On having my books in one room

It felt like a good idea at the time. A way to pass lockdown, of trying to ignore the grief that was already swamping me. Which might be the same thing.

Everyone was doing it. Close family members, their instagram feeds full of it. Books, arranged not by author, but colour. Such a simple idea. And I took to it with gusto.

The whites and the off-whites all in a row at the bottom of the shelf (a long line of Carcanets, I seem to remember), bleeding invisibly into the former-whites, the creams, the yellows, the apricots, oranges, reds (more than I imagined), violets, indigos, navy, pale and turquoise blues, before we got to the greens (more of them, too), browns (ditto), blacks and silvers.

A picture. It took me the best part of a morning. And that was the last time I looked at my books until we moved last autumn. Specific poets, yes, for particular poems, and, yes, just to remember them. Some of them friends (they know who they are). Some because they had died (Kaplinski, Kennelly). But as a library which I perused and savoured and dwelt among, no.

It was, as I say, a picture. But it also shut me out. I briefly enjoyed the connections between poets who had never sat alongside each other before, wondering what on earth some of them had in common, as you sometimes find at a well-programmed reading. But that didn’t last long. The Carcanets seemed happy in each other’s company. But no one else seemed to be having a good time.

Now we are all in Plymouth, enjoying the endless wind and rain even though it is March and should be spring. One of the advantages of moving is that all of your books get clumped together and sent to the same room on arrival in the new house. I had forgotten about the overflows in Exeter. The anthologies. The ones that couldn’t fit anywhere else. The new-since-lockdown collections, which I got rid of a lot of novels to make space for (and now kind of regret). We are all here, in the same room, for the first time, since, oh, moving to Exeter, maybe. Tony Blair was not yet prime minister, Princess Diana was still alive, and there was no internet to speak of.

At a rough guess, the collection has at least trebeled since then. I am happy to be with them. Reunited, you could say. I did not realise I had so much Mark Halliday or Hubert Moore or Jackie Wills. I spend time with them now, enjoying who sits next to who alphbetically, as in the old days, before Instagram, the names a kind of incantation: Bo Carpelan, Peter Carpenter, Raymond Carver, Julia Casterton, Blaise Cendras, Danielle Chapman, Linda Chase. It’s a good team. I think they are happier now, too. It is still raining. But here we all are, together.