'The Old Collections Persist Somewhere'

Speaking of anthologies, I again picked up Books and Libraries (2021), published as part of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series. I’ve browsed in several of these attractively compact volumes and they are a very mixed bag, as any thematic anthology must be. You can sense the editor scrambling to be broadly representative, to fill out the selection by padding with shoddy goods alongside the good stuff. The editor of this anthology, Andrew Scrimgeour, has dug up some poems and poets previously unknown to me, including “Bookshop Stopping” by Frank Osen. The subtitle is “After Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going,’” and Osen’s poem is laced with Larkin allusions, as in the third stanza: 

“Old fools with fragile jackets, broken spines.

A few no doubt, unhinged, climb up the walls,

Intrigued, though, by some well-worn pickup lines—

A browser in a web till evening falls—

I read, enraptured, near a narrow aisle

And build my own small reverential pile.”

 

Joe Lucia’s “The Afterlife of Libraries” is bitter eulogy for the passing of books in the digital age. It concludes:

 

“. . . hints that the old collections persist

somewhere and foam up into being again here,

 

“breaking through the welter of digital distractions,

giving hope to those who remember the weight of pages

and the contract with the future of a few strong words

 

“emblazoned on all the various and durable spines.”   

 

Knowing Lucia is dean of libraries at Temple University adds an additonal level of piquancy to his poem. The English poet Michael Symmons Roberts’ “The Future of Books” is another bookish lament:

 

“Or this: some sci-fi aeon where a drill

draws out a deep core sample,

a candy-stick of sands and clays,

each civilisation -- the gist of all its stories -

packed into a slab of sediment.

Our slice has its own distinctive shade and scent

- paper-musk, the dark behind the bookshelves -

but it is so mystifies our future selves

they fry it like black pudding, a salt and bitter

jus of atlas, sonnet, gossip, scripture.

Text is long gone, cut loose in virtual vaults

with mislaid passcodes. Think of bottles

on a cyber-tide, never breaking shore,

bearing love letters to strangers.”

All three poems are in a chapter titled "Rethinking Books and Reads."