Rob
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Robert Selby
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My debut pamphlet was published as part of Clutag's 'Five Poems' series in May. It is available to buy on Clutag's website here.

I will be reading from the pamphlet at The Social on Wednesday 18th October, for Caught by the River.

Caught by the River have also been kind enough to publish my poems 'The Firecrests' and 'Shadows on the Barley' on their website, here and here.


Poems 'Wild Cherry' and 'Burning the Clocks' appeared in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Structo magazine.

Poem 'The Big Guns' from my 'East of Ipswich' sequence was published in the 22 October 2016 issue of The Spectator. Four poems from the sequence ('In God's Prevenient Grace', 'Elysium', 'Tournai' and 'Wilf') were published in Ambit 221, Summer 2015.

My review of Joey Connolly's Long Pass appeared in the TLS, No. 5963, July 14 2017. My review of Richard Osmond's Useful Verses is forthcoming. An essay I wrote on John Fuller, 'Fun & True', appeared in PN Review, issue 233, January-February 2017, as part of its 'John Fuller at 80' celebration.



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Days of Roses

The anthology, featuring five of my poems and the poems of others from the regular reading event, is now available to buy.

Link to Amazon / Buy


The unauthorised use of any work without permission from the author is strictly prohibited
----> sample of work
This poem appeared in the Times Literary Supplement
No.5495, July 25 2008, and the anthology Days of Roses
(2011)


How easily people forget things,
The winter wood displays.
Hanging in tangles limp from brambles
Are scarves that were gifts on Christmas day,
And gloves adorn waymarkers and fences
Like cairns, or the butcher-bird's prey.
Now and then, a neatly folded Barbour
Or pair of hiking boots, as if a rambler,

Wishing to ramble no more, drowned himself
In the river down by the cattle byre;
Had to wait until a full day and night
Of rain, until it could swell no higher;
Thrust field guide in tweed one last time,
Hung binoculars from wind-bent brier,
And swanned in between dripping pine
Up to his deer-stalker - the only sign

A man gulped hard in there, ending things
As easily as people forget things. Frost
Stiffens body and bower just the same,
And all the walkers' accessories lost
From their selves soften in squally rain;
Decay, forming a rag-and-bone copse
Whose knitted limbs of knotted fabric
Stand as testament to the losing habit.

[The Winter Wood]