Photo by Paul Ligas

*****

Robert Selby’s debut collection, The Coming-Down Time, was published by Shoestring Press in 2020. The Kentish Rebellion, a book-length sequence set during the English Civil War, is forthcoming in 2022. He works as a freelance writer and edits the online poetry journal Wild Court.

*****

*****

Essay by Daniel Bennett • Poems by Robert Selby

*****

 The Coming Down Time by Robert Selby.  Shoestring Press. £10. ISBN: 978-1-912524-51-8

Sometime in the late nineties, I found myself working in a library, the first in what you might think of as white collar opportunities after I finished my degree in American and English Literature. I’d specialised in poetry (writing it and writing about it) but the years after my degree had been rootless, and the job represented the first time I’d given myself a…