Gavin Selerie – författare

Part of a series of literature guides designed for GCSE coursework requirements, this book contains - author details, background to the work, summaries of the text, critical commentaries, analysis of characterization, and sample questions with guideline answers.

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"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Gavin Selerie's career, combining major sequences or extracts with a range of less available material, some previously unpublished.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.

As its title announces, this book collects two interviews with the American poet Edward Dorn (1929-99). 'The Peak Interview' (1971) was published in a Vancouver student newspaper and contains contributions from Ralph Maud and J.H. Prynne, among others. Following it is a selection of four texts from The Day & Night Report, Dorn's unpublished daybook from 1971. 'The Riverside Interview' (1981) was intended for publication in the Riverside Interviews series and is supplemented here with an introduction by Gavin Selerie, the interviewer. Following it is a selection of two chapters from Dorn's unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1980-81), as well as three uncollected poems from the English magazine Spectacular Diseases, 6 (1981).

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