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London

POETRY

BANALITY

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read368 views

Above the music from the pub on the corner,

a bottle’s throw from the Thames Embankment,

and the noise from the eateries housed

in the arches of the railway embankment,

spaces where once there had been workshops,

if you stand still in Bank End, Southwark,

you can hear the squeal of commuter trains

crossing the river to Cannon Street station –

built on the site of a trading post

of the mediaeval Hanseatic League,

exporting wool, importing beeswax.

 

***

 

When the first Brixton Riot began

I was staying in a small hotel

just off the Embankment in Pimlico

on the opposite bank of the river.

One night, I woke to the sound of dripping.

I turned on the bedside lamp. Water

was trickling from the ceiling

through the light fitting, down the flex and the shade

onto the carpet. I went to Reception,

and woke the Night Porter. I could hear

distant sirens, and thought at first they had been

summoned for me – then imagined another’s

anxiety, and their brief comfort. I had looked

through the hotel’s glass-panelled front door

and seen fires lighting the southern sky.

 

***

 

I think of those for whom accidents are never

benign, those who live without dignity,

and those who know nothing but hardship.

This a place of angry strangers,

among cut and tailored granite and limestone,

shipped in blocks on the sea and the river

from Portland Bill and Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove.

 

***

 

Once, when I was eight and with my mother,

after we had been shopping at John Lewis

on the Finchley Road, as we entered

the nearby Finchley Road Underground

to take the tube train to Golders Green,

I noticed an ambulance parked at the kerb –

and then two ambulance men approaching us

carrying a stretcher. The body was wrapped

in a grey blanket. On the covered torso

was a bowler hat and a briefcase.

Between the body and the stretcher’s edge

there was a long, black, furled umbrella.

My mother explained what had happened, and why.

She was one who longed for oblivion –

but death came at a time of its choosing.

 

***

 

Trapped in that liminal space between present

and past, between being and remembering,

that eternal picture show, what might fix

a troublesome head, a troubled heart?

In Tate Modern – a gallery re-purposed,

in this city of money and invention,

from a disused power station on Bankside –

across its spacious mezzanine floor

a little girl is cart-wheeling. O the

banality of joy!

 

 

 

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POETRY

MERIDIANS AND PARAKEETS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read843 views

I am sitting on a bench beside the Thames

on a sunny April Saturday at Greenwich,

and watching the boatloads disembark

at Greenwich Pier. They wander through the erstwhile

Royal Naval College, and walk up the hill

to the Royal Observatory. They tread,

in its courtyard, the stainless steel strip

that marks the prime meridian which set

the clocks of a thousand shipping fleets.

I watch the river as it flows softly

past the Isle of Dogs on the opposite bank,

and the sun glint on the topless towers of

Canary Wharf’s Masters of the Universe.

 

I think of elsewhere: across the Hudson

near the Jersey shore, the view from Liberty

Island and Ellis Island of the isle

of Manhattan – its charm, its promise,

its threat – the Twin Towers still intact;

of the stone compass in the cliff-top

fortress at Sagres, the furthest south west point

of Europe, where the Mediterranean

and the North Atlantic meet, where Henry

the Navigator set his naval college,

some of whose graduates made the Slave Coast.

 

The Royal Naval College here, its elegance

and Portland Stone still pristine, was designed,

during the Restoration, by Wren,

Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh. It has become part

museum, wedding venue, grove

of academe. Mature London Plane Trees grow

in its expansive, graceful courtyard.

Rose-ringed parakeets – offspring of escaped pets

originally from India but now

naturalised through much of south east England,

and spreading westwards, and northwards – flit

their vivid green from branch to branch, their calls

squeaking like infants’ toys.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

HOUSMAN’S BOND SLAVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read882 views

In ‘My Antonia’, Willa Cather’s third

novel about European pioneers

on the Great Plains, and first published in

1918, Antonia’s father,

failing at farming the prairie, longing

for his old life as a musician

in Catholic Bohemia, kills himself.

Denied his burial on consecrated ground

his wife, a bitter woman, has him interred

at the south west corner of their small plot of land,

where two tracks meet – like the old country,

where suicides were buried at a cross roads.

In time, what was unfenced wilderness marked

by stakes, and ways marked by wagon wheels, becomes

ordered farmland and levelled roads. Fenced now,

enclosed with the last of the red prairie grass,

the grave remains untouched. The roads curve round it.

 

***

 

Shortly after the publication

of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896,

Willa Cather became, as she put it,

‘Housman’s bond slave, mentally’. Whenever,

wherever she could, she promoted the work

in the magazines she edited.

She acknowledged that his poetry

made its way freely throughout her own work.

 

In 1902 she went on a tour

of Europe with a friend. First stop, more or less,

was the county of Shropshire. They visited

most of the places mentioned in the poems –

like Ludlow, Wenlock Edge, the Wrekin, and Clee –

sometimes more than once, but could find no trace

of Housman, or anyone who had ever

heard of him. The single copy of the book

in Shrewsbury’s public library was uncut.

 

Eventually, she got Housman’s address:

a boarding house in Pinner near London.

Willa went with two friends. Imagine three young,

outward-going women, passionately

convinced that Housman had written the only

verse in English from the previous decade

that would last, that it was as remarkable

technically as it was in the ‘truth

of its sentiment’. Imagine Housman,

middle-aged, lonely, forever carrying

a secret close to the surface of his heart:

his unrequited love for another man.

 

Later, Cather, in a letter to a friend,

described Housman – ‘as the most gaunt and grey

and embittered individual I know’.

She went on to say, ‘The poor man’s shoes and cuffs

and the state of the carpet in his little

hole of a study gave me a fit

of dark depression’. After they had left,

she had wept on the pavement outside the house.

 

***

 

‘…the grave, with its tall red grass that was never

mowed, was like a little island; and at

twilight, under a new moon or the clear

evening star, the dusty roads used to look

like soft grey rivers flowing past it…’

 

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POETRY

KEEPING THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read647 views

‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD, George Orwell, 1946

 

Democratic socialist, polemicist;

novelist, poet, writer of social

and economic commentary;

Old Etonian, ex-Superintendent

of the Indian Imperial Police,

veteran of the Spanish Civil War;

Sergeant Eric Blair (aka George Orwell)

commanded a Home Guard platoon in London.

 

The platoon – which was known locally

as the ‘Foreign Legion’ because so many

of its members were refugees from

persecution in Nazi Germany

and Tzarist Russia – was one of twelve hundred

volunteer groups of part-timers mustered

nationally to delay and to frustrate

a German invasion long enough

for full-time troops to arrive and deploy.

 

Orwell, rejected from active service

because of his lungs – he would die from TB

ten years later – thought the Home Guard a

peculiarly British institution.

More than two million men being ordered

to keep an Enfield 303 rifle

and ammunition at home suggested

a complacent, almost feudal state of mind.

 

The author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road

to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Decline of the English

Murder’ had a flat in Langford Court,

Abbey Road – some thirty years too soon

to hear the Beatles sing, ‘Love is all you need.’

From the roof of his building he could observe

the fires of the Blitz in the Thames’ docks

and their adjoining terraced streets – and stray bombs

falling quite near him on Lords’ Cricket Ground

and London Zoo in The Regent’s Park,

one of many public spaces owned

by the Crown. History does not record

his being aware that a zebra

and a wild ass and its foal had escaped

during a raid. They were caught in Camden Town,

not very far from the edge of the parkland.

If he had known he might perhaps have made it

some sort of metaphor.

 

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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Tricia Durdey: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments4 min read858 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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POETRY

HINDSIGHT

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read551 views

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

 

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

 

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

 

***

 

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

 

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.

 

 

 

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