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'A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS' - ARMADILLO CENTRAL

‘A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS’ – ARMADILLO CENTRAL

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read55 views

This collection of twenty poems and an Afterword by David Selzer and  five photographs by Sylvia Selzer was published by Armadillo Central as an ebook in 2011 and a POD in 2014. 

‘A JAR OF STICKLEBACKS explores themes as diverse as love, death, racism, war, nature, popular culture and the passing of time. Each is imbued with a gentle sensitivity and a generosity, to both his subject matter and his reader, which harks back to the old-school poets. While David refers to some of these masters in his Afterword: Auden, Yeats, Larkin, Hughes and Plath, to name just a handful; his voice is entirely original, anchored in his own rich life experience.’

Emma Boden, Armadillo Central

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

RAIN

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read530 views

Heavy rain flung against the window panes

wakes me in the dark. In the lull before

the next gust I hear your breath, a sound

I have known now for most of my life.

A spate of raindrops patters on the glass.

Faraway, on the kitchen windowsill,

are pots of bulbs – crocus and daffodil –

sprouting in the early morning gloom.

 

The sun will approach first via low, wet hills

cleft into valleys, then ancient salt pans, dew ponds,

and hedgerows tangled with blackthorn and dog rose.

And you might be awake, hearing my breath.

You are my talisman, my totem, muse,

scourge, sanctifier, love.

 

 

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POETRY

CONSIDER THE LITTLE EGRET

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read767 views

A little egret – elegant, self-absorbed

in its white solitude, its pale yellow beak

poised – is stalking crustaceans along

the low water margins of these mundane straits,

with their pleasure cruises and mussel dredging.

It is a native now not a renegade

from the storied Nile, the intemperate south.

 

Beyond the waters, high mountain ranges

fill the horizon. Two valleys split them –

one wooded, with a waterfall, wild ponies;

the other hanging, deep, steep sided.

In the foothills are sheep runs and stone walls –

above, an ancient caldera, and peaks

we cannot see from here. These featureless

hectares of wilderness – lavender, lilac,

mauve, as the light changes – somebody owns.

 

Nobody owns the little egret.

Here it has no natural predators –

no lurking crocodiles or aggressive

hippopotami – only perhaps

the polluted tides, the dieseled waves

it carefully navigates. We go

where we can go. We are what we are.

How free a spirit the little egret seems –

from guilt and hope and love!

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE CUP AND SAUCER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read5K views

For Christopher and Jane Ireland

 

When my cousin and I actually meet

after fifty years and eighteen thousand miles

apart, we exchange gifts – objects that had once

belonged to our respective fathers, objects

that somehow, as things sometimes do,

had strayed across continents and oceans:

his father’s – five Oxford Pocket Classics;

mine – a first birthday gift, a small, engraved

silver cup and saucer made in Birmingham.

 

Our fathers – brothers-in-law – never met.

They were more or less the same age. His died

in old age; mine, in his twenties, from sepsis.

I never met my father. One Boxing Day

his father took me to a rugby match.

 

Life per se has no purpose, much less meaning –

only love, memories, trivia:

like holding this untarnished cup and saucer

in the palm of my hand.

 

 

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POETRY

FIGURES OF SPEECH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.6K views

She is scooting on the South Bank, her four years
sailing without mishap through the crowds –
multi-national, multi-ethnic, mixed race
– like a skilled UN negotiator.
We stop – her choice – at the Galloper.
She rides sedately, grinning, on a painted
wooden horse. We stop again – our choice –
to watch an Australian with a travelled
face and lived-in voice reprise Houdini’s
cabinet trick. She is unimpressed
but enjoys the fifty metre sand pit
beyond the BFI. At the Tate,
she watches a brief video – over
and over – of Henri Matisse wielding
his draper’s scissors like a pen or brush.
(Later, she will cut us out of paper –
parents, grandparents, herself – and paint us
as cats). We leave for Chinatown and Dim Sum.

Dusk is settling in Trafalgar Square
as she eyes the forbidden pools. ‘Eng-er-lond,
Eng-er-lond,’ chant some youths from a lion’s plinth.
It is the World Cup’s first match at 10.00.
We cross to South Africa House where
a three piece band – drums, lead and bas guitar –
is playing ‘Money for Nothing’. She dances,
a Chinese tourist laughs and a rough sleeper
wakes from his pitch beneath a plane tree
and salutes us all with an empty bottle.

***

On holiday in Crete, à propos of
nothing, pleased with herself, she uttered
her first simile, ‘Sink like guitar.’
I think of that as we cross the river,
to return to our hotel near Waterloo,
and see the shimmering lights – and think of
Eliot’s ‘I had not thought death had undone
so many’ and Spenser’s ‘Sweet Thames, run softly
till I end my song!’ and feel the warmth of
love and mortality, the themes of
this harmonious day.

 

 

 

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