Building a Poetry Shelf for Different Moods

Why Poetry Suits a Mood Better Than a Novel

A novel asks a great deal of you: a fortnight, a comfy chair and the willingness to remember who everyone is and why they've fallen out. A poem asks for four minutes and a kettle. That is the quiet genius of keeping a poetry shelf. It is the most responsive part of a reading life — the part that can be consulted the way you'd consult a friend, briefly and without ceremony.

On a grey Tuesday in February you probably don't want a plot. You want a single page that knows how you feel and then moves you a step sideways. The trick is to stop treating poetry as one shelf and start treating it as several small ones, gathered by mood rather than by author.

Three Moods, Three Small Stacks

Most days ask for one of three things: comfort, curiosity or calm. Build a loose stack for each — ten or fifteen slim volumes apiece, no more — and you have a system that works without an index, a reading list or any willpower at all.

• Comfort for the days when you need warmth, wit and a voice that says I know.
• Curiosity for the days when you want to be unsettled, shown a different street or a different century.
• Calm for the days when your shoulders are up around your ears and the news has been loud.

Keep the stacks physically separate if you can — three short shelves, or three sections of one shelf, or a stack on the bedside table and another by the window. The point is that your hand should be able to find the right one in the dark.

Comfort: Poems That Put the Kettle On

Comfort poetry is often dismissed as soft, which is unfair. It is doing hard work: it steadies. Look for warmth, metrical assurance and a bit of dry humour. Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis earns its place permanently, as does Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, which is funny, sly and quietly furious by turns. Seamus Heaney's early poems — Digging, Follower — have the solidity of a good kitchen table.

Add a little Larkin for honesty, a Mary Oliver for encouragement, and one anthology of well-known verse you can read without thinking too hard. This is the stack for illness, long Sundays, difficult letters through the door and the week after a funeral.

Curiosity: Poems That Ask a Question

The curiosity stack is for the days you want the floor to tilt. It should be stranger than the comfort stack: prose poems, translations, dialect, poems that argue with themselves. Emily Dickinson, all dashes and slantwise certainty, belongs here. So does Alice Oswald's Dart, which follows a river and its voices for forty miles, and John Agard, whose performances remind you that a poem is something a body can do.

Include a translation or two — Bashō, Rilke, a bilingual edition so you can hear the shape of the original. Include something local: a pamphlet from a small press, a poet who read in the upstairs room of a pub near you last Thursday. Curiosity is best fed by work that hasn't been smoothed flat by decades of quotation.

Calm: Poems That Slow the Breath

Calm is not the same as bland. The best poems for settling the nervous system are often precise and attentive rather than gentle: haiku, short lyrics about weather, poems that notice one thing properly and then stop. Larkin's Cut Grass and Trees do this in a handful of lines. So do the short poems of John Clare, who looked at a hedgerow harder than almost anyone.

Keep a haiku anthology on this stack for the nights when you cannot manage a whole page. Two or three lines is a legitimate reading session. Add a slim volume of poems about walking, rivers or birds, and one long, slow piece you can return to across a fortnight, reading four lines before sleep.

Choosing on the Day

A poetry shelf is only useful if you actually use it, so keep the choosing simple.

• Ask your body first. Tight chest and short breath — calm. Restless and bored — curiosity. Hollowed out and tired — comfort.
• Read three poems, then stop. Poetry is concentrated. Three is a proper sitting, and stopping while you still want more keeps the habit alive.
• Read one aloud. Even quietly, in the kitchen. Rhythm is half the meaning, and your own voice tells you whether the poem is working on you.
• Mark nothing, or mark lightly in pencil. A pencil tick beside a poem you'll want again is better than a system you'll never maintain.
• Move books between stacks. A poem that comforts you in spring may be a curiosity by autumn. The shelf should shuffle itself over a year or two.

And when a stack starts to feel stale, go and browse. Britain is unusually well supplied with independent bookshops, and most of them keep a poetry section that rewards lingering: odd pamphlets, second-hand editions with someone else's pencil in the margins, a bookseller who will press a thin volume into your hand and say, "try this one, it's short." Charity shops and village book sales are just as useful, and poetry readings in church halls and back rooms remain one of the cheapest good evenings out in the country.

Build the three stacks gradually. Buy one slim volume a month, borrow another, and let a fourth arrive as a gift. Within a year you'll have a shelf that can answer almost any mood — which is, in the end, what a good library at home is for.