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'AMONG THE MUSES': HI-HAT PRESS NEW YORK

‘AMONG THE MUSES A Year of Poetry’: Hi-Hat Press NEW YORK

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read713 views

My latest book of poems ‘AMONG THE MUSES  A Year of Poetry’ has been published this month by HI-Hat Press New York and is available from Amazon.

The following is an edited extract from my introduction to the book:

All of the poems in the collection were written in 2025, and are printed, for the most part, in the chronological order in which they were written. 2025 was the year in which I became 83 – and a year when public narratives seemed especially dominated by certain men in their ‘70s and ‘80s, my contemporaries more or less: the usual suspects, of course, like Netanyahu, Putin, Trump. Many of the poems in the collection have already been published on the website and all will be in due course. What is special about the poems in ‘AMONG THE MUSES…’ is their unique juxtaposition.

Hi-Hat Press was started in 2023 from a long-held conviction shared by its two editors, the acclaimed American poets Harvey Lillywhite and Eileen Silver-Lillywhite, that the world is measurably poorer without strong poetry in it. They felt that some strong poetry is, currently, going unpublished.

Harvey Lillywhite’s has written the foreword:

Among the Muses: A Year of Poetry gathers a wonderful sequence of poems written across a single year by the distinguished British poet David Selzer, composed in his eighty-third year. His poems search with the clarity and range of a lifetime’s attention. Reflecting on gardens and birdsong, on empire, memory, art, and the calamities of our modern world, the poems find a common ground we must all settle into.

David’s voice is reflective and sharply observant. A robin singing through winter weather, the quiet rituals of a long-lived home, the small dramas of neighborhood wildlife all appear alongside meditations on poets, dictators, wars, and vanished worlds. His poems travel widely, from the Dee Estuary and the Wirral Peninsula to Manhattan, Prague, Gaza, and the American plains. But they anchor in the touch of the known world of everyday life.

What unites his work is a patient and humane intelligence. David writes with wit and moral seriousness. He has a storyteller’s eye for detail. He knits into the lines of his verse History and the present moment. The result is equal parts personal journal, cultural meditation, and his testament to endurance.

Wise and quietly radiant, Among the Muses is the work of a poet who has spent decades listening carefully to the world and still has much to say.

 

Cover design and art work by Evie Chapman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AMONG THE BARBARIANS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

Not long before Vladimir Putin was first

crowned president in the Kremlin cathedral

where the Romanovs had been coronated

Tzars, we were lunching in a self-service

restaurant near Red Square – with vodka shots

for a rouble by the till. As we finished eating

a young man on his own at the next table

leaned over and spoke: ‘May I speak English

to practise, please?’ He was a Japanese

political science graduate student,

he said. He had flown from his home city,

Kyoto, to Vladivostok, and taken

the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow

(via Lake Baikal and Omsk) to study

the decline and fall of Boris Yeltsin –

and had stayed on temping as a translator.

He asked where we were from, and, when we told him,

“Chester”, expressed delight. He had visited

our ‘home city’ on a tour of Europe

with his parents. He remembered its central

thoroughfares following the pattern

of the Roman camp it was named for –

and described the first floor Victorian

shopping arcades, which line parts of those streets,

and which the last Kaiser had much admired.

The three of us shared our wonder at the world’s

smallness – and then were silent, thinking, no doubt,

of vastnesses travelled, and imperial

mishaps. This student of politics

exuded loneliness, but we had appointments

to keep at Lenin’s Mausoleum,

and so we wished him well.

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POETRY

ON THE ARBAT

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

The May that Putin was crowned for the first time,

in the cathedral the Tzars had used,

and made-men of the Russian mafia,

in blacked-out SUVs, were taking their kids

to private English-medium schools,

we walked in sunshine along the Arbat,

a pedestrianised, consumer street,

once the trade route from the Kremlin to Smolensk

and the Steppes, Moscow’s main thoroughfare,

featuring in Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE,

and where Pushkin, with his bride, rented

a small apartment: ‘Better the illusions

that exalt us than ten thousand truths’.

 

We had the modern traveller’s currency

of choice, dollar bills, the lingua franca

of secure world trade. Young Muscovites,

in smart-casual attire, were queuing

outside the newly opened McDonalds.

Almost directly opposite, in the shade,

between Timberland and Shake Shack, dressed

as if for winter, a bespectacled babushka

was begging, her hand held out for kopeks.

 

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POETRY

FROM AN ARMCHAIR

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Through the large window at the end of the room

I can see, out in the April garden,

a sudden wind broadcasting the blossom,

from next door’s ancient pear tree, like snow flakes.

A female blackbird is collecting bedding

and struts of twigs and grass, and airlifting

them into the ivy that covers the fence.

 

On the CD player, between melody

and chords, a dead guitarist’s fingers

slide so poignantly across the strings and frets.

 

A black and white lithograph, fifty eighth

in a series of a hundred entitled

‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’, bought in Moscow’s

Izmailovsky Market – the May Putin

was first crowned – from the artist’s son, the father

fallen, like most of Russia on hard times, shows,

through a thicket, a tangle of leafless

birch trees, a stretch of water gleaming: beyond,

a low rise with a pale fence and a wooden

dacha small against an alabaster sky.

 

I write a couplet, in my head, that is

of such Arcadian perfection, of such

bucolic beauty, it stutters into

silence, like the light of fireflies in a jar.

 

 

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POETRY

THE LITHOGRAPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

The pandemic was daily news last year,

often from someone’s kitchen or study.

Once, behind a British virologist’s

talking head, was a black and white lithograph

from the same series of a hundred

as one we have: ‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’,

ours bought in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market –

the May Putin was first crowned – from the artist’s

son, the father an emigré in New York.

 

Uncle Vanya and the Three Sisters

might stray into the etching’s romantic

melancholy, its stillness, its almost

ominous quietude, its imminent

sense of loss – as if the hawser taut

across the quarry in ‘The Cherry Orchard’

were about to snap at any moment.

Through a tangled thicket of leafless birch trees

a stretch of water gleams: beyond, a low rise

with a pale fence, and a wooden dacha small

against an alabaster sky.

 

 

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POETRY

THE MAKING OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

Though both of his parents were Party members

they had him secretly baptised in case

Stalin died. They often spoke about

the Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life,

the ice routes built across Lake Ladoga

each winter, under bombardment, to help

lift the siege of Leningrad. He spent

much of his childhood chasing after rats

in the bombed-out ruins of Peter the Great’s

once imperial city. Perhaps he was

playing at being Ivan the Terrible

routing the Tatars from Crimea.

 

He appeared, in middle age, to have discovered

the narcissist within. Now he is elderly,

possibly addicted to anabolic

steroids, allegedly the owner

of gold-plated toilets in a palace

on the Black Sea, perhaps the mafia boss

of his old cronies from St Petersburg,

apparatchiks in expropriation

and manipulation. Certainly he appears

to believe that what a bunch of Varangians

aka Vikings got up to on a stretch

of the River Dnipro more than a

millennium ago must determine

what happens now.

 

 

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