Keats

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’.