Early Marks

I first heard you on paper, a Fulcrum ghost 

in Parker’s on the Broad 

 nobody attended and I took an hour packed 

 to move through the lines 

 fluid in take 

  a little face 

       distant 

  at the long jubilee table 

  bunting hung out 

as the king calls ‘be a useful citizen’ 

I was the learning hand, like you somehow left 

with smiles and the odd glare 

in grainy toyland 

 but the longhair climate gave means 

 to feel oblique 

  the things how they come 

  a gash in brick 

  a stream beneath 

  local-placed and sliding in different nows 

a film or canvas foreign with jump cuts 

At Warwick eleven years on your voice alive 

brought that obligation to bear 

in ‘most of an unpublished and could be 

as-yet-unwritten poem’ 

a score for objects 

less of a game 

in the prism 

it was a chart to put my footprint 

back in 

gold remembered in a stain of porcelain 

A few months later, upstairs at The Three Horseshoes 

after a riot of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love 

finding corners through the obvious 

beneath Nuttall’s cornet 

you had the audience in fits 

reporting your engagement and missed contact 

with Avis Tree, researcher 

text spun to identity theft 

while inside the laugh was a struggle 

to reach exactly across the gap 

Published Late Poems (Shearsman, 2024)

Gavin Selerie died at the age of 73 in June 2023.  Late Poems was published by Shearsman in July 2024.  His 1968 memoir Edges of Memory is forthcoming.  Born in 1949, Selerie published a wide range of poetic works, including Azimuth (1984), Roxy (1996), Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006), and Hariot Double (2016).  He was well-known as a performance poet, and collaborated on Days of 49 (1999) with his friend the poet and artist Alan Halsey.  He is also known for his interviews with and critical essays on contemporary poets. Shape-Shifter (Shearsman, 2022) is a festschrift curated by David Annwn. He donated his archive to the library of Lincoln College, Oxford, where it is already being used for academic purposes. 

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