'A Bookshop Idyll'

 There was a time, a long time ago, when an in-depth survey of a good bookshop's poetry shelves seemed to serve as an index of all that was worthwhile. Everything that was there must be good, or else they wouldn't be there. The contemporary poets among them must be the current inheritors of the great traditions and as important as Keats, Chaucer and all those poets we'd be given to read at school.

On a trip to Cambridge, I stood before the comprehensive shelves of the Heffers poetry section, awestruck. A few years later I was to be first thrilled but soon disabused of any such notion when they ordered two copies of my first self-produced booklet, Museum (1990), and realized that they must simply order everything with an ISBN.

I was reminded of how impressionable I was then when a student-aged relation of a friend was reported as asking, 'what? you mean he's got books in Waterstones?' vis a vis somebody else, not me, as if that conferred immortality or made you a bit like T.S. Eliot.

One advantage, or at least result, of the perspectives gained from the passing of years is the realization that not everything that is made so readily available is made so because it's important. Shops are there to sell things for their benefit, not as a High Street version of the Bodliean from which you can buy things. Poetry sections are not what they were and you can pick up all manner of undemanding but lucrative fodder but not the poems of Fulke Greville. Heffers in Cambridge might well still stock some esoteric titles but that will be because they are on the reading lists of university courses.

Now, visiting bookshops much less often, I am interested to see what the poetry section has but not as an indicator of what's serious, big and necessary. It's the other way round now. I check to see which titles by Larkin, Auden, maybe Elizabeth Bishop and such they have, to see how well the shop measures up to my expectations, not me up to theirs.