Last month Sarah Salway , poet and writer and bringer together of poets and writers, asked me to write something for the Poetry Trail she created for the inaugural Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival.
Sarah paired nineteen local poets with nineteen shops in the old part of the town, giving me the Oxfam Bookshop because I volunteer there for an afternoon each week. It's fertile soil for a poet, with a wonderful collection of customers, and an incredibly idiosyncratic mix of books.
(Show me a town's charity bookshop and I'll show you its soul. It may not be what you expect.)
I didn't know what I'd write - character sketches don't come easy to me; wit neither. On my next shift I pulled The Wild Garden at random off the Old and Interesting shelf behind the till purely because I liked the colour of its cover. I opened it and the inscription on the fly leaf gave me a little shiver - here was a treasure shared between friends more than a hundred years ago.
The title page sounded a little dry, though:
But the author's preface was pure joy, and my poem was begun.
As ever, the poem was a surprise to me - I never know what's in my head until it appears on the page. I wrote most of it quite quickly over the following week, and edited it among the spring wild flowers of Cornwall:
A week later I came home to see my poem in the window of the Oxfam Bookshop, surrounded by flowers, books about gardens and books of poetry, and felt deeply honoured. I saw people all over the place peering into shop windows at poems of all kinds, and it made me very happy - even happier when I sold two poetry books out of our window in my first hour back in the shop.
