ABSTRACT
Although I have read poetry almost every day of my adult life, I still nd, when I buy a new collection by a contemporary writer, I ip through it and read all the short poems rst. I don’t want to get involved in something that goes over a page or two, or three; at least not yet. ‘Later’, I nd myself saying to that four-pager. ‘I’ll read you later’. And I do. But rst I read all the short ones, often ipping the pages from back to front, despite the knowledge that the poet has designed his book – not just each individual poem, but the order of them – for a purpose. Later I’ll read every poem, long and short, and in the right order, aware that a poem on, say, page 23, may well have information, factual or imaginative or stylistic, that may help my reading of the poem on page 24 – and other later pages as well. And that I will have missed these connections on my rst reading.
