David Selzer

1085 posts

POETRY

THE CAVES AT TREMEIRCHION

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read399 views

From the terrace of the Jesuit college,

high above the Vale of Clwyd, the poet,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, searching, longing

for his faith, sees a kestrel on the thermals:

‘I caught this morning morning’s minion…

My heart in hiding Stirred for the bird.’

In the distance are the mountains and the sea;

over the vale Denbigh’s castle ruins;

north, at the river’s mouth, Rhyl – fishing village…

become seaside resort…become ghost town…

 

A mile or so south along the ridge

where Hopkins stood, and a few years after

he had left the seminary, caves –

formed hundreds of millions of years ago,

on the northernmost edge of the Ice Age world –

were uncovered: with bones of mammoths,

woolly rhinos, hyenas, and stone age tools,

evidence of millennia of human life,

Neanderthal then Homo Sapiens.

Hunting in the forests that filled the vale,

a natural spring below the caves, and shelter

from the weathers and to keep fires alight

made this as good as castle keep or town

 

Did their hearts rise, like the poet-priest’s,

watching the hawks, and grieve for the creatures

hiding in the ferns? Did they study the clouds

over the sea and the mountains, as he did

each morning on that terrace, searching for words

for things beyond themselves?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A GIFT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read349 views

They arrived abruptly, late in the morning

on a proper summer’s day – windows and doors

open to steep the house in a sun-warmed

stillness. We heard a sudden roaring,

an almost metallic whirring as if some

giant dynamo had just been started up.

 

The air above the garden was darkening,

gyrating with a swarm of wild bees. We felt

bewildered, apprehensive, ignorant

about beings so familiar, so mundane –

from when daisies and magnolias first bloomed,

shortly before small dinosaurs became birds.

 

Eventually – in what might have been

moments – they disappeared beneath

the branches of the Japanese cherry.

When we looked under the leafy awning

they had attached themselves to the trunk,

become one still mass around the queen,

broad then tapered like a roughcast urn.

 

Over the next days we checked frequently.

They remained, unmoved, enigmatic.

And then – perhaps one dawn while we were sleeping –

they must have left, leaving a white, urn-shaped

honeycomb adhering to the bark,

its hexagonal cells of beeswax empty

of pupae, pollen and honey. We felt

abandoned, and chosen.

 

 

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POETRY

STILL WATERS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read355 views

Though there is haze today, from the headland

I can see the outline of the southern hills

of the Isle of Man. The sea is still, barely

a ripple between here and the Manx coast,

or west towards Dublin, eastwards Liverpool.

Across the sky there are wispy clouds,

and con-trails drifting slowly off course.

This is a Viking sea, a sea of

emigrants, of refugees, the dispossessed.

 

So many miles of becalmed aquamarine

belying that other, twilit world

that teems beneath, and we left long ago:

leviathans and shrimps and jellyfish,

impervious to whatever weathers

might be forecast here – moderate; veering;

severe; phenomenal.

 

 

 

 

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THEMES

THEMES: THE RIVER DEE, CHESTER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read657 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 VOICE OVERS

POETRY VOICE OVERS 1: ‘A SHORT HISTORY’

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read505 views

To mark the seventeenth anniversary of the launch of the website I have created a new category: POETRY VOICE OVERS. 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 PEOPLE'S FLOWERS

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

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments3 min read598 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.

View PDF > The Siege of Bass Rock – Lesley Johnson

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