This is the second post in this category, one which brings together poems with a connecting theme.
The Dee, which rises in North Wales and enters Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea through the vast Dee Estuary, flows through the city of Chester in North West England. There is a stretch of the river – no longer perhaps than a third of a mile – that flows past a tree-lined embankment called The Groves. The titles and opening lines of all of the poems inspired by that stretch are listed in alphabetical order. Please click on the title to read the whole poem.
In the driest months when the tidal river
is low and the current almost lethargic,
when the waters flow gently over the weir
the Normans built to create a fish pool…
In the stretch from here to where the river bends
around the meadows, there have been drownings –
…A children’s cancer charity has fastened
awareness-raising memento mori
to the railings of a suspension footbridge…
An aged busker in a Stetson sets up
on the river embankment near the café.
He talks at length about his life, then sings
Carole King’s ‘And it’s too late, baby now’…
Beside the city’s river is a bandstand –
Victorian, octagonal in shape,
with eight delicate wrought iron columns –
redolent of summer Sunday afternoons,
and the poignant breathiness of brass bands…
‘Knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door,’ a busker
began to sing near to the ice cream kiosk,
just after I had left the public toilet,
its adamantine urinals made
in Burnley…
Rome’s legionnaires quarried its sandstone cliffs
and Ptolemy put the Dee on the map.
William the Conqueror, in winter,
force-marched his army over the Pennines
to reach the river and waste the town…
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…
This river, deeper than most in metaphor,
abundantly fluent in simile,
is in spate…
By David Selzer
