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the Potteries

POETRY

CONSUMERISM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read540 views

From the open air car park adjacent to

the first floor of one of the largest

department stores in Western Europe –

whose customers are car owning folk

with some disposable cash to spare –

I can see the methane being burnt off

at the oil refineries, and, beyond,

a bundle of wind turbines turning

on the flood plain beside the estuary.

 

On the opposite side of the busy road

from the store is the second largest

retail park in England. At its centre

a gleaming big wheel turns attracting

and distracting families of shoppers,

who have commuted from across the region –

north east on the motorways from the old

Cotton Mill Towns, south east from the Potteries.

The car I am sitting in was made here

in this town built for the refineries,

motor vehicles, and canals – with narrow boats

carting bags of coal and fetching finished goods.

 

In the furnishing department of this store

there is a new range: William Morris Towels.

Morris – iconic textile designer,

socialist activist, artist, poet,

author of ‘The Glittering Plain’ and ‘News

From Nowhere’ urged: ‘Have nothing in your house

that you do not know to be useful,

or believe to be beautiful’. Yesterday

it would not have been safe to ask about

the towels – and tomorrow it might be

unsettling again – but today

we may be comfortable in our knowledge

of where they were made, and how, and who made them.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE BRIDGE AT HOUGH

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read743 views

And this poem, which will be about England,

and, in some part, the southern margins

of the North, and the vagaries of the tongue,

has already stalled at the title’s fourth word.

Does it rhyme with ‘though’ or ‘tough?  Or with ‘cow’

or ‘row’? That is ‘row’ as in beans, of course,

not as in a shouty altercation.

It is as in ‘huff’, ‘houfe’, ‘hoff’ – from the Old English

for the heel of a hill, a projecting ridge.

 

As you drive through the ancient hamlet,

you do not notice any raised ground or,

indeed, the place – scattered by the road

to the Potteries – but for the signs on leaving

and entering. At one end of the hamlet –

that on the eastern edge of Cheshire –

is the bridge itself: narrow, stone, hump-backed,

replaced and repaired since medieval times.

Beneath the bridge – famed now in the annals

of English verse! – runs Swill Brook, and along

its reedy banks are endangered colonies

of water voles: aka water rats,

rats taupier, arvicola

amphibius. The brook springs limpid

from the clayey earth some miles south, seeps

northwards into the River Weaver’s catchment,

and so into the Mersey, past Liverpool,

through St George’s Channel to the Atlantic.

England’s mercantile empire shoved its

Anglo-Saxon tongue – complete with French veneer

and Greco-Roman embellishments –

down the throats of millions.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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