The Coming-Down Time
Shoestring Press, 2020
Order at Blackwell's
“War and peace, past and present, love and death: The Coming-Down Time has a large reach, but makes its themes feel intimate by catching them in language that is at once simple and capable of wonder. It’s a striking achievement: moving and intelligent and memorable.” – Andrew Motion
“Vivid, precise and stamped with a very English restraint, these poems deftly connect people and place across the span of a long century. There are images, echoes and correspondences here that resound as truthfully and as poignantly as a village church bell.” – Melissa Harrison
“… a marvellous anatomy of English life over the past century, working outwards from its gripping evocation of a family centre in East Anglia by a writer who is at once poet, local historian and naturalist. The book focuses on the extraordinary development of war experience into the familiarity of the period which is ‘now and England’, showing in its final part how everyone’s personal life is in direct descent from the personal lives of ancestors.” – Bernard O’Donoghue
Reviewed by Agenda, Ambit, Caught by the River, The Friday Poem, The High Window, London Grip, Los Angeles Review of Books, Magma, The Manchester Review, PN Review, Poetry London, Review 31, The Scores, and Under the Radar.
Reviews:
“Selby has a better eye than Eliot for the details of English rural life [...] and an instinctive gift for pastoral.”
- John Greening, Agenda
“Remoteness is made present through the gripping, even startling scenes, the accessibility of the language, control of formal elements, and the reworking of pastoral tradition [...] Permeated by a sense of landscape, history, family, and divine intention, Selby’s collection is a three-part lyrical meditation on the forces that define individual and national identity [...] Such poignant moments are matched by lines that mesmerise with rhythmic beauty and by stanzas of formal intricacy. Potent images persist, catching in one’s throat after the reading ends. Entrancing.”
- Kevin Gardner, PN Review
“The World Wars, industrialization, and the public and private realms of love are woven through the book’s three sections with a formal elegance that reminds how a close attention to lineation and stanzaic structure can produce as much surprise and playfulness as the oft-lauded ‘experimental’ approach.”
- Tarn Macarthur, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Selby’s collection reflects honour and humility, humour and hope: a fine start to a journey which I hope will last for a long time.”
- Alison Brackenbury, Poetry London
“Among the many surprises is the fact that this is Selby’s first full collection – so assured does it feel, right from the first line, that I found myself double-checking more than once […] The self-awareness in his poems suggests Selby is far too smart to fall into the trap of simply repeating the considerable triumphs of what is an outstanding first collection.”
- Matt Merritt, Magma
“…an unmistakeable gift of fitness of language, an unforced rapport between content and form. The formal conservatism of The Coming-Down Time might constitute a more serious attempt at imaginative resistance in the desolate era in which we find ourselves. Expressive, beautiful and sincere.”
- James Peake, Ambit
“This is a gift of a collection, where love for people and for landscape is expressed in a quiet kind of faithfulness and attention.”
- Katherine Venn, Caught by the River
“The Coming-Down Time stands out from the field in its willingness to tackle unfashionable themes and stand squarely within its interest in the past, but it is also a collection which presents some genuine lovely moments unencumbered by these wider considerations. A debut collection worth getting a hold of.”
- Andrew Neilson, The Scores
“It is certainly the best debut collection of the year, but also makes a bid (in a strong year) for the best poetry collection that I have read this year, given the sheer expanse of its reach in subject, reflection, skill and execution.”
- Patrick Davidson Roberts, The High Window
“It brilliantly evokes a bygone age – the poems have an almost filmic quality. This is a collection full of loss, longing and nostalgia. It feels like it is yearning for something real yet undefinable.”
- Julia Webb, Under the Radar
“This idea of the past and present co-existing in the mind of the poet is more than hinted at by the striking cover image (a woodcut by Claire Leighton) of two men planting a sapling. This captures the essence of these poems – the desire to celebrate the past but also negotiate ways in which to live in the present and future while also doing justice to what has come before.”
- Richie McCaffery, The Friday Poem
“Prior to the publication of this book, Selby had edited a Selected Prose of Mick Imlah, and to a degree you can see Imlah’s work rate has rubbed off here. Robert Selby has taken his time with this collection. ‘Your Bright Jays’ has been around since at least 2013, published in the New Statesman and has barely changed since then. The ‘cardie’ is no longer defined as ‘red’ and a gerund has been replaced with an intransitive verb. This stuff takes time…but I hope it doesn’t take the twenty that it took Imlah to produce his second collection.”
- Mat Riches, London Grip
“…. a marvellous volume of lyrics the main subjects of which are family legacies, history, love, England, and poetry…”
- Ben Leubner, Review 31
"Selby’s is an intriguing first collection, innovatively both old-fashioned and of its time. He’s a poet looking to praise who succeeds in finding ways of doing it."
- Paul McLoughlin, The Manchester Review
"If you wanted an example of Ezra Pound’s maxim that ‘Poetry should be as well-written as prose’ then you’d find it here. There is publication and then there is acclaim, and in the currency of the poetry world, for better or worse, that means featuring in the lists of the prizes. Selby is entitled to feel disappointed that more hasn’t happened for The Coming-Down Time, but there’s a cost to be had from going against the grain."
- Daniel Bennett, The High Window
