What I do when I open a book of poems for the first time

When I was in the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre recently I read an excellent account by Michael Laskey of how he reads poems. He reads quickly at first, to see if anything grabs him, and doesn’t get too hung up on getting everything, as he’ll go over it again. While reading, he says he needs:

‘some rewards along the way, some encouragement: a striking phrase, an exact description that excites instant recognition, a mysteriously powerful image, a flash of wit.’

Quite. Then, weirdly, I came upon a book of his poems on the shelf. This little coincidence made me decide to emulate his example by writing a brief description of what I do when I pick up a book of poems for the first time.

I go straight to the titles page. My eyes flip down the titles and back up, as I’m keen to find something like me. Because poem titles are so small and specific, and there are so many, chances are I will find something that will match with my own experiences or interests.

If I were to find a poem called ‘Being A Toddler in Howth’ or ‘On Having Gone to School in Guildford’, or ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’, I’d turn to it first. I’d read it fairly quickly the first time, as Laskey describes. What I’d be looking for are lines that hit the ear like a depth-charge (the best example of one of these I can think of at the moment is Derek Mahon’s ‘Magi, moonmen, / Powdery prisoners of the old regime, / Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought / And insomnia […]’). I think training my ear on Yeats years ago has given me an incurable weakness for the resonant and plangent.

If I don’t find lines like these, what I’ll look for next is something that strikes me as true. Imagine I found a poem called ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’. Imagine it went something like this:

With the increasing desire to jog

comes increasing pain in the calves

and photos confirm that I look horrifying

when I’m trying to look happy.

I’d be looking at these for social reasons. Knowing them would mean that the next time I was talking about being thirty, instead of saying ‘I find I look horrifying when I look happy’, I could say ‘it’s like Michael Laskey (or whoever) says: ‘photos confirm that I look horrifying / when I’m trying to look happy’. It’s become ratified by publication, it connects you and your interlocuter to a wider world, and it makes something depressing into something fun, or at very least something rueful, through the fact that it is communal.

And if I don’t find something I like the sound of, or something I can quote within three or four poems, I put the book down…