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Liverpool

POETRY

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read2.5K views

i.m. John Wareham

 

The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!

THE OPPORTUNITY Thomas Hardy

 

Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –

chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s

on West Derby Road at the ready –

he and I would turn on the TV

in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s

‘Opportunity Knocks’.  It was an hour –

including adverts – of metaphors

of the mid-sixties: kitsch; schmaltz; condescension;

nudge-nudge; the cruelty of class; fifteen

seconds of fame; occasional talents.

 

We had no doubt we were poets – actual

not aspiring. Would we settle for minor

recognition – or would only major count?

How this would happen we never discussed.

Maybe we hoped we would be discovered

like others in their twenties in the city!

 

I can see him now chortling at the absurd –

his laughter bubbling, his kindly eyes gleeful.

He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy,

ever the collector of the bathos

of pretentiousness and misfortune.

He told me tales about the writer’s heart.

Hardy had willed, though an atheist,

his body be buried in the churchyard

of the village in which he had been born.

But his young widow was strong-armed by the Dean

of Westminster Abbey. Her husband’s ashes

were interred in Poets’ Corner near Dickens’.

His heart, however, was preserved, and borne

in a biscuit tin – Huntley & Palmers

Bath Olivers, it was claimed – from Paddington

or Waterloo to Dorchester then Stinsford.

One tale had the heart buried in the tin.

Another, the tin being on the grave digger’s

kitchen table with, for some reason, the lid

off, maintained the family cat ate it.

 

He published little. Re-reading what he wrote

when we lodged together in Liverpool

I am shocked by the matureness of his talent,

and his ability to make the mundane

original, significant, portentous:

Spareness is the point.

November’s manifest in skies of ash,

Branches whittled by the edge

Of winter, the parkland quite

Quit of final birds.

And how his, over years, has shaped my work,

like an underground, uncharted watercourse.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

ORGANISED CRIMES

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

I watched the TV parade of affluent

(and mostly public school) chancers, liars,

fantasists, hypocrites, law-breakers

vie to top each other’s warmed-up clichés

and self-serving platitudes. The social

and economic future dystopia most

seemed to desire would, they assured us,

bring out the British best in all of us,

just like the Blitz. I thought of bomb-razed

building lots in major cities still empty,

and a tale a cabby told me years ago,

taxiing me from the railway station.

 

As he dropped me off he looked at the house.

He asked if it had a cellar, with a door

opening onto the back garden. I nodded.

He and his mum, he said, had joined a silent

and lengthy queue to buy black market sugar.

‘A doctor lived here then, ran a racket

with the lad that worked at the grocer’s.

The lad did time. The medic got off scot-free.’

 

I did some research, worked out the dates.

Here, in this place of light we have made our home,

all those ordinary folk committed crimes

like common recidivists – while London

was bombed, and Coventry, and Liverpool,

and the BBC broadcast Churchill’s speeches

of carefully crafted rhetoric.

 

 

 

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POETRY

CONVALESCENCE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.5K views

We drove towards the River Dee – down walled lanes

with rhododendrons festooning the sandstone,

their attic blooms in imperial colours –

to visit a doughty friend convalescing,

from two knee replacements, in Seize The Day,

a recently opened upmarket care home.

 

As we turned into the drive, I realised

that this, long before rebuilding, was where

my mother had first trained to be a nurse –

sixteen, with her friend, Belle. They cared for children

with TB from the Liverpool slums.

This unpolluted estuary’s airs

and the views of distant Welsh hilltops

through the coast’s pine woodlands might soothe and cure.

 

Our friend was listening to La Traviata.

I recalled a photo of the two girls smiling,

in uniform, on a veranda

with two of their charges on iron bedsteads.

The children stare at the camera

as if it were their only photograph.

 

 

 

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POETRY

53 WILLIAM STREET

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Our DNA is filled with wondrous

commonplaces, luminous platitudes:

refugees from pogroms in the Ukraine,

refugees from the Famine in Connaught.

*

This was the house my mother’s family moved to

from 7 Moses Street, off Sefton Park Road,

Liverpool, three years before she was born;

Ma, Da, her two small sisters, her two teenage

step brothers; a rented end of terrace –

with gas, running water, outside privy –

in a cobbled cul-de-sac, where bread

still warm was delivered in the Co-op’s

horse drawn van, and milk in a pony and trap

from a farm only half a mile away

(long gone now to semi-detached estates);

five years before Da was wounded at Mons,

and the lead gun carriage horse he rode was killed;

seven before the boys were gassed at Ypres

waiting at dawn to ‘go over the top’.

*

I have lived most of my longish life five minutes

from where my mother was born. Accidental

journeys – personal, ancestral – brought me here

to these streets, where no bombs have been dropped,

no invaders have marched, no citizens shot.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LIVERPOOL, 3RD MAY 1941

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

This is one of the great public, civic

spaces of the world – the museum,

the library, the gallery, the court house,

Wellington’s column, the Steble fountain,

the Empire Theatre, Lime Street Station,

St George’s Hall,  St John’s Gardens, vistas

of the river, the Wirral, the Welsh hills…

 

During the worst raid of the Liverpool Blitz

the museum was set ablaze – a bomb,

one of so many, supposedly

for the docks, that razed history, neighbourhoods.

My grandmother, Liverpool Welsh – who took tea

with Buffalo Bill and was offered a place

in a music hall chorus line but refused,

being the eldest of thirteen, her Da

at sea and her Ma at the sherry –

described to me in detail many times

the natural history collection:

stuffed walruses, condors and Don Pedro,

a retired Barnum and Bailey elephant –

all immolated, and washed away.

 

While mummy, daddy, grandma see ‘Evita’,

she and I make our way to the museum,

holding hands. I talk about history,

public and personal – my father,

a stranger, a London Jew, in transit

that May Saturday, joining a line

of desperate buckets. She listens –

in my company a serious,

concerned seven year old – and asks if fires

can ever be put out. ‘Yes, always…

eventually,’ I say. We decide

to explore as many floors as we can

from the top – space, dinosaur poo, bugs

but have no time for masks and totems –

and pause, me for rest, her to draw,

before, leaving a moment for ice cream,

we walk in the dusk, past the statues,

up the incline to the theatre crowds.

 

 

Note: first published April 2017.

 

 

 

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POETRY

A SILK PURSE: THE EVERYMAN THEATRE, LIVERPOOL

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read2.4K views

Before it was the Everyman Theatre

it was Hope Hall Cinema – and bar –

frequented by Dooley, Henri, McGough,

the Liverpool Scene. I saw Jean Renoir’s

1939 black and white ‘La Règle

du Jeu’ – Chekhovian, dystopian

entre deux guerres – in what was an untouched

dissenters’ chapel four-square between

the two cathedrals on Hope Street.

 

It became a theatre known for new writing,

new music – all with a political edge

and with humour, thumbing the collective nose

to one rule, one game – and genuinely

original staging of classics: the Bard’s,

Brecht’s, Brighouse’s examination texts.

Coach loads of young people from Liverpool,

Lancashire, Wirral and Cheshire would watch

the likes of Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce,

Antony Sher, Alison Steadman

perform at rapt matinees, their teachers

relaxed that all was as it should be,

that they would never forget that afternoon.

 

That group of boys had seen ‘Hobson’s Choice’

the year before and we prepared for

‘Julius Caesar’ even more thoroughly,

listening to the Argo recording –

with Richard Johnson as Mark Antony –

while following the text. At what point

the parallel plan began to take shape –

with such diligence and application,

such textual scholarship and retail research –

or what inspired it or whom, I never

had the humility or joy then to learn,

and now too many threads have been unravelled.

 

As Act Three began – ‘The ides of March are come’,

‘Ay Caesar but not gone’ – some of the boys

began to be restless. ‘You gentle Romans -‘

Alan Dossor, the Artistic Director,

as Mark Antony, began. ‘Friends, Romans,

countrymen, lend me your ears.’ I can still see

the pig’s ear arcing towards the stage,

hear the audience’s gasp. Dossor paused,

picked up the ear by its tip and tossed it

stage left to much applause.

 

 

Note: the poem was inspired by current developments at the theatre: https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/the-company-2017

 

 

 

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