BOOKMARKS: ART TROUVÉE

Occasionally there is added value

in purchasing a previously owned

aka second hand book online – like today,

for example, when I opened the packet

and withdrew a used copy of the Penguin

Poetry Library’s edition

of A. E. Housman’s Collected Poems,

with an introduction by John Sparrow,

Warden of All Souls College, Oxford,

and found a number of improvised bookmarks

between some of the pages: a sliver

of cardboard cut with scissors from a box

of muesli or granola, and placed between

‘When I was one-and-twenty’… and  ‘There pass

the careless people…’; another piece

of cardboard from the same box, this time marking

‘Is my team ploughing That I was used to drive,

And hear the harness jingle, When I was

a man alive…’; between ‘Into my heart

an air that kills…’ and ‘In my own shire

if I was sad…’ copies of John Keats’

Sleep and Poetry, Wilfred Owen’s

Exposure, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Say Not

The Struggle Naught Availeth cut out neatly

from the Daily Telegraph; lastly, between

‘Bring in this timeless grave to throw No

cypress sombre on the snow…’ and ‘Here,

the hangman stops his cart…’, a roughly torn

ad from the Stourbridge & West Midlands Express,

for a newly opened hotel and spa

in the hamlet of Fockbury, Housman’s

birthplace, purporting an unrivalled view

of Shropshire, and, quoting the famous poet,

‘those blue remembered hills’.

 

A.E. Housman's 'Collected Poems'Arthur Hugh CloughDaily TelegraphFockburyJohn SparrowKeatsStourbridge & West Midland ExpressWilfred Owen