On this page you can download my work in acrobat pdf format. You will need a pdf viewer like the free Acrobat Reader installed to view/print them.

Autumn Tiger

This is Selwyn's last collection completed shortly before his death.

In The Delta of The Pearl: a novel/collage

I was surprised by my surprise at finding how charming, courteous, kind and enthusiastic our colleagues were, given everything that I had heard about China and its history, but since we have returned from our two years' teaching in a Chinese university, we have realised how little that is not negative appears in the media of the West. This is a fiction about a lonely ex-university teacher and poet, which includes students work and other material giving different aspects of Chinese life and character.

Poems of the Dao

I was told, and half-believed, that everything worth saying about the Chinese had been said by the poets of the Tang and Song dynasties, and much of that had been shaped by Tao Yuan Ming four centuries before. I was lucky enough to be able to spend every Friday afternoon for two years with the distinguished scholar Tan Shilin, who supplied the translations which I turned into English poems with much discussion, then after with his students, Zhan Qiao and Liang Rui-Qing.

Senex - Poems of my 71st Year

I have bravely elected to post everything I wrote between one August and the next. As I get older, at least my poems get bonier, and I dislike pretension more than ever in such fraught times. Scripsi quod scripsi.

Pritchard's Pomerania

A letter to a friend from my military youth who went on to a distinguished career as a barrister, businessman and spy, it seems. I may also seem to explain why, with the advent of the mad Thatcher, we brought our children out of it to the Antipodes.

Pritchard's Pomerania was originally published as Letters and Characters by The Cornford Press, Launceston in 2002.

Love's Curriculum

A novel in verse, unless it is erotic, has little chance of publication. Why write one then? Why did cavemen air brush their palms or paint vibrant red ochre animals? For the delight of it...Because it preserves something from the flux and from death...Because you can.

I wrote this novel and was surprised at how it allowed some narrative means which prose did not. I went on re-writing it in New Zealand, then Australia, and made some attempts to interest publishers, but I have always been useless at selling my stuff. Now I am able to put it in a balloon and cast it on the ether. I hope that you enjoy it.