'As I Turn the Old Pages and Read'

On my return to the university library for the first time in three weeks, I saw two librarians, a guard and three students, all on the first floor, all wearing masks. There was no one on the second and fourth floors, and I felt that customary lift of anticipation I’ve always known when entering a library or bookshop, this time boosted by the sense of COVID-19-induced exclusivity. I came, as usual, with a list, found the books I wanted, browsed a bit, trusting in serendipity, and picked up the three volumes already on hold at the circulation desk. 

The Everyman’s Library series called Pocket Poets is a mixed bag. It’s good to have small clothbound volumes of Yeats and Dickinson, especially for young readers. But Beat Poets? Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem? Poems Dead and Undead? Ralph Waldo Emerson? That’s pandering, not publishing. But on Friday I found the newest volume in the series, Books and Libraries: Poems (2021), edited by Andrew D. Scrimgeour. At home I learned he is dean of libraries emeritus at Drew University, archivist emeritus of the Society of Biblical Literature, and the founding archivist of the American Academy of Religion. Clearly, a learned, book-loving man. The junk quotient in his little anthology is minimal. Here’s a find from Mel Pryor, a Scottish poet new to me, titled “In a Secondhand Bookshop”:

 

“Here’s his signature, W.S. Graham,

in tidy pencil inside a first edition

of Alanna Autumnal by George Barker.

And he’s written the date, August

1944. And the place, Cornwall.

Back then he was twenty-five, at war

with the war, living in a caravan

near Sydney Cove. Picture him there,

sprawled on a cramped bench bed,

feet up against the caravan window

as he pulls this book back on its hinges

and reads, lifting his eyes only occasionally

to the scraps of cloud above Pengersick Lane,

until the clouds become stars,

until he moves into that next world,

beyond Cornwall and beyond books,

of dreams. Did it have, the caravan,

man-made light? Don’t tell me

it wasn’t the sun and then the moon

that lit his way from word to word

down Barker’s trail of young sentences.

Maybe I buy the book in the brief belief

that thoughts can be reciprocal

and travel back and forth through time.

Maybe I want to feel his hand under

my own hand as I turn the old pages and read

We have nothing left for us to do but sicken

at the magnificence of our predecessors.”

Alanna Autumnal (1933) was Barker’s first novel, published the year he turned twenty. The poem’s final two lines, quoted by Pryor presumably from Barker’s novel, express a sentiment I’ve often experienced. There’s a thrill in discovering an association copy, or even a volume signed by the author or previous owner -- a rush of connection. In this case, a three-way linkage: Barker to Graham to Pryor.

 

A friend in Washington, D.C., during a recent visit to a bookshop there, discovered a book by the Beats-associated journalist Seymour Krim. It was inscribed by Krim to the odious William Burroughs. My friend put it back on the shelf. He did buy a copy of Sentences (1980) signed by the author, Howard Nemerov. He writes:

 

“Thus for the second time in a matter of days, I’d randomly caught a bookseller--a different one each time--carelessly cheating himself.  What are the odds?”