The University Library

I’m at Uni! As of Jan 1^st my institute joined the University of Cambridge. I had an honorary contract with them before, so not much has changed, but it made me swagger a bit as I walked across town to the University Library.

 The library is a monstrous Stalinist edifice, a bit like the old Bankside power station (now the Tate Modern). And the method of obtaining books is similarly 1930s. A very few are put out on shelves for us proles to stroll among, but not organized in any way that makes them easy to browse — generally they are shelved according to (I shit you not) height. In order to find a particular book you need to trace the full ~10 digit reference number. Most of the poetry books I actually want to read are even harder to get – they need to be requested from the stacks, and most of them I’m not allowed to borrow. Instead I need to sit and read them in the West Room, then hand them back.

 Fortunately poetry books are short, so today for the first time I went through this procedure with Sophie Hannah’s Pessimism for Beginners. I’ve often heard her praised as funny and incisive, and she’s a woman of about my own age who writes mostly formalist poetry, so I was keen to try it. And on the whole I liked it – it was technically brilliant, almost never deviating from true rhyme (which is tricky in English), and often funny and true. But I came away a bit disappointed at how one-note it seemed, since almost all of the poems were about her crap relationships with men. I’ll definitely read more of hers when I can spare an hour in the reading room, but I’m hoping they will be more varied in subject matter.

 Wendy Cope has a lot of poems about bad relationships too. I can’t decide whether this is good, because the funny formalist female poets are leaving a large niche for me to inhabit, or bad because relationship failure is the only subject matter which will gain women an audience. I don’t want to have to dump my husband just to get material.