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Chester

POETRY

THE GROVES

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

For Matt Baker

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 –

with a bandstand and moorings for pleasure boats –

was commissioned by one of the city’s

Victorian worthies at his own expense

to match the elegant pedestrian

suspension bridge built by a developer.


If we sit here long enough with our take-out

hot chocolates and toasted sandwiches –

counting the passersby wearing masks –

someone we know may saunter past with their dog.

Here there used to be a whiteness of swans,

but a flock of panhandling black-headed gulls,

squawkily scrambling for the odd dry crust,

has, as it were, elbowed out the large mute birds.


When the Roman mercenaries built the camp

on the sandstone bluff behind us, when barques

from Anjou docked downstream with cargoes

of wine and spices, the air, like now,

was multi-lingual. We can hear snatches

of French and Polish, Greek and Arabic.


If we sit here long enough late winter’s

high tide may rise, as now, over the weir,

and begin to cover the embankment’s steps,

propelling various bosky flotsam

upstream at a proverbial rate of knots,

with a couple of mallards and a moorhen

floating past on a wizened trunk the size

of an alligator from the bayous.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

COURAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In the stretch from here to where the river bends

around the meadows, there have been drownings –

crowded pleasure boats upturned, youths,

desperate with raucous bravado,

jumping from the suspension foot bridge.

The river, which is a whorl and tension

of conflicting, muddied undertows,

seems linear today, almost emollient.


A children’s cancer charity has fastened

awareness-raising memento mori

to the wrought iron railings of the bridge.

The cards and photographs – obscuring

the occasional lovers’ padlock – are tied

together, and to the rails, carefully,

almost gaily, with golden ribbon. 

The charity promotes research. The bridge’s

wooden walkway registers each human step,

shifts with each tread, beating like a slow heart. 

One card begins, ‘If love could have saved you…’ 

We dare not imagine such loss, such

unendurable humility, such

self-effacing courage.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Tricia Durdey: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments4 min read2.4K 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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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

SERMON ON THE MOUNT

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

The plaque has been placed high onto the front wall

of a terraced house in the street next to ours –

and is, in effect, a terracotta tile,

roughly a foot-and-a half by a foot,

with a raised border, and lettering

and numerals probably executed

by a gravestone mason, who maybe lived there.

The date inscribed is 1872 –

the words, first in English and then in Welsh,

‘Blessed are the meek. Matthew V.v’.

 

When the railways came in the 1850s

bringing the London-Holyhead line,

the station became an important one.

Chester was a garrison city,

and Ireland always needed pacifying.

Where we live now was developed

to house the families of working class

skilled men and lower middle class clerks

in exclusively rented accommodation,

which makes the plaque a surprise: not its faith,

nor its grave taste, nor its erudition –

the railway junction attracted migrants

over the border from the poverty

of North East Wales – but that mere tenants

should have had the courage to declare their right

to a place in the world. That, on reflection,

was perhaps the point of the Beatitudes,

and whoever it was who crafted them.

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT CHESTER CROSS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.7K views

I am standing near the loud evangelists

by the medieval sandstone cross that marks

the centre of this erstwhile Roman camp,

Castra Deva, base for two centuries

of the Twentieth, Valeria Victrix –

streets south and west to the Dee, east to forests

and the lush plain, north to sandstone outcrops.

 

The Presbyterian rhetoric

of Damnation and Sweet Jesus keeps

other spectators away, gives me

a clear view of the midsummer,

pagan parade – ‘I am the good shepherd:

the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep’ –

with its Hell’s Mouth on wheels, its samba band –

‘…he that is an hireling…whose own

the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming’ –

with its Romans, Vikings, giants, a dragon –

‘and fleeth: and the wolf scattereth the sheep’ –

with its Saint Werburgh, the city’s patron saint

(famed for resurrecting a goose)

and my three geese in white gowns following –

wife, daughter, granddaughter – but no sheep.

 

I move to a spec on one of the Rows,

unique first floor arcades, their origin

unknown but much admired by the Kaiser.

When I was at school in the city,

we would come to these Rows for a smoke,

our striped caps folded in our pockets.

Below was a tobacconist who sold

Cuban cigarettes in packets of 5.

How I would dream of the wide avenues

of a metropolis – of fame, romance

in its concert halls and libraries!

Directly opposite where I am waiting,

behind a Greek revival portico,

is a private club, its Masonic curtains

drawn. Here was the camp’s principia –

headquarters of the legion and the province.

If the Empire had continued to expand

not consolidate before collapsing –

despite Rome’s alarming geese – Deva

would have been Britannia’s capital.

 

The procession passes beneath me

in triumph – led by two street theatre

professionals, a husband and wife,

consummately engaging the crowds.

The evangelists are hectoring still,

threatening distantly, out of sight.

My geese are smiling still, cavorting,

even the littlest – earnest, seemingly

untiring – and my lucky heart fills with love.

All three are holding up their goosey standards

made by an artist – painted, sculpted

papier maché glued to frames of withies,

those lithe willow branches, slender, sturdy,

infinitely flexible, which have been used,

since antiquity, to keep safe ewes and lambs.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LEVITICUS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

As we travelled back from a London weekend

in the Quiet Zone on the afternoon express

three very young, head scarved mothers nursed

their newborns and chattered softly all the way.

At Chester they headed for the North Wales train.

 

Not far from the Great Orme Tramway Station,

Church Walks, Llandudno, and near St Georges,

is a three storey detached house whose ground floor

has been a synagogue for a century

and more. Lubavitch rabbis officiate.

Above the shul, to facilitate

a minyan, are holiday apartments.

 

In summer months there are pop-up kosher shops

and activities. Families stroll along

the promenade – the men, black suited,

with trimmed or untrimmed beards, fedoras

or keppels, some with earlocks – past the strident

evangelicals by the bandstand.

 

What would the Lubavitcher Rebbes –

during their century of solitude

in the shetl among the darkening forests

and the gorging marshes of Belarus,

who only knew of oceans from God’s words –

have made of Jews, their Jews, sauntering

beneath the sun and beside the sea no less,

safely and kosherly among the goyim!

 

Somewhere among the streets below the Orme

is the six week post-partum retreat

the new mothers were travelling to

with their unknown futures.

 

 

 

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