A discussion about the merits of reading a physical book rather than a digital copy led to considerations about the way that books – like songs – are associated with a particular moment in time in memory. There’s some truth to this. I often recall the first copy of a selection of Thomas Hardy’s poetry fondly.
It must have been the summer of 1987. It was a bright summer’s day. One of those days that – in memory – capture the sunlight and glorious happiness of being a teenager. U2’s The Joshua Tree was the album of the moment. I was in a small bookshop across from Islington Green and was captivated by the cover of a selection of Hardy’s poems: a woman and child among flowers and grasses at the edge of what looks like a wild cornfield. Whenever I think about this book – and I do from time to time, especially when I’m up in the attic and looking at the piles of books there – it evokes intensely happy memories.
Back then in 1987, I didn’t realise how influential Hardy would turn out to be (which was only enhanced a few years later after I watched Alan Bennett’s Poetry in Motion series of television lectures [and even bought the accompaying book], which additionally opened up to me poets like Auden, MacNeice and – especially – Larkin). I think I first developed a sardonic, bitter humour from Hardy that I’ve sought to shake off ever since.
I don’t have the book any more: lost in a move at some point many years ago. Instead I have a massive volume of Hardy’s complete poems, bought in the early 1990s from a university bookshop on a grey, rainy day.
UPDATE: The artwork on the front cover is a detail from Picking Poppies in Flower-Fringed Fields by the painter Edward Wilkins Waite. Waite was a painter of landscapes from the 1870s to 1920s. There’s almost no trace of the painting online and the best reproduction (below) lacks the clarity of the image on the book cover – so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an imitation or preparatory sketch.
