Signed Poetry Books- Timothy Steele

 In an astute move in the transfer market, I acquired 19 back copies of About Larkin, the magazine of the Philip Larkin Society, which happily don't seem to include either of the issues I was in, and the booklet, Beatitudes, limited, numbered and signed thus by Timothy Steele.

It's tempting to play graphology when collecting, entirely for their own sake, books signed by poets. In Timothy Steele's case the precision and clarity of the signature are exactly as one might expect from the poems. Thom Gunn's, who was equally adept at formality, is similarly circumspect and one would imagine J.V. Cunningham's to be more so, if anything.

I don't know what happened with Timothy Steele, of whose work there is a bibliography going up to 2018 but whose last collection of poems still appears to be Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006.

But, if only at a glacial pace, the signed poetry books can still be added to when the opportunity arises.