David Selzer

1085 posts

POETRY

‘CHILDREN PLAYING ON OMAHA BEACH’: David Seymour

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

The war is two years over. The tide is out,

and the beach clear of detritus except

for part of an upended landing stage,

like a leviathan’s jaw, in a pool.

Beside it there are four small children,

who are playing the serious, absorbing games

the very young play with wet, fugitive sand.

The photographer, whose parents were murdered

by the Nazis, was killed by machine gun fire

near the Suez Canal. He photographed

Ingrid Bergman with a dove, and Picasso

with ‘Guernica’; covered the Spanish

Civil War, and the founding of Israel.

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POETRY

NO SURRENDER

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Before the six counties of Northern Ireland

had civil rights, when some subjects had two votes

and some had none, and our constitution

permitted such injustice, I was woken,

in my third floor student digs on Newsham Drive,

Liverpool, early one summer Saturday

by pipes and drums and accordions.

The city’s Orange Lodges were having

their family day out in Newsham Park –

more than ninety Lodges each with a band

of swagger and lilt: ‘The Sash My Father Wore’,

‘The Orange Maid Of Sligo’. By mid-day

children and wives were picnicking round the Parks’

two boating lakes – the bandsmen aleing

in and outside pubs along West Derby Road.

Through the afternoon there were intermittent

outbreaks of song: ‘…the shutting of the gates…’,

‘…when you’re marching down the Shankill…’. Later

the soft night swooned with swaying revels, stray notes,

oaths, and the hollow noise of empty bottles

rolling on pavements.

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POETRY

CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments1 min read2.7K views

We are told by a Minister of the Crown

that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,

that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.

We are a mature democracy but

allow ourselves to be treated like infants.

Though his writ runs only in the largest part

of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,

his pronouncements dominate the media.

He is the son of working class Pakistani

immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –

though not those of one who would have ordered

“Over the top!”, while brandishing a pistol –

have been completely shorn of his past.

He is a trimmer led by a trimmer –

that sinister clown, that jovial

sociopath, that idler, that sponger –

leader of a circus of distractors,

of seedy rhetoricians, of swindlers,

that extols the charity of food banks.

The coterie seems to be kept in power

by a clique of greedy, threatening, snobbish

xenophobic, racist parliamentarians,

obsessed with the zealotry of abstractions –

‘freedom’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ – but all merely

servants of the corporate masters

of the universe, who have already

acquired their gated Ararats, and designed

the manorial space stations to which they may

need to repair. Meanwhile, liberty,

we are told, must be measured in Starbuck’s

coffee cups and Wetherspoon’s cheesy chips.

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OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Tricia Durdey: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments4 min read2.7K views

I first met David and Sylvia Selzer – www.sylviaselzer.com – many years ago when, as a child, I would go to watch my parents rehearsing plays at Chester Little Theatre. At first I saw them as newcomers (if younger) joining a group of eccentric and opaque would-be-actors, producers, and set designers, who were also surrogate aunties and uncles to my sister and me. Gradually, as I grew up, I became more aware of their vitality, curiosity and creative urgency, and I no longer thought of them merely as two in a crowd, but as my own special friends. I loved to spend time with them in Hoole, a suburb of Chester. (I still think of their house as the perfect place to be – where I feel deeply rested and at the same time awake to all that’s good in life). I wanted to be a dancer, and a writer, and I would take David’s collection of poetry Elsewhere from my bookshelf, and read with awe and wonder. It spoke to me of a world beyond the narrow existence of my life so far.  Maybe one day I would have my own work published?

I left Chester for London when I was 18 to study on a new Performance Arts degree course, based at Trent Park – the home of the poet Siegfried Sassoon. It was a wonderfully free and creative time and I loved being near London, travelling to see shows every weekend and attending dance classes during the week. From London I went to Amsterdam to attend the State Theater School for a year, inspired a performance I’d seen at Riverside Studios by the Dutch dancer Pauline de Groot. I lived for six months in an 18c Dutch merchant’s house round the corner from Anne Frank’s secret annexe, where my bedroom window looked over the same tree and church tower that Anne wrote about in her diary. It made me aware of how recent German Occupation had been, and how different it felt in the Netherlands from home.

On returning to England, I formed a small dance company in the East Midlands, touring dance theatre in schools, arts centres and theatres, but I didn’t forget my time in Amsterdam. In many ways that year formed a foundation of experience from which I could teach, choreograph, perform – and, years later, write.

I began writing fiction twenty years ago, during a hiatus in my dance career. Over a period of ten years I was published by Chester University Press, Mslexia, Cinnamon Press, Shoestring Press and Radio 3 website, for The Verb.

In 2013 I graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with an MA Distinction in Writing, and won the Blackfriars Open Submission in 2015. You can read more about my dance, and writing life, on my website www.movingthemind.co.uk

For many years I lost touch with David and Sylvia, until one summer day, when I was in Chester looking after my aging parents, Sylvia turned up with another old friend to visit my mother. It was a joyful reunion. I had the biggest smile on my face, and years of memoires flooded back. I went round to visit the next day, and it was as if we’d never lost contact.

Since that day I see both David and Sylvia as key – with their openness and positivity – in supporting the development of my writing. They were also with me during the difficult months leading up to my father’s death, which I’ve written about in my memoir Upside Down in a Hoop (to be published by Cinnamon Press – https://cinnamonpress.com/ – in 2022)

Shortly before my father’s death in 2016 my first novel The Green Table – https://cinnamonpress.com/the-green-table/ – was published. It was inspired both by my time in Amsterdam and by the true story of the choreographer Kurt Jooss’ fleeing Germany with the rise to power of the Nazi Party and Hitler. My second novel The Dancer at World’s End –https://cinnamonpress.com/the-dancer-at-worlds-end/, published in May 2021, is, in part, a sequel to The Green Table. It continues my preoccupation with Germany, the war and post-war period, through the eyes and voice of my main protagonist, Gregor von Loeben, the son of a high-ranking Nazi.

I write at a desk in Haarlem Arts Space in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, alongside three other writers, often gazing from the window at the calves frolicking on the hillside. We share the Arts Space with many visual artists, and several dogs who come along with their artist owners. I leave my own dog at home as he has a habit of visiting everyone’s wastepaper bin.

To earn a living I teach movement and ballet, mainly for older people. As a challenge I’m learning aerial arts at Circus School in Sheffield and Derby, and I hope to create a performance involving text, dance and aerial work, as a development from my memoir Upside Down in a Hoop.

Thank you to David for offering this platform for sharing the opening section of my second novel The Dancer at World’s End, and memoir Upside Down in a Hoop.

Click to open .pdf in new window:

©Tricia Durdey 2021

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POETRY

THE ROAD TO THE WEST PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer7 Comments2 min read2.6K views

‘Everyone who knows the meaning of poverty, everyone who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war, is on the Socialist side, potentially.’

George Orwell, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, 1937

“We have closed the door…to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party…We have turned our back on the dark chapter.” Kier Starmer, Labour Party Leader, MIRROR, 27th September 2021

‘Britain deserves better than this incompetence and total lack of leadership.’ Kier Starmer, Labour Party Leader, THE SUN, 2nd October 2021 

 

A photo was released to the media

with a copy of his conference speech.

The Leader of the Opposition, tieless

but dressed in dark suit and white shirt to show

he does not overdo formality,

is standing on a hotel balcony,

with his back to the sea, perusing,

presumably, the speech but looking as if

it is a summons he has received. The salt air

is beginning to rust the wrought iron railings,

and, behind him, unnoticed, presumably,

by all, including his aides, masters

of the unintended metaphor,

fifty yards or so out in the Channel,

the remaining girders of Brighton’s West Pier

destroyed by fire, left like a wreck in wartime.

 

The party of Kier Hardie, Nye Bevan,

Jeremy Corbyn: tilting at imagined

anti-Semites; purging like Stalinists;

dressing up in Tory old clothes; ignoring

the room with the elephants, Afghanistan,

Iraq; revering the egotist,

and his acolytes, that took us to war –

a party in a divided land

at rancorous, self-destructive odds

with everyone of its next door neighbours;

where the mainstream media is complicit

in the nakedness of straw Emperors,

in their mendacity; where misogyny,

xenophobia, racism thrive;

where poverty knocks, knocks!

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

STERKFONTEIN CAVES

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.5K views

For Sizwe Vilakazi

 

An hour’s drive or so from Johannesburg

and Pretoria are limestone caves,

a depository of fossils,

a chance ossuary of hominids,

the so-called Cradle of Humankind, owned

by Witwatersrand University.

 

Our guide, the first time we visited, was Arnold,

a young man in his twenties, who had lived

all his life near the caves, and whose ambition,

since boyhood, had been to be a guide.

He showed us a pool and its blind reptiles –

which, he said, if brought to the light, would see.

 

Our second visit, seven years later,

World Cup year, the clapboard visitor centre

had been replaced by plate glass and videos.

A white, nameless, archaeology student

showed us around. In the very depths of the caves,

he turned off the lights – so that we might

“experience the dark our ancestors knew

more than three million years ago”.

And I thought, in that pristine blackness,

for a brief moment before fear took flight,

of a history, a topography,

a geology of ironies.

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