As a way to gather poetry from across a career, a “selected” is not as unwieldy or as final-sounding as a “complete” or “collected” edition. The even more popular “new and selected” helps old poems reach a new audience, while offering established readers some of the poet’s latest work.
As Jill Jones notes in her latest collection, Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems, there are practical issues as well. Poetry volumes tend to go out of print and are unlikely to be digitised. A selected edition, then, is a way to raise poems out of oblivion, as much as it is a chance to demonstrate and reflect upon the development of the style and ongoing themes of a writer.
