I daresay I’ve paraphrased Orwell thus, or something similar, before: all poets are unique, but some are more unique than others. Lydia Harris certainly falls into this category, thanks to her instantly recognisable combination of subject-matter, style and purity of diction. Fairly hot on the heels of her first collection, 2022’s Objects for Private Devotion (Pindrop Press) comes her latest, Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World, published by Blue Diode Press and available to buy here. The space of only two years between the collections has not, however, led to a dilution of quality; far from it, because the book fully illustrates Harris’s gifts.
Lydia moved from York to Westray, the sixth largest of the 70 or so Orkneys, a decade ago, and much of her poetry investigates the archipelago’s people (women especially), history, religion, flora, fauna and much else .
Henrietta’s Library is an assortment of 68 concise, closely-linked poems concerning the library of an imagined predecessor in Trenaby, a settlement on Westray. The poems talk to and echo each other in a manner reminiscent of Gillian Allnutt by way of Borges.
Lydia has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.
*
This library of forgetting and rememberingOf the treatises, one is much consumed with mould,
she wears fine linen gloves to smooth the folds,
mixes paste from wheaten flour to glue the Bible’s skin,
wraps the psalter in a velvet gown to stay salt air from seeping in.
The Hours of Boniface perch on her wrist, take flight,
return to her palm. She lectures the mice.
Shelves creak as if they were still at sea.
She binds into each volume a past too big to carry.
Sews gathering into the spine of the land,
the island a volume which rests on her hand.
She appeases the dead, inks a plough in a margin,
three crows and a vine curling to heaven.
*
Let’s start with the form. Here we have rhymed couplets; irregular in length and syllable-count, both within and between them. It’s an attractive form, not just because of its work on the ear, but visually also. That there are only six couplets means, as always with short poems, that every word really does have to count by playing its part, on its own terms and as a contribution towards the whole. End-rhyme is used sparingly in the collection as a whole – only three other poems, including an excellent villanelle )’Henrietta’s Library of the Spaces-between’) – consistently contain it, but many of the poems use occasional end-rhyme and plenty of internal rhyme without it ever seeming obtrusive or forced.
The poem presents puzzles to the reader from the outset. Does that ‘with’ mean the treatise in question is upon the subject of mould, or, as it more likely appears, is it just a synonym for ‘by’? And why is there no conjunction between the two lines, either through a semi-colon, colon or dash after the first line or a ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ at the start of the second line; because surely the wearing of the gloves is a consequence of the pages being mouldy? Or is it? As it stands, it looks and sounds ungrammatical, but does that matter? The impact on the reader’s understanding is, perhaps, one of rendering the ‘action’ pleasingly synchronous and consequently timeless. What century is the poem set in?
The flow into the second couplet provides no answer to that question, because wheat paste has been used for millennia to bind books, and here it’s being used, by Henrietta we presume, to repair ‘the Bible’s skin’, most probably vellum. The eye-rhyme between ‘paste’ and ‘psalter’ helps to bind the lines. The poem’s fourth line, like the whole, rings beautifully on the ear, helped by that delightfully archaic ‘stay’ and the sequence of ‘s’ sounds. The care with which Henrietta undertakes her work is amply shown but not pointed out.
The third couplet is more puzzling still. One might presume that the ‘Hours of Boniface’ is a canonical liturgy, written by the Devon-born Benedictine saint of that name, but how the daily offices can ‘perch on her wrist, take flight’ and ‘return to her palm’ is a mystery: it is as if they have merrily metamorphosed into a butterfly. The magical realism is compounded by the couplet’s extraordinary second sentence, presented so simply that the reader can do no more than accept it at face value; the word ‘mice’ echoing the last syllable of the saint’s name.
The poem’s vista is extended beyond the confines of the library within the fourth couplet. Again without explicitly telling the reader so, that ‘still’ somehow implies that the shelves are made from wood salvaged from a ship. The trust that the poet has in the reader here, and throughout the poem and the collection as a whole, is a lesson in itself. The couplet’s second line plays more outwardly with the concept of time; it’s a statement-making line which speaks eloquently for itself, yet its profundity does not overload the poem.
In the fifth couplet, a knowledge of sewing is helpful in order to intuit the meaning fully. Wiki gives the following:
Gatheringturns the edge of a piece of fabric into a bunch of small folds that are held together by a thread close to the edge. Gathering makes the fabric shorter where it isstitched. The whole of the fabric flares out into irregular, rolling folds beyond the gathered stitching.
Here, that meaning makes Henrietta the binder of the world around her: the image of Westray as ‘a volume which rests on her hand’ is a delight. The syntax is once more slightly askew, in that one would expect a comma at the end of the preceding couplet and a lower-case ‘s’
at the start of ‘Sews’; nonetheless, it reads and sounds perfectly compatible with the rest of the poem and its spirit.
The poem might well have ended there. Harris, though, is canny enough to move the poem, in one more couplet, to another angle: the book-restorer turns illustrator, and in so doing, we are told, ‘appeases the dead’. What is meant by this? Presumably, it is in keeping with the tradition of Dark Ages and medieval manuscript illustrators who added to, and annotated, the works of their forebears. The couplet, like its two immediate predecessors, is very weighty in terms of significance, but the simple, limpid lightness and sureness of the language ensures that the poem can be received as if the fantastical content is entirely straightforward. The poet’s sleight of hand in accomplishing that achievement cannot be underestimated.
So, back to the start, what of the title? It nods, for me, to Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though I doubt that was intended. The act of ‘remembering’, of summoning and respecting the ghosts of the past, suffuses the poem. Maybe the ‘forgetting’ refers to the mouldy decay into which the treatise has been left, before Henrietta’s work provides the ‘remembering’. It’s a title which cross-refers to plenty of others in the collection: ‘This library of forgetting and remembering’ is a library within a larger library. Underlying the poem, and the collection, is a deep love and reverence for books as sources of knowledge and as articles in themselves. In these times of increasing digitisation, it serves us all well to be reminded of those values.
