It is technically a partial retirement project, not a lockdown project, but since they have arrived together, the distinction is blurred.
In other people's houses, rather than the new cushion covers or three piece suite, it's the book shelves and record collection I'm most interested in. In mine, there are four bookcases in this back room housing the poetry books. There is no point reading any further if you don't want to know about them. The pictures celebrate a sorting out of one of them but this is a guided tour of all of them.
The most important, in many ways, has a top shelf of biographies from Wyatt to Hughes, next is the Thom Gunn shelf, then one with Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien and Rosemary Tonks, then the Philip Larkin shelf and the bottom is devoted to Shakespeare biography.
The little structure behind me is mainly non-C20th, thus Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Fulke Greville, Romantics, Victorians but I can now see that further re-organisation would not have Edward Thomas and Robert Graves there, never mind Tom Leonard.
In the far corner are anthologies, essays (Clive James, Heaney, etc) and, for some reason, the complete novels of Richard Yates. Dorothy Parker is over there with Raymond Carver's stories and Dr. Johnson. To think that I ever imagined myself a librarian looks like a disaster averted so many decades later but I know where they are is the main thing.
So, it was the three shelves of the nice, glass-fronted cabinet that I have so far sorted out the top two shelves of. It was roughly in chronological order but largely 'contemporary' but with Classical in the bottom right corner. The problem with it was that they are double parked and the big names that I'm more likely to want were at the back. Eventually, one tires of taking out handfuls of the front layer to find a Heaney volume from behind.
So the process so far has matched up such things as a separated Duhig with its kin. All the Muldoons are now together and while it is no disgrace to be on the second layer - because I bought your book and read it if you're there- you need to be considered a big star to have your books visible on the top layer. Thus, the pictures show the left-hand side with the top shelf going Copus, Motion, Lumsden, Mooney, Duffy, Armitage, Burnside, Paterson and the middle shelf going Donaghy, Heaney, Longley, Harrison, Dunn. Those familiar with Anthony Thwaite's litany poem will already be thinking of it and the mind-boggling number of fine poets there have been in recent decades. The right-hand side goes Muldoon, Mahon, Harsent, Kleinzahler with MacCaig, Hughes and Plath below.The bottom shelf will be re-ordered over the next few days with Auden and MacNeice rightfully elbowing their way to attention. The much-admired Donald Davie's position will be interesting, as will Betjeman's, and Mina Loy's, but the tidy, scholarly Loeb editions of Ovid will retain bottom right with Catullus, Daisy Dunn and such sacred texts.
One strategy involved in this process is excused by the expediency of needing to know where to look for the books behind without removing too many of the front rank. Thus, I employed an apartheid system of putting female poets together, which is not something I wanted to do but two of Lavinia Greenlaw's are waiting to be filed there. Luckily, Elizabeth Bishop is not one of them, because she wouldn't appear in women-only anthologies and I entirely take her point. It is about the words and not about the gender but if I want a recent female poet, she's likely to be somewhere behind Derek Mahon.
I am, of course, only taking part in the new, lockdown sport of the Battle of the Bookshelves as seen whenever anybody is interviewed on the telly. Well, I'm not bad at it but, beyond grandstanding, the benefits are more likely to be looking at some of them more often, possibly moving Edward Thomas into a more appropriate place and possibly a feeling that I have put my lands in better order. On the other hand, I can't see me making use of the Dewey cataloguing index any time soon.
