A week before my fortieth birthday—feeling more than a little late for the party—and in order to dredge what remains of my wellbeing through this ceaseless pandemic dirge—I have determined to start a blog.
So much of how I love to work is social. In these times where orchestras have stopped, theatres have closed, and classrooms have become humourless, faceless voids on Blackboard in which I talk largely to myself, this blog is written in effort to capture once more some conversation and contributions on the topics of poetry and music.
The first thing to do is find old friends, and I have spent the last two long, locked-down evenings recording and archiving certain of my books—at least the ones I can reach at home (I feel a pang of pity for those incarcerated in my lonely university office then wonder how normal it is to feel this way about books. . .) and so far, I have finished the living-room shelves, which contain mostly poetry collections.
In a world in which digital abstraction has become only more emphasised over almost a year of ‘Teams’, ‘zoom’ and pandemic, it has been easy to forget these old friends. I pick up a hardcover Zukofsky from the 1960s with its gilded swirls embossed onto its creamy dustjacket like a flocked dressing gown. I remember paying thirty pounds for it in Hay-on-Wye—when the festival was real and not zoom call—and thinking that a fortune for a book at the time. It still is. This is what makes it valuable.
I find a selection of love poems by Carol Ann Duffy, which has on a mossy, velvety purple dressing gown even more ostentatious than the Zukofsky—on the title page, a forgotten-about, soppy note to my husband before he was my husband and an edgy passport photo of me taken over fifteen years ago.
Then, a Faber first edition of Louis MacNeice, left behind by a retired colleague. Its sun-faded edges are sand-stony against the sage-leaf jacket, and it is titled in a serious typeface just “POEMS”– chiselled with the exact austerity of 1935. Yes, 1935—the publication information on the front matter is even in roman numerals. Handwritten on the title page, in soft, flowing fountain cursive, is “Queenie Iredale, 1935”. She was a writer too and wrote a book on Thomas Traherne in the same year. I cannot resist adding my own inscription and date below it with a Pilot Hi-Techpoint 0.7 nib, hoping that she would not mind.
Laid out in stacks on the dining table, I see new connections linking these books like distant, new constellations. I can see thematic and comparative possibilities between Philip Gross’ Deep Field and Lisa Linn Kanae’s Sista Tongue. These books remind me of who I am at a time where I was beginning to forget.
And so, some of this blog will also reflect on and ‘think aloud’ about what I have read and will read again–why they’re important, and what new things I find along the way. Sometimes those thoughts might gravitate to my current research, but if it does, I promise to try not to be a bore, even if my thing right now is prosody in mid-nineteenth-century poetry. And sometimes, I might just want to tell everyone why I am obsessed with Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead or Koh-I-Noor 2B pencils.
Lisa Mansell 
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