Outside falls away

© C A Lovegrove

Off the Shelf:
A Celebration of Bookshops in Verse
edited by Carol Ann Duffy.
Picador, 2016.

‘… You step aside

from the roar on the street to the door
of Strand Book Stall. Outside falls away.’

—Imtiaz Dharker: ‘Beware the books.’

It’s autumn 2016, and at the second Crickhowell Literary Festival I pick up a slim hardback promising a selection of poetic paeans in praise of bookshops. Dipping into the contents I see some thirty individual pieces – mostly filling one page, only one expanding to five pages – and discover that I like the two or three I pay close attention to.

So why has it taken me more than seven years to return to this thesaurus, this storehouse of exquisite treasures – no tawdry trinkets these – and give them the attention they deserve? Is it because I’ve been too busy living the bookish experiences they describe in so much detail, actually entering the sanctums where the faithful may find the joy of texts?

Well now, here am I finally fully appreciating the gems that have lain so long in store for this tardy reader, and hoping to share their virtues with you too.

© C A Lovegrove

This anthology of commissioned poems was put together for a 2016 tour of independent bookshops in the UK by Carol Ann Duffy, then Poet Laureate, along with Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay and Imtiaz Dharker, all of whom have poems featured here, plus some two dozen or so others, a few of whom guested at various places on the tour. As Ian Duhig’s piece reminds us, “‘Anthology’ means ‘a gathering of flowers,'” and Off the Shelf is indeed a varied bouquet of blooms.

Many of the poems focus on what the premises contain on their shelves – favourite titles from childhood, perhaps, or the authors whom Edward Doegar envisions in a South Carolina Barnes & Noble bookstore:

Nabokov turns his back on Joyce
to examine his glasses – in focus, out of fashion.
[…] The two Eliots are obvious:
she sports an androgynous pink bow-tie; he’s predatory
restraint.

— ‘Without Prejudice’

Paul Henry notes that, while browsing, even “the books we almost bought | were precious in our hand”; Colette Bryce knows that all fiction consists of “the longest lies”; the late Clive James, off signing some of his publications in London bookshops, gives the world a valedictory sign-off: “Heffers or Waterstones, this is goodbye, | But I rejoice that I came here to die.” Sean Borodale contemplates a secondhand book into which “in the old days someone stuffed a postcard | thinking it was a post box into the future.”

Sylva Beach outside Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Yet, this being specifically a celebration of bookshops most pieces focus on them as safe havens (here for instance was where Mark Pajak’s child self escaped to when his mother had a hangover); moreover, these are places to lose oneself in, as other poets reiterate. Peter Davidson invites us when in Edinburgh to “patrol the New Town squares at dusk” to see what indie bookshops exist; Gillian Clarke in Cardiff knows that “What stays is not the book alone | but where you took it down, | how it felt in your hands, | how she wrapped it in brown paper, | how you carried it home;” Zaffar Kunial, while thinking of a bookshop as a kind of Narnian wardrobe, recalls the family Quran which, kept on top of an MDF wardrobe in his childhood home, had a particular significance for him.

Alongside Don Paterson’s concrete poem of ‘The Bookshop’ – a visual counterpart of Patience Agbabi’s “rare spines [which] paper four walls” – we have the emotions that are evoked by the thought of these various premises. Jackie Kay rejoices in “The blessed benevolence, the sweet, sweet ambience | Of independent bookshops,” maybe the kind which proudly proclaims, as Liz Lochhead writes, that “They don’t do coffee here. | They sell books.” In contrast Kit Wright sees the tiered shelves as “standing coffins, catafalques| Of books and books and books.”

Vintage Penguin paperbacks

But there is a sadness here too. In Dublin Michael Longley regrets when “Each wee bookshop has closed, a lost cathedral”; Daljit Nagra knows “How it feels when […] one more house of books leaves a high street”; Michael Symmons Roberts considers the future of books in a digital age: “Think of bottles | on a cyber-tide, never breaking shore | bearing love letters for strangers.”

And what of Vicki Feaver’s Bookshop at the End of the World, when absolutely everything has stopped, an establishment which is opened “not to sell books | but to satisfy a hunger for the stories | and the history of the world as it was”? This is a nostalgia for what can so easily be lost if we’re not careful, but it’s also a yearning to be in a place where so much that matters to us and which makes us human has taken up residence.

Off the Shelf will remain a keepsake for me, a volume to keep safe and return to. Among the metaphors and filigree engineered forms I sensed the presence of each genius loci, a spirit which only marginally shifted shape as I moved from one locale to another. Reading this anthology may help you sense that spirit too.

© C A Lovegrove

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Off the Shelf can be matched with the scroll icon (No 3) in Mayri’s Picture Prompt Book Bingo for 2024. It’s also National Poetry Month.

Bookforager’s Picture Prompt Book Bingo, 2024: https://wp.me/p7GrCV-1nN