I am a fast reader who became a slow reader. I started in the fast-reading lane in the sense that I learned to read unusually young and was treated as a freak show for visitors to the Presentation Convent school in Thurles, where my schooling began. No guest – lay or clerical, church canon or Department of Education inspector – was spared what was no doubt a cringe-making display, as I gave command performances from Pear’s Encyclopaedia or a gold-edged Lives of the Saints. My greed for words gathered momentum in secondary school with essay competitions, radio scripts, a verse-speaking medal, slogan and caption entries. I read with the obsession of an addict in the grip of an uncontrollable urge. Whatever had been written, I wanted to read. Whatever there was to read, I wanted to have read. Eventually, what there wasn’t to read, I wanted to write.

At some point in my childhood, I began to ruefully realize that one book a day – adventure novels, biographies of the great inventors, stories of everyday life in distant lands like Norway and France, heroic accounts of missionaries and lifeboat men – would make only a small dent in the stock of the local library. I therefore resolved to double the dose and increase my intake to two books a day, as though I needed a book for each of my avaricious eyes. My favorite reading position was in a large tea chest propped against the smooth bark of a mature laburnum tree; close enough to the backyard rose beds to catch their wafting scent and near enough to the proliferating blackcurrant bushes to warily monitor their progress. The currants, which seemed to increase and multiply at a prodigious – even promiscuous – pace, would need to be picked for jam-making before their plum-colored skins reached seam-bursting ripeness. My tea chest was rendered comfortable by deft deployment of borrowed cushions and a deaf ear to the demands that I clamber out of my shell and – instead of risking cabin fever – help to weed the long thin lettuce and cauliflower beds.

I have never lost my sense of urgency about reading, any more than I have gained a sense of urgency about weeding. I sometimes want to bypass the reading process altogether and – reverting to the metaphor of addiction – simply inject knowledge into my veins so that they might course with whatever wisdom or insight the reading of Proust or Plato, Maria Edgeworth or William Faulkner would confer. But reading is a gratifying act in itself, and one pleads for more time, more life, to get through everything: Amichai to Zabolotsky, Zozimus to Aristotle. My older brother Frank once remarked that “Whenever someone buys a book, they also imagine they are buying the time to read that book” – a sage insight which encapsulates not only the pleasurable anticipation that accompanies the buying of a book but also the depth of our illusions. We feel more learned simply for having bought Tacitus’s Agricola or Juvenal’s Satires. The volume is handled and fondled, sniffed and shelved, never again in many instances to be disturbed: a bibliographical example of “dust to dust.” If living authors received royalties for books read rather than books bought, they couldn’t hope to balance their own books. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” Paul Valéry famously remarked of the writing process. And – of the reading process – one might similarly claim of our frenzied, distracted age, “No book is ever started, only anticipated....”

When I say I was a fast reader, I don’t mean that I read carelessly or skipped pages. Skipping was an activity in which my sister and her friends specialized – the metronymic beat of their rhymes and the rhythmic thud of their sandaled feet as much a defining part of summer as hoverfly hums and horsefly bites. As a reader, I absorbed every page, eking out the pleasure; but – displaying a youthful conflict of interests – I also relished the prospect of conquering the next column of books and was limbering up in expectation. It was as if reading was childhood itself, as if I sensed that my days under the pendulous laburnum, with everything coming up smelling of roses, were numbered. Time was running out. Evenings dissolved too quickly into a red-skied night. Relatives were quizzing me with increasing seriousness about what I would do when I left school. Certainly, I indulged in a lot of daydreaming about time and infinity; I would take the sudden notion to jot down the time as shown in Roman numerals on the classroom’s pendulum clock. Later, I would ruminate on the fact that the particular second I had taken such careful note of was now gone forever and a day.

TEMPUS FUGIT

X to III by the school clock;
a pendulum paces its cage.
Now I know what time means:
at III, I will be older by ten minutes,
this moment will have passed.

A singsong teacher lists
the industries of Wales.
The fly Glossy Gleeson freed
from a red Elastoplast tin
scales the chalky blackboard. . .

I never saw my friends again
once we had walked out
together, backwards,
through the wrought front gates
— all that remains of the school.

If we chanced to meet
what would there be to say?
What would we have in common
(crow’s-feet; grey hairs landing
like some migratory birds)?

                         

Another sense in which I was a quick reader – and an anticipative one – was that I would sometimes check the book’s ending before I embarked on the first chapter. As speed-reading experts tell us, it is always easier to follow the plot of a story when its outcome is known. Advance notice of how the characters in the book would fare whetted my gratification more than it spoiled my suspense. Happy endings are one of the great impulses for childhood reading – and of course they are normative, too, in great literature of the order of Shakespeare’s comedies and Jane Austen’s novels – because of the assurance they offer that “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” In a fractious world – where a volatile teacher would suddenly whip the leather strap from its scabbard and lash out, and where family life was not without tension either – it was salutary to enter a space where good invariably triumphed and adversity was overcome. If books revolved solely around their dnouements, few would reread them, whereas – in Hazlitt’s words, which I recently reread – “When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated.”

In poetry, rereading is the whole point. Stanza means “room”; and the first familiarization with the poem is a way of getting a feel for its rooms, exploring their ambience, gauging their proportions, deciding whether or not one would want to linger in them. If the poem has real merit, it will reveal more and more features – tonal, emotional, linguistic, rhythmical, metaphoric – on each subsequent visit. Eventually, you live in the poem and it lives in you. As the American poet C. K. Williams brilliantly expressed it:

A poem is meant to be read and read again and again, to be run through the mind until it is part of the mind, until the mind recites it as it recites itself.... Mind becomes doubled in its dealings with the formal arts. We aren’t satisfied to ‘know’ a poem, a painting, or a piece of music by being able to describe it to ourselves, to paraphrase it. There has to be the incorporation of the actual object, of the precise notes in a piece of music or the precise words in a poem, so that we hear the music or the poem when we think it, so that we hear our own actual voice, the voice we speak our own lives with, drawn into and fused with its melodies and rhythms.

Hazlitt rightly emphasizes the fact that to reread a book we love is not only to savor the work itself but also to enjoy the added “pleasures of memory”: “It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way.” As a schoolboy, I remember instructing myself more than once, “Don’t ever say your schooldays were the happiest days of your life,” a command to which I have remained unswervingly faithful. But school holidays are not school days, as such; and to think of the balmy Easter break from fifth year – a secondary school year free of exam woes – still warms what Thomas Kinsella humorously terms “the yolk of my being.” It was not Easter eggs but Easter reading that brought about this fulfilment. No longer nesting in a tea chest, my brooding took place on a maroon-colored kitchen chair, transported to the garden where I was revelling in the little Oxford Classics edition of The Vicar of Wakefield. It was as simple as that.

As a younger child, though, I had been less keen on classics, resisting in particular the nineteenth-century novels which my parents wished on me: Swiss Family Robinson, Children of the New Forest, and so on. These were printed on yellowing pulp paper of a North Korean standard, which soaked up blotchy ink the way “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung soaked up the adulation of his “Progressive Peoples.” I read them (one read everything), but only as an interim measure, an emergency ration, on those still, starched days out of school with asthma, pending my return to full health – and to further raids on the library, where I would find volumes aplenty that were worthy of the high status I assigned to books. Many of the disparaged hairshirt productions were not so much true classics as out-of-copyright stories which happened to be known to, and sanctioned by, parents and grandparents – factor which only increased the child’s sense that they (the books rather than the grandparents!) were a bit musty and antiquated. What I loved beyond price were lively brightly illustrated tales from World’s Work or Blackie’s; ever reliable Antelope Books; an exotic American production, solid and shiny – illustrated with plaid lumber jackets and crew cuts and left drive gas guzzling cars that swept all before them; and anything at all by Enid Blyton, whose signature on her front covers represented a quality mark equivalent to the logo lettering on a Coca-Cola bottle (a lesson not lost in a town where County Cola from Dwans on Parnell Street just didn’t offer the same fizz or frisson as the “real thing”).

A seven-year old bibliographer and short-lived child diarist in 1961, I recorded a few highlights from my past reading, including titles like The Little House in the Woods and The Sleepy Lion, along with Rupert Bear annual and – as befitted a veteran of convent readings – Pear’s Encyclopaedia. The following year, on his tenth birthday, my brother Frank used some of the blank diary pages to catalogue what he called “The O’Curry Private Library at Galtee View, Mill Road, Thurles.” Ever the historian, and now editor with his wife Mary of the scholarly Tipperary Historical Journal, Frank had named the library after Eugene O’Curry, the nineteenth century historian and manuscripts scholar – an astonishingly esoteric and precocious choice for a ten-year old. As well as true classics by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne, the books he listed – having presumably salvaged them about our child-disordered house – ranged from a well-balanced pair of bipolar biographies (those of rivals Michael Collins and Eamon de Valéra) to Blackcock’s Feather and a Biblical tome. The fifty-six books deposited in the O’Curry Library were divided into sixteen categories – many of which, such as “Rilegon,” “Soldering,” and “Love” contained no more than two or three volumes. The “History” section, with nineteen titles, was much the best stocked; “Fiction” and “Potery” had six volumes each. Books could only be borrowed “when charman is present” and, with an entrepreneurial eye on expansion of the enterprise, he added that “books will be bought secondhand (on conditions).”

It is a measure of how centrally important the public library could be for children of our generation that a home equivalent would be created by a bright ten-year-old in an austere rural home that might in some respects have been a Haworth parsonage. Our household offered no television, no record player, no musical instruments; background music came from valve radio programs on the BBC Light and Home services and Radio Éireann: waltzes from Brighton tea-rooms and Rhoda Coghill accompaniments from the Henry Street studios in Dublin, brass bands and céilí bands, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, John McCormack and Jim Reeves, the Clancy Brothers and the Tulla Céilí Band, “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls” and “Kevin Barry gave his young life for the cause of liberty....” I don’t suppose it would have occurred to anyone in my circle that music or visual art could be at the core of an education; they were hobbies, entertainments, pastimes – and the implication was that only a waster, a shaper, or a sissy would want to study them at a boy’s school.

I received not a stroke of instruction in art, though I displayed some slight flair and had won a couple of small Caltex – now Texaco – prizes for my doodles. Not only were drama and music not taught to my class, our secondary school had no assembly room or hall in which to present a play or musical, even had such a frivolity been contemplated. The education provided was as rudimentary as the school’s facilities: a narrow preparation for the roles in church, bank, teaching, and the civil service into which most of us drifted. We may not have been cultivated, but we must have been courteous in a manner that anticipated the era of “customer service.” One of the peculiarities of my education was that, for a year or two in secondary school, my class – swains and townies alike – was treated to a weekly lesson based on a book by our headmaster called Courtesy for Boys and Girls.

Glimpsing a favorite book from childhood, I shamelessly indulge in rose-tinted memories of some red-letter day when I was the first borrower of some similarly coveted title from the library. The pages open with an agreeable creak, like the sound – on which every young reader becomes expert – of a door slowly and stiffly opening to reveal hidden treasure. The print is invitingly large. The cover foregrounds an Edward Ardizzone illustration perhaps, warm colors washing over the bold drawings of characters whose boldness, in a different sense, is fundamental to their charm and fascination. The smell of the book, the feel of the paper, the allure of the illustrations, the excitement of the plot: one delight is heaped on another. I may not know what happiness is; but I know it smells very like a newly opened children’s book. I have been following that scent all my life, recognizing that – whereas for adults, happiness occurs by happenstance – bliss can be summoned, sustained, even guaranteed by the child reader. Seamus Heaney notes that “everybody recollects their earliest life as somehow in the middle of a space that is separate and a little sorrowing.” Reading provides the necessary solace and escape:

A rose window, buried
since Cromwellian times,
was unearthed in the henhouse
of a children’s adventure story.
I read about it, waiting in the car
for my father, as a shivery evening
descended on the village like an Asian flu.

                         

Sorrowings notwithstanding, the obliviousness that is a synonym for happiness (we are never more contented in life than when we are out of it) triumphs regularly in childhood like the happy endings of the stories. Reading acts as a literate means of achieving preliterate states of primary contentment – insofar, that is, as one can actually speak of happiness except retrospectively. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger remarks, “the moment / when the word happy / is pronounced / never is the moment of happiness.” Books can prove as infectious as measles or mumps, the fever of the stories becoming one with the fervor of childhood itself. Here is Brandon Robshaw’s encapsulation of the glowing Enid Blyton world:

Days are always sunny; adventures take place almost entirely out of doors; food is constantly consumed (ham, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, salad, sandwiches, cakes, ice creams and of course lashings of ginger beer), usually in the form of picnics or high tea.... There is a clear moral structure; bad characters are punished and flawed characters learn their lesson.

Most notable of all is the near-total absence of grown-ups. Uncle Quentin may hover around at the beginning of the story and he tends to pop up again right at the end, but in between he is entirely dispensed with. The children are allowed a degree of liberty which would be considered the height of parental irresponsibility today: they climb mountains, find their way into ruined castles, go swimming in the ocean, even drive motor-boats around, and all without a smidgen of adult supervision. This must be a vital part of the appeal – the vicarious sense of independence and control the books give to children, at a time when they are beginning to be old enough to realise how little power they have in reality.

Independence was certainly a well-thumbed theme in my childhood reading. After all, if childhood had been unfailingly blissful in itself, one would scarcely need the escape which books provided: escape from dependency; from being herded as a large family en masse to Mass; escape from adult gloom and conflict, from childhood fears and dreads. Little wonder that a book like Eleanor Graham’s The Children Who Lived in a Barn (1938), in which five young brothers and sisters manage without their parents (and without Child Lines and social workers too, as Jacqueline Wilson observed), made an unforgettable impact.

A book that has remained with me all my life – the physical object as well as the favorable recollection – is Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), a first edition hardback of which I received as a gift from my aunt Eileen – Sister Gabriel of the Ursulines, one of the guardian presences of childhood. In Pearce’s atmospheric book, the lonely hero – lodging with childless relatives while his brother is quarantined with measles – begins travelling through time when the clock in the hall strikes thirteen. It was in homage to this dysfunctional grandfather clock, living on borrowed time, that I named a recent sequence of prose poems “Fifty O’Clock.” And time is of the essence in reading: the arresting of time and – by allowing us to live other lives in other eras – the imaginative and emotional enlargement of our own lives. The alternative lives I imagined were ones I could identify with. This preference for what I regarded as “realistic” books would lead me to poets like Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, and Douglas Dunn – poets whose collections were among those I bought from my first teenage pay packets. I related to wardrobes more than witches, lions more than hobbits, just as – in visual art – I came to prefer Munch to Picasso and the unflinching Northern Renaissance school over the more voluptuous Mediterranean schools.

As a young hurling heathen, in a Thurles where almost everyone was a fervent believer, I was often banished to the sidelines for games. Scrawnily built and sporting few attributes (not even a knowledge of the rules) that would make for glory on a hurling field in the very town where the Gaelic Athletic Association had been founded, my only goal was to make myself dispensable. Eventually, at the age of fourteen or so, I received a welcome transfer indoors as the school’s first librarian, date-stamping and card-indexing book loans to younger students when my own class was – there being no accounting for taste – flogging a ball fervently in the mud with an ash stick. While the library included high-minded, inspirational material – which of course remained in mint condition – the cowboy books (Zane Grey’s purple sage prose especially) were “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” equalled in popularity only by the Hardy Boys mysteries. I staked a claim on a narrow seam of more valuable stuff by middlebrow authors who could write stylishly – Somerset Maugham, Saki, Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, even the forgotten Neville Shute of Trustee from the Toolroom – and who led the reader onwards to better things in bigger libraries. As a reader, I was gaining altitude but losing my taste for adventure. The Hardy Boys seemed synthetic, every chapter ending implausibly in a frenzied cliffhanger. I tried Agatha Christie’s most famous detective story and found myself utterly bored with its thin language and a plot that creaked in all the wrong places.

It is autumn, 1968. I am standing, aged fourteen, in a long, slowly moving snake of schoolboys waiting for the Intermediate Certificate results when I decide to give up, there and then, on the Agatha Christie book I am reading. I can’t muster the slightest interest in whodunnit. My days of trailing detectives, amateur or professional, were over. A literary puberty was well advanced. The town’s, if not the world’s, most zealous reader of Enid Blyton stories – of which her “find-outers” series and her “adventure” books reigned supreme – was in search of new adventures in words. The founder and most assiduous member of the Thurles branch of the Lone Pine Club, inspired by Malcolm Saville’s gripping stories with picturesque rural settings, was in search of more taxing adventures. The only smugglers I would encounter from then on would be real ones, known to me through my job in Customs – criminals who didn’t conveniently wear the crew-neck sweaters and shifty expressions that made them so immediately recognizable in an identity parade of Enid Blyton characters. December, 1967, had been my last fling. My Christmas gift from my parents had included eight Malcolm Saville paperbacks. By 1969, Samuel Beckett and Henry James were at the head of my reading list; and some nimbus of forbidden fascination surrounded the hazy name of James Joyce – if only because of the tongue-lashing meted out to Frank by our mother for sullying our household propriety with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Thurles having no bookshop to browse in, I continued to rely for reading material (nonfiction mainly at this stage: essays by George Orwell, poems by Austin Clarke, a biography of Rubens) on the same single-storey, multi-story library on Castle Avenue which I had first joined as an infant. A prim, trim, well-proportioned whispering gallery, set back from the street and never of course painted in a loud color, it discreetly but firmly stood its ground not far from the technicolor rival attractions of The Capitol, one of the town’s two cinemas (establishments known to everyone simply as “the wan above” and “the wan below”).Whereas the craved-for excitement of the Sunday afternoon matinée was rarely sanctioned by my parents, and I have to this day watched fewer films in my lifetime than many people see in a year, library visits ¡– like savings stamps purchases – were a long-running Saturday-morning serial:

     Saturday morning, our father ferries us to town.
     A pound of this, a scoop of that, from fragrant sacks
     of seeds, pellets, phosphates, feeds in Sutton’s yard.
     A pair of brass hinges at Molloy’s hardware.
     The library’s squeaky-clean linoleum for Enid Blyton’s
     Secret Seven, a doctor-and-nurse story for our mother,
     our father wavering between two gory wars.

     Salmon-colored stamps licked into savings books.
     The sweet, addictive smell of pulped sugar beet
     wafting our way on a raft of factory steam.
     Bills to pay for clothes we’d tried on appro.
     Then back to the car, pulling faces at passers-by,
     while our father eyes a rival’s cabbage plants,
     doused and counted into hundreds at the market.

     A busker plays a tarnished trumpet. Hawkers gesture.
     Capped men off country buses check used suits for thickness.
     Half-heads, teaty bellies, hard-salt flanks, smoked streaky
     grace Molony’s bacon window.My brothers and I caffle,
     tire, then face out racing clouds until the world begins
     to spin — like when our father swings us to dizziness,
     sets us down on the kitchen’s unstable ground.

                         

You knew the library in Thurles was open when its heavy wooden double-doors, with raised panels resembling square books, were pinned back like wings and the display case of new arrivals could be tantalizingly glimpsed from the entrance path. The most sought-after children’s titles, not least among reluctant readers who wanted an experience akin to a cinema on the page, were the comic book annuals. A small boy is rushing home to Kickham Street, pressing an annual possessively to his duffel coat. “What have you there?” I ask, curiosity getting the better of me. “The Harold Harry Annual,” he informs me victoriously, displaying the trophy cover on which Harold Hare is grinning – like the lad himself – from ear to velvet ear. Annuals and weekly comics like The Topper, The Beano and The Beezer brought color to all our lives in a monochrome age of black-and-white opinions, black-and-white TV screens, and the black-and-white clerical dress that set the tone for a town of two seminaries, two convents, and a Christian Brothers’ monastery. While the service of God was seen as a job for the afterlife, I opted at sixteen for a civil service “job for life.” Three years of legal studies and thirty years in offices dealing with specialized technical legislation would make a crucial impact on my reading pace and practice.

During secondary school holidays, I had been sampling the library copy of the cobalt blue Oxford Standard Authors edition of Wordsworth: seven hundred double-column pages in small print. The fact that the volume opened with a poem “composed in anticipation of leaving school” heightened my sense of being at the threshold of some vital lifelong commitment to this poet and to poetry. I was quickly, as it were, becoming a slow reader, savoring words and images and rhythms and ideas rather than storylines. Just as I am a tedious companion in an art gallery, where I wear down the canvases with staring, so I am a very deliberate reader, turning the pages hesitantly and staring over my shoulder in case I missed anything first time round. I collect and publish literary quotations. I note down sources. I cross-reference articles. I file and index reviews. For about ten years, much of my work in the stamp duties office in Dublin Castle pivoted around a relief for company amalgamations and reconstructions which the standard textbook on the topic, Sergeant on Stamp Duties, characterized as “one of the longest and most complicated sections in revenue legislation.” Only a slow reader, prepared to outstare each individual word and to tease out every possible implication, could survive for long in such a job. There are worse groundings for a poetry critic than the study of law.

Poets – seldom found in civil service offices nowadays – are increasingly employed in creative writing departments of universities. Michael Donaghy once remarked that saying you studied English because you love poetry is “like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.” But there is a vast difference between a student being systematically walked through great poems and novels by a sympathetic English department mentor, and having those works treated as plastic bones for aspirant writers to cut their creative teeth on. Instead of being read for their own sake – for enjoyment, enlightenment and a fresh angle on reality – the great works are degraded by the creative writing industry into a kind of booster rocket to be discarded once the would-be author has been launched into an inspirational orbit.

One of the most popular internet sites summarizes its advice to teenage writers in three words: “Read, read, read.” “Reading,” it goes on, “can teach you to write better and it can teach you how not to write. It can give you ideas, topics to write about, tidbits and facts to work into your fiction or poetry....” Having continued in breathless vein, the instructor paused for a “But....” After this potentially pregnant pause, I naively expected a peroration exhorting people to read for pure pleasure; or for the understanding of the world reading fosters, the language it finds for our losses and joys, the insights it offers into the human condition, its capacity to break and lift our hearts at once.... Instead, teenagers were warned that those who spend too much time reading, albeit in pursuit of creative kindling, will be depriving themselves of time for their precious writing. Robert Hass, probably America’s finest living poet, has confessed that, while there are times when he reads poetry “only in the hope that it will inspire me to write,” it “crosses my mind that what I do write will be read, if it is, by poets who are only reading it so that they will be inspired to write.” Addressing his deeper reading of poetry, “out of need,” Hass concludes that not only will reading “clarify and focus inchoate feeling,” it will sometimes “not help me live my life, but make living it seem impossible.”

Only when we are prepared to be challenged and resisted and appalled as well as charmed and cheered and inspired by what we read are we engaging deeply with literature, opening ourselves fully to its scope. But for many writers, whose attention span is conterminous with the responsive click of the Internet pointer and the flick of the TV zapper, serious reading may be a very difficult discipline to master. All those small-print pages, all that tiresome concentration.... Here’s what an American professor, himself a writer, told me recently about his students: “As for reading, they would rather write, which is the product of the computer age, of course. Banging away on the computer, giving vent to TV notions of the world, is like a playstation.” The drawback, however, in being a slow reader, taking poetry and prose at a pre-TV pace, is that, at this leisurely rate, one will leave so much great literature unread. Books I once gazed on with avid anticipation, I now contemplate with something akin to elegiac dread; books I had virtually taken as read and imagined rereading in old age still elude me. I revise some famous lines of Keats to say “I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my brain has gleaned those teeming books....” I try to half-heartedly convince myself that some of these volumes would have proved disappointing; but I – who have squandered my way through so many Sunday newspaper supplements and literary periodicals and mediocre books and reviews of mediocre books – repudiate my self-serving propaganda.

It is difficult to state precisely why reading is so essential. It is impossible to disentangle the linguistic pleasures from the moral insights, the wisdom from the knowledge, the cadence from the characterization.... One may quickly forget the details of a plot or the premises of a philosophy and yet feel changed forever by having read the book. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school,” is Albert Einstein’s formulation. The nearest adult experience I know to being a child, eagerly turning pages in the kitchen while my mother – hands gloved in a dishcloth – takes from the oven a sugar-dusted apple pie that is sweating cinnamon through its pores, is being a slow reader of a great book, entering a zone of timelessness. I suspect that it is only in such a state that we are detached enough from the attachments of the everyday to gain access to those profound truths and poignant yearnings that are the ultimate goal of serious readers and the richest reward a writer can bestow. And it is significant that, in writing poetry, what is remembered with uncanny intensity is often some experience one hadn’t realized was being even casually registered at the time. If we want to see the world with a clarity and amplitude denied us by the dazzle of our electronic screens, we must take a step beyond chronological time and enter the thirteen o’clock world of Tom’s Midnight Garden.

The realization that – despite having renounced TV, cinema, DVDs, pubs, thrillers, golf, morris dancing, and just about everything else – the odds are stacked against my being able to tick off as read all of the books that anyone half-civilized should know fills me with panic. It is as if we are barely granted a sidelong glance at the world when it is time to leave it again. Life, I have always said derisively, is too short to accommodate this or that trashy book; but how am I to cope with the creeping awareness that it is literally too short to allow for nearly enough of the great poetry, fiction, essays, journals, memoirs, letters, criticism, travel writing, art history, and all the rest of it to be absorbed? I contemplated writing my way out of this frustration. Could my not having read, say, Hobbes’s Leviathan really become raw material for a poem? Why not just devote time to reading the book and spare the world my moans about not having bagged it? However illogical or contradictory, the inner pressure to explore my word-craving in words proved so overwhelming that I felt compelled to succumb, eventually making not just one but two stabs at the topic. The first, called “Classic Days,” was itself in two parts:

I

What a day to be alive,
on leave from work, free
to sit out among sun and flowers,
a renewable supply of song birds
perched on birch and beech and yew.

I want to catch up with an unread classic,
some book of hours, long
looked forward to, one of those
sessions of sweet silent thought
last granted as a schoolboy

when an aromatic tea chest,
stamped “Ceylon,” was my
wood-panelled reading room,
the garden unwinding around me
like a delayed-action nature program.

II

Having had it to up to there with worldly
life, what I now want is the right
to plunge headlong into books,

to clear space for another run at Proust,
dust off Buddenbrooks, take on Boswell’s
Life of Johnson, rediscover Adam Bede.

A rueful sense of wasted time afflicts me,
reading an advertisement for Loeb Classics:
a “freshly-edited” version of Valerius Maximus

to die for; a new two-volume Virgil (Georgics,
Eclogues and the Aeneid) to gorge on.
The backlist’s Aristophanes and the Horace Odes.

Sometimes a creaky fragment of school Latin
or a fleeting tale of seafaring Greeks will surface
in my mind, like driftwood floating in a wreck.

“492 books strong,” the Loeb announcement boasts.
What a long leisurely life I could have done with.
And what a happy life it might have been.

                         

When a letter from John Lucas, the critic and poet, brought an invitation to contribute to a book celebrating the poet Anne Stevenson’s seventieth birthday, I decided to offer “Classic Days”: it seemed thematically well-suited to a poet as widely-read and as attuned to literary tradition as Anne. By the time the Lucas book had been published and noticed in the Times Literary Supplement – where the reviewer was enormously encouraging about “Classic Days” – I had unravelled the entire poem as ruthlessly as Penelope’s shroud and started again. I wanted to home in even closer on the joys of childhood reading and to counterpoint the mortal pangs I feel when – if I may again redistribute Keats’s words – standing before “high-piled books,” knowing I will never harvest their “full ripen’d grain.” I’m not sure that my second effort, “Book Sale,” is any more definitive than the first:

         Seizing, as if in panic,
armfuls of reduced-price classics,
         bound in sombre, artful jackets,
he is determined at last to take
         a stand on Crime and Punishment,
come to terms with The Rights of Man,
         surrender to the power of Leviathan,
renew youth like a library book:
         remembered times past when —
cushioned from hardship, lying astride
         an easy-chair or in the wood-panelled
reading room of a summer garden lair,
         an aromatic tea chest marked Ceylon,
he plunged headlong into adventure,
         knowing contentment like the back
of his page-turning hand, oblivious
         to the rota of household chores,
the squeegee singing of a thrush,
         the tennis ball’s monotonous crush
on a gable wall, the canter
         of an empty meat tin blowing
like perpetual motion near the bin,
         cows ripping out chapters of grass.
He expects more substance from
         his reading now, of course,
and these books he stacks up
         at the cash desk have a weighty feel:
You must change your life is what
         he wants to hear them say,
There is still time to begin.
         They will fill his shelves like resolutions,
tasks he must get round to some day soon:
         that leaking tap, that creaking door,
that bathroom fungus needing close attention.

                         

When I was a schoolboy, my classmates pitched some of their reviled textbooks into the River Suir at the end of the Leaving Certificate exams, a gesture like that which Prospero promises at the close of The Tempest. But the schoolboys had little Prospero-like sense of the magic that was contained in anthologies of prescribed prose and poetry, the very books on which Patrick Kavanagh’s precocious but precarious talent had been nurtured in his Inniskeen hedge school. I didn’t drown any texts “deeper than did ever plummet sound.” Having shut my favorite childhood books in the preceding years, I had begun to give primacy to poetry, abandoning in the distance The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton, Strangers at Snowfell by Malcolm Saville, The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater, Biggles, Jennings, Billy Bunter, William.... Long cured, too, was the ache to pack a trunk for public school, to have mortar-boarded “beaks” as teachers and quads and removes instead of a rough gravel schoolyard, to plot midnight feasts washed down with ginger beer, to while away summer hols on some island of adventure where mysteries were the norm and crimes that baffled policemen could be solved by a few inquisitive, independent-minded children and their laterally thinking dog.

I have no access now to the Library of Adventure; in fact, I haven’t even been a member of a library for a decade. But something of the hushed pleasures of libraryhood are still accessible on days when I am fortunate enough to have set aside time for reading and my book-lined study, overlooking a formal garden, is as soundproofed and trouble-proofed as the most cushioned tea chest from monsoon-drenched Dimbula. In Montaigne’s words, “It is my throne, and I try to rule here absolutely, reserving this one corner from all society....” Am I aged fifty o’clock or thirteen o’clock? My God, look at the time – and I need to be up at six for work....

By the close of Tom’s Midnight Garden, the clock hands have stretched well beyond thirteen and Hatty, the girl befriended every night by Tom in his visionary garden, is an old woman. Even in children’s books, the pages of time must finally turn and The End be greeted with a bereft but satisfied sigh:

A village clock struck across the darkened countryside, and Tom thought of Time: how he had been sure of mastering it, and exchanging his own Time for an Eternity of Hatty’s and so of living pleasurably in the garden for ever. The garden was still there, but meanwhile Hatty’s Time had stolen a march on him, and had turned Hatty herself from his playmate into a grown-up woman.

New Hibernia Review

University of St. Thomas

Editor: Thomas Dillon Redshaw
Managing Editor: James Silas Rogers


Copyright © 2005 The University of St. Thomas.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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New & Selected Poems Paperback
Exemplary Damages — Paperback
Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams: Selected Prose Writings — Paperback

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