The Coming-Down Time

Robert Selby’s first collection introduces a poet of outstanding range and versatility. Here are dramatic monologues and personae, poems of war and in memoriam, moving personal lyrics and portraits of hearth and history. In plain-dealing, serious addresses, Selby meets the reader with candour and subtle, finely-tuned music, earning the company of a line of poets which runs from Hardy through Larkin and which, with feeling and restraint, sings love songs of England.