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BOOK REVIEW

Gavin Selerie
Roxy
West House Books, ISBN 0952189127 (0-9521891-2-7)
and
Le Fanu’s Ghost
(by Gavin Selerie and Alan Halsey), Five Seasons Pr, ISBN 0947960449 (0-947960-44-9)

reviewed by Robert Hampson

This review is about 14 printed pages long. It is copyright © Robert Hampson and Jacket magazine 2008.See our [»»] Copyright notice.

Robert Hampson

Gavin Selerie’s «Roxy» and «Le Fanu’s Ghost»

Gavin Selerie is probably one of the most obviously scholarly of contemporary British poets. The two works I am discussing, Roxy and Le Fanu’s Ghost, both grow out of (and constitute) large-scale research projects, and they both display their engagement with scholarship from the start. Thus Roxy signals its research-interest in fashion through epigraphs from Robert Burton and John Locke, while Le Fanu’s Ghost begins with a 60-page Prologue, a critical and biographical essay on the entangled and extended Sheridan/Le Fanu families and their wide range of literary works.

Roxy (West House Books, 1996) was started in November 1985 and completed in 1995 — a ten-year project like Allen Fisher’s Place.[1] Michael Bracewell described Roxy Music’s project as ‘time-travelling between different notions of glamour’, and Selerie’s long poem, Roxy, can be seen as doing much the same.[2] It takes off from the word that provides the title to undertake a multi-layered engagement with popular music, cinema, theatre, visual art, architecture and fashion. As Selerie reveals, in a short essay at the end of the volume, ‘Roxy’ is the diminutive of ‘Roxana’, the type-name for an oriental queen; the professional name taken by the prostitute in Defoe’s novel of that name; and, in a further diminuendo, a movie starlet. ‘Roxy’ also signals the chain of cinemas of that name, originally founded by Samuel L. Rothafel in New York; and, by extension, the Moorish cinema-architecture of the Astorias and other chains, that often later became the venues for rock concerts. It becomes an index for the importance of art-cinema for Selerie’s generation — in Selerie’s own case, this means the Electric in Notting Hill, the Academy in Oxford Street, the Scala at King’s Cross.

As well as the allusion to Bryan Ferry, ‘Roxy’ was also a 1970s Covent Garden punk-rock club. This suggests something of the constellation of overlapping concerns from which the poem arose. The cultural reach of the poem, however, goes back through Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (novel, film and television versions); Baudelaire’s dandyism and nineteenth-century aestheticism; Blake and Byron; eighteenth-century mock-epic; the Elizabethan stage and the Art/Nature debate of the Renaissance; to Ovid and Pliny. A note at the end of the poem observes how the ‘moguls who created Hollywood’, Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, all came out of the garment industry. This provides a linkage between the production of glamour through popular film and the glamour of fashion.

As Selerie has noted, the poem was also written as a response to Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams. Wilson sees fashion not as simple consumption, but rather as secondary production: a vehicle for fantasy, complex commentary, the basis for a new cultural order. For Wilson, it is the ‘pointlessness of fashion’ that is ‘precisely what makes it valuable’ (p. 245), and the same, of course, might be said for popular music, cinema, theatre, visual art, and poetry.

Le Fanu’s Ghost (Five Seasons Press, 2006) was started in October 2001, after a year’s initial research, and was completed in 2006. It grows out of extensive original research into the lives and writings of the tangled Sheridan / Le Fanu families, starting from Swift’s friend, Dr Thomas Sheridan, through generations of novelists, dramatists and writers through R.B. Sheridan, Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton down to Caroline Blackwood.

It is also an exploration of Irish Gothic as part of ascendancy culture, registering the anxieties of the Protestant land-owning class at the end of its resources. As W. J. McCormack has noted, ‘the comparatively closed ranks of the professional grades among the Anglo-Irish were perpetuated in intermarriage’; at the same time, the self-experience of this group was one of financial and political insecurity and ‘collapsing historical coherence’.[3] This provides the context for a specifically Anglo-Irish version of the Gothic.

1. Roxy

Like others before him, Selerie, in Roxy, engages consciously with the problems and the specificities of writing the long poem. One the one hand, there is (as Pound most clearly exemplifies) the problem of sustaining a long writing project through an extended period of time. In order to avoid being merely an exercise in writing, the poem has to be open to the changes in the writer through the time of writing and the changes in the circumstances of the writing. Roxy was written in and in response to what Selerie calls the ‘Thatcher-Murdoch era’. (Some of the practices of that era now seem to have become institutionalised so that new British Prime Ministers, after presenting themselves to the Windors, also have to attend on the Murdochs to assure them of their allegiance.)

The poem is grounded, at least initially, in the everyday experience of living in Ladbroke Grove, London, and is open to the unexpected and unforeseen: thus Section 12 deals with the office-development on the Rose Theatre site; Section 13 with the King’s Cross fire; Section 16 with the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. In the same way, the use of found materials — magazines, newspapers, graffiti, logos on bags — opens the poem to the contingent. The writing project has to be conceived and set up through specific plans and procedures to be open in this way. In the case of Roxy, I have already mentioned the constellation of interests with which Selerie began: the project was conceived of as bringing together various concerns and putting them in play with each other. But it was also conceived of in terms of the dialogue of various perspectives. Thus, the first section not only presents itself as dialogue, a form that the sequence as a whole repeatedly returns to, but sets up competing perspectives on fashion. Thus two stanzas read as follows:

Pushing object into subject,
it seems after centuries
she inhabits her house.

She dresses to please
herself, down décolleté
with burnished-leaf earings
and a diamante choker,
stretched lips and blown hair.

Following Wilson, the opening lines assert the subjective power of woman to take pleasure in her own body. The line-break in ‘She dresses to please/ herself’ precisely articulates the issue: do women dress to please men or to please themselves? But the confident assertion of woman as subject is then undermined by the objectifying effect of the subsequent lines and the implicit presence of the male gaze. Later in this section, another perspective on fashion is brought in:

Pecuniary canons:
Who gasps over a bench
In the sweating den.

Puritan ghosts to the chameleon —
smoke in history
from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

Even if fashion can be seen as empowering, as secondary production, there is still the issue of primary production: the sweatshops in which garments are produced, and the dangerous conditions of garment factories. The memory of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which 125 female workers were burnt to death in a New York garment factory, is kept alive and used synecdochally for the conditions of primary production. Similarly, an assertion of the democratisation of urban spaces (‘the streets belong to everybody: / glam-trash, asset-strippers’) is undermined by the reminder of ‘pecuniary canons’ and answered by the closing perception of a new elite seizing power (‘the man who drives the crowd’).

Section Two brings these concerns together in another take on women and power:

Twenty years on from day’s bright dance
they awake from a dream of skewed intimacies
to see her smeared architecture:
Britannia on the front page,
helmeted and breast-plated,
thrusting into the Page Three unravelment,
a regressive fantasy of substitute objects
lying in any readers grip.

Like other parts of the poem, this section is very conscious of the twentieth anniversary of the events of 1968. The muted invocation of Blake’s ‘Bright Day’ (Albion rising from the Mill with Slaves) as an iconic encoding of the political dreams of 1968 is played against another visual image, the Sun’s 1983 election-day front-page photograph of Thatcher, presenting her as war-leader and drawing subliminally on the iconography of Britannia. This in turn is literally superimposed upon the Sun’s Page Three nude. The naked male body of Albion, with its (somewhat problematic) implications of political and sexual liberation, is checked by the armoured body of Thatcher. The juxtaposition of the breast-plated Thatcher and the naked Page Three image initiates an inquiry into the popular imaginary, the sado-masochistic erotics of power and the objectification of the female body.

Section Three picks up these concerns from another perspective and introduces another set of references into the poem: Joseph von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich and von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. It is tempting, but an obvious over-simplification, to read von Sternberg and Dietrich as a subject rhyme for Murdoch and Thatcher. Nevertheless, we are invited to link the Sun’s iconic image of Thatcher with the image of Dietrich in an exploration of power, sexuality and the gaze. Section Three (and subsequent sections of the poem) focusses on the fabrication of Dietrich as the ‘Steinbergian woman’.

Light falls from a grating
on discarded ribbons, artificial cherries
and a manikin in a white shell hat.
Her expression, formed in a slash,
seems to wait for editing.

Section Three begins in a cellar under a milliner’s shop. The manikin is both substitute for and representative of the actress: the actress, like the manikin, is presented as a blank, as a potential, waiting to be dressed, positioned, edited by the director. The section ends by drawing attention to another form of fabrication:

What if it’s translation and she didn’t
emerge from sea-foam, that the spoken seen
is a brush-stroke and bow-stroke
of some tormenting tutelage,
that she has telescoped her names
and is no longer married with a history.

The ‘screen-goddess’, a contemporary term evoked through the image of the birth of Venus, is also the property of the film studio. If the screen-goddess seems to have a position of power relative to her viewers, Selerie allusively reminds us of the real power of the Hollywood studios over their stars and the off-screen (as well as on-screen) fabrications: ‘Marlene’ as an invented name, produced by the telescoping of Dietrich’s real names ‘Maria Magdalene’, and the studio suppressing the fact of Dietrich’s marriage in a re-writing or erasure of her history.

The section also explores the modality of the visible through film and film theory.

You watch with a governing eye
rapt by untouchable links
as the gate opens
bringing skin to an elsewhere of hope.

It sets up the debate between contending views of the screen-actress — as a fetishised object constructed for the pleasure of the male spectator or as a potentially liberating creation — as a way of revisiting the contending views of fashion presented earlier. Section 4 explores this further through an engagement with the mirror and through Alan Resnais’s film L’Annee derniere a Marienbad. The fact that Lacan’s essay on ‘The Mirror Stage’ was first delivered at Marienbad provides a basis for the associative nexus of Section 4, while Delphine Seyrig (the female protagonist of L’Annee derniere a Marienbad) adds another to the line of screen stars who inhabit the poem as embodiments of ‘glamour’: Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer will be added in subsequent sections.

Section 6 returns to Dietrich and, through a compressed account of The Blue Angel, explores both voyeurism and exhibitionism. The film shows the dangers of erotic obsession, the decline and humiliation of the Professor drawn by the glamour of the cabaret singer Lola-Lola, and Selerie uses it to set up again questions of power and the gaze. Section 8 returns to the commodification of the actresses by the Hollywood studios:

A contract guaranteed everything
from the lace on her underwear
to the use of her lips.
Under his gaze, her head tilted,
she is the perfect product
and remote, a brand-name
which the buyer will return to
again and again.

But this is juxtaposed to the female viewer, finding a liberatory, self-fashioning potential in the film through secondary production.

What we see from this brief account of the opening of the poem is how it was conceived as a sequence of independent but inter-locking sections. Issues explored in one section can be explored from a different perspective in the next as part of a dialectical process. Like Pound, Selerie makes use of ‘subject rhymes’ as part of this explorative process. What we also glimpse is how certain sections can effectively constitute a mini-sequence. Thus Sections 3—8 constitute a mini-sequence on film, before the poem returns to a more direct engagement with fashion in Section 10. Film returns later — Garbo, Dietrich and L’Annee derniere in Marienbad in Sections 37 and 38; Barbara Stanwyck and Rita Hayworth in Section 42; Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds in Section 44; and so on. What this points to is Selerie’s use of recurrent motifs to interlock the sections of the long poem.

In addition to motifs from fashion (including sewing, weaving and tailoring) and from film, Selerie also uses, for example, motifs of angels and flight, and recurrent references to Cleopatra. Thus The Blue Angel is picked up by references to the Angel, Islington; Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire; Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’; Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’; and the winged Nike. This suggests something of the flexibility of this particular device as a means of generating and proliferating linkages across the poem during the process of writing the poem..

What my analysis doesn’t reveal is the overall architecture of the piece. Roxy is made up of 52 sections, one for each week of the year, with section 26 beginning ‘To begin again ...’. However, the poem doesn’t seem to have been conceived in this way, but rather this seems to have been a numerological ordering that gradually emerged during the process of writing, which Selerie then worked to retain. Indeed, as late as 1992, Selerie still conceived of the poem as being in four major parts (with breaks after sections 11, 19 and 31), but there is no indication of this division in the published text.

Another kind of articulation of the text is suggested by sections 25 and 31, formal dialogues between Roxy and a male interlocutor, which operate as linked or mirroring sections. What this suggests is that, in addition to the idea of independent sections that inter-locked, Selerie was also concerned to produce (or, more accurately, evolve) an overall structure and to create some sense of closure. Like the proliferation of the dense concatenation of motifs and references, this architecture for the poem developed as the poem was in process rather than being the scaffold around which the poem was built.

Female fashion and glamour are central to the poem but also problematic material — perhaps particularly for a male writer. James Annesley, for example, has criticised Brett Easton Ellis’s engagement with the fashion world in Glamorama for failing to establish sufficient distance from its subject and ending in a position of complicity rather than critique.[4]

Similarly, in Roxy, the language of fashion, like the language and processes of cinema, is savoured and enjoyed, even as the poem engages critically with brands and status.

William Rowe, in a recent essay on Barry MacSweeney’s Jury Vet, has engaged with MacSweeney ‘shamelessly enjoying’ the language of fashion in his poetry.[5] In Rowe’s reading, Jury Vet takes the fashion show as ‘mirror of production’, but the issue then becomes ‘the types of work that MacSweeney’s text does in its handling of the fashion image’ (220) Among other things, Rowe argues that MacSweeney’s use of the language of Pearl and Wyatt and Chatterton, a language that speaks of ‘a time other than the amnesic present of the fashion image’, ‘played into the fashion fetish, dislodges its hold and prevents it from completing its meaning in the shimmering object of circulation’ (223). Selerie, too, plays his own cultural reach and depth against this ‘world/without memory’ (87). The language of Swift (‘a lexicon of fopperies’) and a consciousness of the processes (‘From cotton fields to the catwalk’) work against the fashion world of surfaces (87).

More seriously, as in some of the passages quoted above, distance from or investment in the objectification of women through the male gaze remains, at times, ambiguously unresolved. However, as I suggested earlier, Selerie has deliberately set up the poem as a dialogue of different perspectives, a dialogue which he frequently allows to remain open.

2. Le Fanu’s Ghost

Le Fanu’s Ghost has its roots in Selerie’s collaboration with Alan Halsey, Days of ’49 (West House Books, 1999).[6] Selerie has mentioned how, after completing Days of ’49, he became interested in the ‘marginalia procedures’ used in ‘Faust Variations’ (in Days of ’49) as the basis for another book-length project. In ‘Faust Variations’, Selerie divided the page vertically with creative responses to Faust on the left-hand side and various kinds of researched material on the right-hand side as a kind of marginal commentary. Thus, for example, Selerie’s treatment of the damnation of Faust is glossed by a reference to Los Alamos physicists and the Director of Los Alamos asserting ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll let anybody in Washington or any politicians tell me what work not to do.’ This ‘marginalia procedure’ clearly underlies the combined scholarly and imaginative impulses at the heart of the Le Fanu project.

From Days of ’49 also is derived the device of ‘raised documents’. In Days of ’49, Halsey and Selerie included three sections of ‘raised documents’, researched materials that charted literary events (or recorded literary exchanges) month-by-month through 1949. In Le Fanu’s Ghost, these ‘raised documents’ are more substantial: they include extended passages from Theophilus Swift’s Touchstones, a complaint about the marriage of Miss Emma Dobbin and Mr Thomas Le Fanu; W. R. Le Fanu’s memoir, Seventy Years of Irish Life; Le Fanu family letters; letters from James Joyce about Finnegans Wake and The House in the Churchyard; J.S. Le Fanu’s writings for the Dublin University Magazine; Thomas Sheridan’s treatise, The Art of Punning; and so on. At other times, we are given a distilled version of the catalogue of Thomas Le Fanu’s library; a list of plays which Sheridan Le Fanu might have seen during his visit to London in May/June 1838; and a list of plays performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, between 1794 and 1809, during Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s tenure. In addition, Le Fanu’s Ghost also manifests the same kind of visual and typographic inventiveness as was evident in the earlier collaborative project.

In addition to the scholarly and critical work that provides the foundations (and intertextual materials) for Le Fanu’s Ghost, Selerie also includes material derived, in the manner of Iain Sinclair, from his on-foot investigations of relevant sites. An early poem, ‘Burnt Custom, Bright Shroud’, for example, records a visit to modern Dublin. ‘Bootmarks and Fingersigns’, similarly, clearly derives from a research trip to Chapelizod. Selerie is also concerned, throughout the poem, to layer different historical contexts. Thus, for example, the poem as a whole is not constructed as a chronological history of the Sheridan/Le Fanu families.

The first part, for example, which is largely focussed on J. S. Le Fanu moves from ‘The Portraits’, which imagines Le Fanu writing at his house in Merrion Square, surrounded by family portraits, to Theophilus Swift’s 1811 complaint about the marriage of Le Fanu’s parents, through the catalogue of his father’s library and the list of plays Le Fanu might have seen in 1838; through the plays of James Sheridan Knowles to The House by the Churchyard. The second section segues from The House by the Churchyard to begin with Joyce and Finnegans Wake. Sheridan Le Fanu had spent his childhood at the Military School in Phoenix Park (where his father was the chaplain) and had drawn on this for his novel The House by the Churchyard; Joyce’s father had a copy of the novel as one of the four books in his library; and Joyce drew on the novel for the ‘dirty deed’ in Phoenix Park which lies behind Finnegans Wake. This provides a glimpse of the kind of associative matrices through which the poem is developed. By this means, the poem tracks the Protestant Ascendancy from Edmond Spenser through Jonathon Swift and the Sheridan/Le Fanu clan down to Yeats. At the same time, through the Phoenix Park murders and Joyce, it also gestures towards a very different political and religious tradition.[7]

The poem is also concerned to make connections with more recent issues. Thus, ‘Glass Master’, whose title and much of whose imagery derives from the manufacture of CDs, begins from a pirated recording of Van Morrison’s 1995 Dublin Concert (airshot from a radio broadcast) and rumours of IRA involvement in bootleg CDs. It draws in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland and sketches the subsequent history of resistance to British occupation though Whiteboys and Oakboys, Captain Rock and Sinn Fein, to the ‘dirty protest’ in the Maze Prison. ‘Castle and Pin’ draws on R.B. Sheridan’s opposition as a Member of Parliament to the repressive legislation introduced by Pitt’s administration such as the Aliens Bill and the Treason and Sedition Bills and his vigorous opposition to the suspension of Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus was a legal protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment established by Magna Carta in 1215 and ended by New Labour under Blair.

As with Roxy, Le Fanu’s Ghost was not written straight-through in sequence from beginning to end. Instead, it was built up through a process of accretions around an original core of texts in a deliberately layered and winding pattern. Selerie’s research in the Sheridan/Le Fanu families foregrounded the pattern of repetition and variation of genetic inheritance, of family names across generations, and the repetition and variation of real life and literature and across literary texts. Thus, ‘Pedigree Peepshow’ gives a list of family names with multiple repetitions of first names and surnames in various combinations, while ‘Babble’ gives 18 different alternative spellings for each of the family names Blackwood, Le Fanu, and Sheridan. Similarly, in ‘Rivals Interleaved’, Selerie begins, as the title intimates, with a compression and conflation of R. B. Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal, but the notion of rivalry is used to bring in Frances Sheridan’s comedy, A Journey to Bath (1765/6), through the notion of mother/son influence and rivalry, as well as another Bath comedy, Samuel Foote’s The Maid of Bath (1771), about Sheridan’s rivalry with Captain Mathews over Elizabeth Linley.

Again, as with Roxy, Selerie works to interlink the separate parts of this long poem through repeated motifs. Thus, the Prologue begins with a mapping of Dublin spaces through a focus on a series of houses: 12 Dorset Street, the birthplace of R.B. Sheridan; 70 Merrion Square, home of Sheridan Le Fanu; 27 Capel Street, home of Dr Thomas Sheridan. Then, in the poem that follows, there are repeated references to keys, locks, panels, doors and so on. The poem in effect becomes a house haunted by ghosts. Thus, we have a piece like ‘Casement’, referring not to Roger Casement but to the architectural feature which its shape mimics. The block of text can be read both as a window-frame and as an enclosure, as a visual image and as a determining absence. The text itself gestures towards a Gothic building — a ‘castle’ and/or ‘prison’ with its ‘vaulted passage’, ‘many stairs’ and ‘painted glass’. It gestures also towards Gothic narrative with its ‘Ghouls’ and ‘guardian’ and moving pictures. Moving pictures are a Gothic convention, but the reference here also picks up on the earlier concern with portraits and anticipates Selerie’s engagement with Joyce’s interest in establishing a cinema in Dublin.

The next piece in the sequence, ‘Moving Picture’, effects a transition from the Gothic device to film, while the following piece, ‘ Voltascope’, takes off from Joyce’s Volta Cinematograph and the five films shown there on its first evening. ‘The Casement’, in fact, draws on Sophie Lee’s The Recess, one of the first historical Gothic novels. Le Fanu’s father had a copy in his library (as ‘Skaldic Manoeuvres’ notes), while Lee herself was part of the Sheridan/ Le Fanu circle at Bath. The text thus has both an immediately readable content but also calls for (and supports) deeper reading in.

The motif of locks and keys also links up with motifs of codes and ciphers — for example, genetic codes or digital codes (as in ‘Glass Master’), but the notion of codes and ciphers also relates to an important aspect of the poem. Consider, for example, ‘Speedwell’. It is obviously an engagement with the appearance, uses and symbolism of the common wild flower — a perennial with four blue, joined petals and a ‘white core’. ‘Manner Treue’ (‘man’s constancy’) is its German name, and Selerie explores ‘man’s constancy’ in the latter part of the poem (‘will last as long as held’). Its Latin name, ‘Veronica’ is punned on in the final line — ‘To fear an acre’).

What this leaves unexplained is the connection with Le Fanu. However, a close reading of the ‘Personalia’ section at the end of the volume reveals that Guendolen Ramsden, the great-grand-daughter of R.B. Sheridan, published a novel Speedwell in 1894. The heroine of this novel reflects on the short-livedness of ‘man’s constancy’. Compare this with ‘Mizmaze Mizzard’. As the facing page to ‘Speedwell’, it reads first of all as a spray of flowers superimposed upon a circle. The text is derived from Finnegans Wake, where Joyce is referring to Jonathon Swift’s (Nathan Joe) relationships with Stella and Vanessa (Esther van Homrigh and Esther Johnson), which Joyce uses to introduce the motif of the older man with two young women (as a parallel to his protagonist HCE). In fact, the visual image turns out to be derived from Guendolen Ramsden’s cover-illustration for Speedwell.

The piece thus becomes not only a posie of Joyce’s engagement with Swift, but a rebus, an emblem, which ties together Swift and Joyce in a Le Fanu/Sheridan context. The title, ‘the mouth of the maze’, might be said to register quite accurately the reader’s experience as they engage not just with this page but with the poem as a whole. As with Finnegans Wake, Le Fanu’s Ghost draws on and encodes an extensive research programme. Both projects have an encyclopaedic quality: in Selerie’s case, an exhaustive engagement with Sheridan Le Fanu, his family and his works which goes far beyond, for example, William McCormack’s standard biography of Le Fanu. At the same time, both works make far more complex assemblages of the encyclopaedic information they have assembled than any critical or biographical work.

This combination of exhaustive research and complexity of presentation can be one of the daunting features of the long poem for its readers. However, this is more then offset, in Roxy and Le Fanu’s Ghost, by the pleasure of the constant formal inventiveness and the playfulness of the text. As with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the reader’s work is amply rewarded by the readerly pleasures of the text. [8]

I want to end by considering one last piece, ‘Wander Jar’. The poem has the shape of a Kilner jar, and the title puns on the German Wanderjahre (the period of itinerant apprenticeship that follows the Lehrerjahre, the period of learning) and the title of Maturin’s great Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. The important year for this piece is 1816, the year of R.B. Sheridan’s death and the present time of Melmoth the Wanderer. In that present time, the narrative moves back to cover the centuries of Melmoth’s life, the ‘dim glass’ of today wedded with ‘yesterday’s living hand’.

In the same way, Le Fanu’s Ghost has sought to layer historical times or, rather, to show the presence of the past within the present, the pressure of the past upon the present, through its exploration of the genealogy of the Sheridans and Le Fanus. Maturin was the prime exponent of Irish Gothic, and his writings influenced Le Fanu. He was also a Protestant clergyman, and had officiated at the burial of Le Fanu’s grandmother. He was also the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde adopted the name Melmoth, when he was released from Reading Gaol ... In Le Fanu’s Ghost, Selerie has opened the rich vein of Irish Gothic. At the same time, he has done this through a constantly inventive handling of poetic form. Le Fanu’s Ghost is, among other things, a masterclass in formal inventiveness and an exemplary performance of contemporary poetic forms.

Notes

[1] Though completed in 1981, this has only recently been published as a single volume: see Allen Fisher, Place (Hastings: Reality Street, 2005).

[2] Michael Bracewell, The Guardian Weekend (14 June 1997).

[3] W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) 1, 46.

[4] James Annesley, Blank Fictions (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).

[5] William Rowe, ‘State Secrets: Names and Fetishes in Barry MacSweeney’s Jury Vet’, in Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (eds), Poetry and Public Language (Exeter: Shearsman, 2007), 216—30; 219.

[6] I have discussed this work in an earlier essay, ‘Memory False Memory: Days of ’49 by Alan Halsey and Gavin Selerie, New Formations 50 (Autumn 2003), 48—56.

[7] For a fuller account of this, see Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s revenge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

[8] In his recent book, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Finn Fordham show how research into textual detail and textual genesis reveals the serious playfulness of the text. He notes how, towards the end of writing the Anna Livia Plurabelle section, Joyce described what he’d done for fifteen years as ‘combing and recombing the locks of Anna Livia’. Fordham observes ‘It was so beautiful, playful, sensual: he couldn’t help himself’ (86).

Robert Hampson is Professor of Modern Literature and Head of the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He co-edited Alembic with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards in the 1970s. His most recent publications include Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems 1973–1998 (Stride, 2001) http://www.stridebooks.co.uk/ and pentimento (Pushtika, 2007). His long poem Seaport is due to be re-issued by Shearsman late in 2008.