BOOKMARKS: ART TROUVÉE
Occasionally there is added value
in purchasing a previously owned
aka second hand book online – like today,
for example, when I opened the packet
and withdrew a used copy of the Penguin
Poetry Library’s edition
of A. E. Housman’s Collected Poems,
with an introduction by John Sparrow,
Warden of All Souls College, Oxford,
and found a number of improvised bookmarks
between some of the pages: a sliver
of cardboard cut with scissors from a box
of muesli or granola, and placed between
‘When I was one-and-twenty’… and ‘There pass
the careless people…’; another piece
of cardboard from the same box, this time marking
‘Is my team ploughing That I was used to drive,
And hear the harness jingle, When I was
a man alive…’; between ‘Into my heart
an air that kills…’ and ‘In my own shire
if I was sad…’ copies of John Keats’
Sleep and Poetry, Wilfred Owen’s
Exposure, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Say Not
The Struggle Naught Availeth cut out neatly
from the Daily Telegraph; lastly, between
‘Bring in this timeless grave to throw No
cypress sombre on the snow…’ and ‘Here,
the hangman stops his cart…’, a roughly torn
ad from the Stourbridge & West Midlands Express,
for a newly opened hotel and spa
in the hamlet of Fockbury, Housman’s
birthplace, purporting an unrivalled view
of Shropshire, and, quoting the famous poet,
‘those blue remembered hills’.
Kate Harrison
May 31, 2024I am a big fan of Shropshire. It still seems a mysterious place, with the sort of hills you don’t find elsewhere. Far enough from the biggest cities, you might expect to take a turn off the main road and see a horse drawn plough making its way across the brow of a field. Of course you might just be at the Acton Scott Farming Museum . . . but maybe not!
John Huddart
June 5, 2024Is there no part of the earth that is not poetry?