The Night Bus – Derek Sellen
ISBN: 9781788648516
£12.99
The Night Bus gathers Derek Sellen’s poems from the past decade into a wide-ranging and carefully structured collection. Moving through themes of war, history, public life, ageing, art, music, and individual lives, the poems chart a journey from darkness toward light.
By turns satirical, elegiac, and compassionate, Sellen’s work confronts violence and injustice while attending closely to moments of tenderness and renewal.
Accessible yet formally attentive, these poems offer a sustained reflection on memory, experience, and the enduring complexities of the human condition.
Praise for The Night Bus
I enjoy these poems for their dry wit and puckish humour, for their empathy and rage, for their attention to detail and delicious word-choices. I enjoy the poet’s sense of history, his cosmopolitan outlook, his lightly worn scholarship, and the ease with which he can slip into another persona and a different era.
Ama Bolton, poet and blogger, founder barleybooks press, Fountain Wells poets
Throughout this haunting and complex collection Derek Sellen displays a rich gift for language which is unflinching. He never shies from the grave events that have shaped the world yet is able to bring to life, with telling details and compassion the trials of individuals caught in the maelstrom.
Jocelyn Simms, poet, founder with Gordon Simms of Segora Poetry
Derek Sellen’s work shows an endlessly inventive imagination. His poems find beauty, human drama and strangeness everywhere.
Janet Montefiore, Professor Emerita, University of Kent, critic and poet
The Night Bus is acutely engaged with the world and with the possibilities of language, far-reaching in its vitality. The poet’s eye and ear are wonderfully attuned in poems that capture the heartbeat of experience.
Graeme Ryan, Fire River Poets, poet
We become witnesses to the worst atrocities, yet we are not alone in this journey, he guides as through, illuminating the way with moments of hope, humour and delightful images.
Kate Rose, co-founder Artemesia Arts, poet
The Night Bus ranges ’from pre-history to the now’, often rooted in accounts of ‘the raw eloquence of war’. Indeed ‘nothing is beyond recall’, including Mallory’s ice-axe, cats and split finger-nails! A powerful collection.
Roger Elkin, multi-award-winning poet
Author biography
Derek Sellen has written poetry over many years as well as plays, short stories and books for international students. He has found inspiration for poetry in art, politics, travel and personal experience. His work is widely published and he has read his poetry to many audiences during his writing career, in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany and, in better times, Russia. He has twice won Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and three times won O’Bheal (Cork), as well as winning Poets Meet Painter and Poets Meet Politics among other competitions. He has been a prizewinner in The National Poetry Competition and other international writing competitions, also being highly commended and commended. His second collection, The Other Guernica, was a finalist in the Poetry Book Awards 2020.