POETRY

POETRY

HIGHWATER

By David SelzerMay 28, 20191 Comment1 min read1.8K views

The incoming tide brings shoals of mackerel fry.

Herring gulls, perhaps a hundred, more,

young among them in their mottled plumage,

are yelling at the water’s edge, feeding

in frenzy as the small waves scatter.

Far out on the low, narrow, wooden jetty

my small family leans over to marvel

at the fishes before landfall. At my back

is the white crescent of hotels, the town,

the estuary, the mountains, sun setting.

They cross the beach, granddaughter running ahead,

towards me, as the frenetic birds

yell and flap. Along the horizon,

the forest of white wind turbines slowly

disappears, becomes a blurred prism of green,

ivory, red – like an attenuated,

distant, gaudy city.

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POETRY

‘MARILYN MONROE READING ULYSSES’: EVE ARNOLD (1955)

By David SelzerMay 28, 20193 Comments1 min read1.9K views

After the shoot on Long Island’s Cedar Beach

they drove next to a local playground.

While Eve loaded her camera, Marilyn sat

on some play equipment and read a book –

her worn copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,

which she kept in her car, and had been reading

for some time, often aloud to get it’s sense.

(She looks to be about nine tenths through

so into Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated

soliloquy of love and longing).

This photograph of a pretty woman

in her late twenties, tanned, wearing short shorts

and a stripy top, reading an egghead’s book

was greeted with incredulity, “Oh yeah!” –

and, more harshly, “The thinking man’s shiksa!“.

Among the four hundred and thirty books

auctioned after her death were works by Flaubert,

Freud, Aristotle, Housman, as well as Joyce.

She was on Long Island that day visiting

her friend the poet Norman Rosten,

one of the last people she spoke to

the day before she died. Long before they met

he wrote, ‘Morning meets memory/and kills it’.

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POETRY

UNDER THE LIME TREES

By David SelzerMay 28, 20193 Comments1 min read1.7K views

For Mike Rogerson

The layout of our local park was finished

the year my mother was born, the year

before the Great War was started, and named

for Alexandra Saxe-coburg and Gotha

née Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg,

widow of the late King. An avenue

of lime trees – and a single row along

another path – was planted. My mother,

the Spring of the year she was war-widowed,

pushed me in my pram beneath them.

Berlin’s Unter Den Linden avenue –

that stretches from the Brandenburg Gate

to the razed imperial palace –

was named for a medieval poem of love

and lust that became a song. ‘Under

the lime… sweetly sang the nightingale…’

As the Red Army encircled the city,

the last of the trees was felled for firewood.

In the scullery of the house we shared

with my mother’s mother, her two sisters

and their step-brother (gassed at Ypres),

the draining board and the mangles’ rollers

were made from lime, and the piano’s keys

in the back room. Under the lime trees

in the park my granddaughter races,

still carefree of history’s absurd

ironies – and, oh, so many loving ghosts.

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POETRY

THE DIGITAL MUSE: THE POET AS WEBSITE OWNER

By David SelzerMay 26, 20193 Comments3 min read2.1K views

The site was launched in April 2009. A regular reader, Kira Somach, gave the site the following endorsement (in an email to me a couple of years ago), ‘Most people enjoy shopping delivered to their doorstep. I enjoy Selzer Poetry delivered to mine’. A pithy, witty rationale!

The idea for the site came out of discussions with a friend and ex-colleague, John Plummer. He shared the development of his book, ISLANDS AND LIFELINES: EXPLORING THE DRAMATIC FRINGES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND, with me and we talked about self-publishing. I raised the notion of his doing so via the web, but he opted quite understandably for the conventional route. It took me some to realise that, since I had thought the notion was in principle a good one, I ought for once to take my own advice!

The site was designed to my specifications by Sam Hutchinson. We seem to have done the job well as the site has only required some tweaking since its launch – and feedback suggests it is generally user friendly.

I had anticipated that the content of the site would for the most part be work I had already produced – and that once the work was posted I might add the occasional piece. I had not thought beyond that and had certainly not anticipated that one of the effects of creating the site would be that I would write more. In fact, I’ve written more poems since its inception ten years ago than in the previous fifty years!

I suspect there are two main reasons for this. I now have a group of regular readers – from all continents except Antarctica! Some are people I have known for many years, others I have reconnected with through the site and some I’ve never actually met and probably never will.

The other reason is that I have consolidated what I might call a blogging style of poetics, a style I realise I aspired to when I was a young man but, to quote Henri Matisse, ‘Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now – and it is what I dreamed of then – I wouldn’t have dared.’

The only significant editorial decision I have made since the site launched has been in relation to the use of pictorial images – diagrams, maps, paintings, photographs etc. – with the text. Originally I thought their use essential as in the print medium – to illustrate and to leaven the text. But I eventually realised their use in this context was redundant – primarily because my poetry has always been built on imagery, figurative or literal. Duh! as they say. If I were capable of being embarrassed at my age I would be!

Mentioning age reminds me that another of my regular readers, the writer and critic Mary Clark, wrote in a review of A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS, ‘As an avid reader of his blog, I believe in the last few years he has reached a maturity as a poet that sets him apart’. Even if I could have done when I was young what I’m doing now…

David Selzer, May 2019

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By David Selzer

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POETRY