation; what I like best about Selerie, though (and I hope I’m not being heretical when I say this. Actually, I don’t mind being heretical, so ya boo sucks.) is the immediacy of his language, the way he speak directly to me, the way he can illuminate a day with an idea or a line. Take these satisfying stanzas, set in Rosedale in North Yorkshire, an area ringing with layers of history: ‘Glass Holes/a little way south/in shale and sandstone//dug for rabbits/yield something else//vessels/from a winged surface/under bracken//pale green beaker pieces,/neck of a wrythen Kuttrolf bottle,/pincered handle from a bleeding bowl, girth of a globular jug/linen-smoothers or slick stones...’ Beautiful!

Music’s Duel contains extracts from books like LeFanu’s Ghost alongside uncollected poems from the same decades as the more substantial works, and in the book we see Selerie’s development from the earlier pieces quoted above via the longer works to recent uncollected poems, like the moving and ostensibly simple ‘Deep Clearance’, about the clearing out of (I’m guessing) Selerie’s parents’ bookshelves, heartbreaking in the apparently workaday language: ‘His copy of The White Company/with detached boards, signature and address,/ 184 Wardour Street, my own name/appended above.//Stories from English History,/my mother’s prize, September 1927,/Lady Margaret’s School, Willesden Lane./ “No more wars”, says the parson in hope/(last page)’. The poem ends ‘all margin/each book a case of unwritten thoughts’, a troubling idea that sends us back into the poem, back into the idea of what reading and writing can be, and how memory can function within that.

And maybe that, in the end, is why I love Gavin Selerie’s work so much: he always sends me back into the poem, always makes me work hard even with the apparently simple lyrics. He won’t let it lie, he won’t let me lie. ‘Tomogram’, for example, is ‘an enquiry into the origins and meanings of “ghost”, including its use in a printing context’: ‘Your text is the ghost of a call/(I did not ring) but since after all the message yields up//Caxton’s H/a panel of ink starvation/as seen in Gothic – ‘ghastly for to see’//the word is as much as breath/at three removes//beyond the jurisdiction of veracity/paling in a spectral line...’ and so on, each stanza stopping you in your tracks, each packet of information and art forcing you to take your time.

So you can read Selerie on many levels: he’s a poet of place, describing urban and rural settings with an accuracy and craft that always illuminates the human engine that drives the visual delights; he’s a love poet or a poet of relationships, creating tender lyrics on the longevity of desire, and he’s above all a restlessly experimental writer, always wanting to expand the idea of what a Gavin Selerie poem can do, and by extension what all poems can do.

Read this book: you won’t be disappointed. If you are, blame me, not him.