Shelf Life

Encountering Poetry Pt.3

This post is the last part of a short series I have been sharing here, charting some of my early experiences with English literature and the mark that they have left on me ever since - drawing a simple reflection from each encounter. You can read Pt.1 here and Pt.2 here.

Northern Ireland shopping centres in the 1980s and 1990s were a cultural experience, a kind of frontier between rising international brands and the last vestiges of independent market traders. In all but the most salubrious settings one could find high street names and side street hustles living side by side, albeit uncomfortably. Ards Shopping Centre was one such place, with its more polished shops held in one wing and its Village Hall in another. Shoppers could pick up high profile sports brands in one section of the complex, purchase a Fender Stratocaster in another, and have their vacuum cleaner repaired by an aproned handyman in yet another. A cultural experience indeed.

Ards Shopping Centre became a regular haunt for me in my teenage years, chiefly owing to my Mum working at the ‘Provisions’ counter in Stewarts Supermarket. We were a one car family, which meant my Dad had to drop my Mum off and pick her up three nights of the working week. The golden hour for me was 8pm to 9pm when my brother and I were allowed to roam freely through ‘the mall’ as we called it, while waiting for the supermarket to close. Hours were spent (and a savings pot of 10 pence pieces were spent) trying to fish soft toys from a glass case via a robotic arm that seemed to have suffered the mechanical equivalent of nerve damage. The toys were utterly worthless but the chance of winning one was unaccountably electrifying.

With my growing interest in poetry, one shop became more important than all others for me and I began to visit it on each of the three ‘lift home’ nights. Eason’s sat squarely at the bottom corner of the mall, a cavernous expanse housing a seemingly endless strip of magazines to cover every conceivable interest, a formidable range of stationery and business supplies, and an array of books that seems unthinkable in terms of modern stock control.

This range of books included a breathtaking amount of poetry (and specifically Irish poetry) for a Protestant market town, and even boasted a full range of the works of James Joyce. It was here that I began to encounter something of the breadth of literature that I simply knew nothing about. Beyond Seamus Heaney, none of the poets were known to me in any way deeply, and hour after strip-lit hour was spent pouring over collections, leafing through anthologies, and occasionally purchasing what felt like exotic texts. It was here, standing in the yellowing artificial light of a crass 1990s consumerist Mecca that the strange words of Paul Durcan wrapped themselves around my consciousness for the first time, that the corvid brutality of Ted Hughes’ verse shocked my sensibility, where the lyrical disarmament of Patrick Kavanagh’s writing sauntered into the soundscape for me.

The encounters with this poetry was as dizzying as the Faber and Faber jacket designs, with their kaleidoscopic repetitions of the letters ‘ff’ set obsessively against lurid colour schemes. Slowly but surely, via pocket money and teenage pay earned helping to clean at the coal yard, I built a library of books. I had little idea of what many of them were articulating but, as with The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, the atomic weight of the words was not lost on me. The poetry may not have been accessible but its reality was tangible, and for some reason that mattered to me a lot.

Looking back now, the sheer incongruity of reading poetry in a supermarket comes home with fresh reality. For all of our immediate availability and online access to supply chains, it is hard not to feel that something has been lost since those days. Eason’s could not have been turning a profit on Irish poetry in Ards Shopping Centre but somewhere, by someone, a decision had been made that this stock should be carried. With all of its limitations, with all of the garishness of that era, such shelf life served as a kind of seat of consciousness within a community, as a literary possibility among the smorgasbord of other commercial activities that a shopping centre could house.

Even with the revival of shopping centres in recent years, and the proliferation of Waterstones shops that now grace our retail experience, the Eason’s era feels forever lost. The regress of big spaces with multiple items for sale means that the possibility of stumbling on literature, of happening upon unknown books and authors is greatly reduced. Without the incidental availability of such literature in an unlikely location my educational possibilities would have been more limited than they were, and my exposure to the brave new world of literature would have been greatly reduced.

Independent booksellers are skilled at placing themselves in unexpected places in towns and cities and it can only be hoped that similarly uninitiated teenagers will find themselves browsing books that no algorithm would ever push in their direction - but the shopping mall arts scene that opened my mind in so many ways is forever gone. All things retail have a shelf life, and no business model would allow for such a store to operate in our current environment. I was blessed and changed by the gravitational centre that Eason’s served as in my culturally impoverished background, and for the new things that met me on those shelves. The path to studying literature at university and loving literature across my entire adult life owes much to the tacky and aesthetically lobotomised world of 1990s commercialism, and I feel both gratitude for what was and a certain degree of lament for what will never be again.