David Selzer

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THEMES: THE RIVER DEE, CHESTER

By David SelzerApril 22, 20260 Comments2 min read120 views

This is the second post in this category, one which brings together poems with a connecting theme.

The Dee, which rises in North Wales and enters Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea through the vast Dee Estuary, flows through the city of Chester in North West England. There is a stretch of the river – no longer perhaps than a third of a mile – that flows past a tree-lined embankment called The Groves. The titles and opening lines of all of the poems inspired by that stretch are listed in alphabetical order. Please click on the title to read the whole poem.

CORMORANTS

In the driest months when the tidal river

is low and the current almost lethargic,

when the waters flow gently over the weir

the Normans built to create a fish pool…

COURAGE

In the stretch from here to where the river bends

around the meadows, there have been drownings –

…A children’s cancer charity has fastened

awareness-raising memento mori

to the railings of a suspension footbridge…

SALMON LEAP

An aged busker in a Stetson sets up

on the river embankment near the café.

He talks at length about his life, then sings

Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’…

THE BANDSTAND

Beside the city’s river is a bandstand –

Victorian, octagonal in shape,

with eight delicate wrought iron columns –

redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,

and the poignant breathiness of brass bands…

THE CYBER DEAD

‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker

began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,

just after I had left the public toilet,

its adamantine urinals made

in Burnley…

THE EMBRACE OF NOTHING

Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs

and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.

William the Conqueror, in winter,

force-marched his army over the Pennines

to reach the river and waste the town…

THE GROVES

We are sitting on a bench in a peaceful

place popular even on a winter’s day

now lockdown has been eased. This tree-lined

terraced embankment beside the river…

THE RIVER

This river, deeper than most in metaphor,

abundantly fluent in simile,

is in spate…

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POETRY VOICEOVERS

POETRY VOICEOVERS 1: ‘A SHORT HISTORY’

By David SelzerApril 22, 20260 Comments1 min read139 views

To mark the seventeenth anniversary of the launch of the website I have created a new category: POETRY VOICEOVERS. The first poem to be published on the site – almost seventeen years ago to the day – was ‘A SHORT HISTORY’, written more than forty years ago*. I am republishing it here with my voiceover.

A SHORT HISTORY

For a generation, like weather cocks,

their skeletons swung near the highway.

James Price and Thomas Brown had robbed the Mail.

Years turned. The Gowy flooded and the heath

flowered. Travellers noted the bones

hanging in chains by the Warrington road.

Justices ordered the gibbet removed,

the remains disposed of. In Price’s skull,

while Napoleon was crossing the Alps

or Telford building bridges or Hegel

defining Historical Necessity

or Goya painting Wellington’s portrait,

a robin made its nest.

Note: I would like to thank Sylvia Selzer for enabling me to create this new category.

*Re-published in 2013 in A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS.

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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: LESLEY JOHNSON’S ‘THE SIEGE OF THE BASS ROCK’ – BRANWELL JOHNSON

By David SelzerApril 9, 20260 Comments3 min read342 views

Flicking through my 1974 Cub Scout diary I see in scrawled pencil, ‘Mum landed on the Bass Rock’. Why did my mother, Lesley Johnson, want to visit a plug of volcanic rock covered in gannet droppings in Scotland’s Firth of Forth while we were caravanning above the pretty town of North Berwick?

It was down to a passion that culminated in my mother, who never went to university, getting her application to study the Siege of the Bass Rock at Oxford’s Ruskin College more than 30 years later approved as part of the special residential older student ‘Ransacker’ programme .

David Selzer has kindly let me write about Lesley in Other People’s Flowers before, when I told how she was both a Wirral housewife and a local playwright crafting short, funny and poignant plays about Liverpool people under the pen name Lesley Clive. Her work was produced at the Chester Everyman, the Liverpool Playhouse, the Edinburgh Festival and even adapted for local radio and Radio 4.

But while she liked to write contemporary dramas Lesley was also a lover of history – as witnessed in her play about doomed Tudor queen Catherine Howard The Daisy Chain – and that’s why some of her precious holiday time was spent with the seagulls and salty flume on the rock.

Lesley’s fascination with the romantically tragic tale of The Stuart kings led her on this trail. When I was a child, I’d often hear about Charles I’s dashing cavalry commander nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his actions in the English Civil War. Mum was also deeply moved by the stories of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite rebellions and the suffering of the Scottish Highland clans for supporting the Stuart cause.

The Siege of The Bass Rock is one of the strangest chapters in the whole story of Jacobite resistance. The tale which so entranced my mother concerned four Scots prisoners on the rock who tricked their guards to take the island’s fortress for the Catholic King James VII.

They formed a small pocket of opposition against William of Orange for three whole years merely a mile off the mainland and within sight of a hostile garrison at Tantallon Castle. Lesley was particularly intrigued by the leader of the rebels, Captain Michael Middleton, and his ‘enterprise and steadfastness’, as she put it in her essay dedication.

While at Ruskin she spent time researching original sources and producing a lengthy, very readable essay on the siege. The icing on the cake was a commission from the magazine history Scotland to produce a digest version of her essay for publication. This was a triumph for her.

It’s an incredible story that should really have any film or TV producer drooling with its ingredients of derring do, self-sacrifice and brutality set among stunning, bleak scenery.

The original essay – including the final, sad fate of Captain Middleton – is now available for online reading below as a PDF.

Lesley sadly now has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recall the inspiring tale of bravery she documented but I have her old painting of the Bass Rock on my study wall. When I gaze at the picture, it reminds me of the tenacity and determination both she and the subject of her dissertation possessed.