My latest book of poems ‘AMONG THE MUSES A Year of Poetry’ has been published this month by HI-Hat Press New York and is available from Amazon.
The following is an edited extract from my introduction to the book:
All of the poems in the collection were written in 2025, and are printed, for the most part, in the chronological order in which they were written. 2025 was the year in which I became 83 – and a year when public narratives seemed especially dominated by certain men in their ‘70s and ‘80s, my contemporaries more or less: the usual suspects, of course, like Netanyahu, Putin, Trump. Many of the poems in the collection have already been published on the website and all will be in due course. What is special about the poems in ‘AMONG THE MUSES…’ is their unique juxtaposition.
Hi-Hat Press was started in 2023 from a long-held conviction shared by its two editors, the acclaimed American poets Harvey Lillywhite and Eileen Silver-Lillywhite, that the world is measurably poorer without strong poetry in it. They felt that some strong poetry is, currently, going unpublished.
Harvey Lillywhite’s has written the foreword:
Among the Muses: A Year of Poetry gathers a wonderful sequence of poems written across a single year by the distinguished British poet David Selzer, composed in his eighty-third year. His poems search with the clarity and range of a lifetime’s attention. Reflecting on gardens and birdsong, on empire, memory, art, and the calamities of our modern world, the poems find a common ground we must all settle into.
David’s voice is reflective and sharply observant. A robin singing through winter weather, the quiet rituals of a long-lived home, the small dramas of neighborhood wildlife all appear alongside meditations on poets, dictators, wars, and vanished worlds. His poems travel widely, from the Dee Estuary and the Wirral Peninsula to Manhattan, Prague, Gaza, and the American plains. But they anchor in the touch of the known world of everyday life.
What unites his work is a patient and humane intelligence. David writes with wit and moral seriousness. He has a storyteller’s eye for detail. He knits into the lines of his verse History and the present moment. The result is equal parts personal journal, cultural meditation, and his testament to endurance.
Wise and quietly radiant, Among the Muses is the work of a poet who has spent decades listening carefully to the world and still has much to say.
Cover design and art work by Evie Chapman
By David Selzer