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Before the pandemic, when coincidences still happened, I was haunted by the poet Gavin Ewart. Perhaps haunting is the wrong word. Ewart’s poetry isn’t especially haunting, at least not in the way critics tend to use that word. The poems rarely echo around in the mind long after reading, though they are memorable, and can be unsettling, especially in the directness with which Ewart writes about sex and death. Ewart was too prolific, too outrageous, too dry, too formally ingenious to be ghostly. Spectres don’t write light verse.
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This was a more literal kind of haunting. Without knowing it, I was buying up part of his personal library. One of the second-hand bookshops in Bloomsbury that I would trapse around on my lunch breaks was stocked with books previously owned by Ewart, and, slowly but surely, I began transferring them back home. It was only after the fourth or fifth book with the same modest signature placed carefully at the top and centre of one of the opening pages that I realised what was going on. There it was, the same name, again and again. Gavin Ewart. Gavin Ewart. Gavin Ewart.
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It wasn’t just books. The moment the first lockdown was announced, we moved to Putney in southwest London to help shield my girlfriend’s mother. Ewart lived in Putney most of his adult life and the riverside suburb often appears in his poem, sometimes satirically, and sometimes, in typical Ewart-esque fashion, defying all boundaries between seriousness and satire. In ‘The Ruined Cemetery on Barnes Common’ the vandals ‘prising the letters / from inscriptions on the tombstones’ are imagined to be the same people turning up for ‘sexual dalliance / in uncomfortable positions’. In the resulting ‘moral for the moral’ (with Ewart, it is never clear whether we or he are included in that number), the language rises suddenly and disarmingly into poetry out of the previous chatty preamble. It is a good motto, stylistically – and morally – for what Ewart is up to in the rest of his oeuvre:
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all that keeps on keeping on is
change, decay, and sex and mischief
and the blackberries’ bright shining.
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Most mornings, during our one permitted outdoor activity, I took the dog down to that cemetery, or else we would go down to the boathouses where the Thames was lined with cyclists, joggers, rowers and benches. At some point during those months, a new bench appeared where the road along the river ends and the tow path to Hammersmith begins. The bench is for Ewart and his wife Margo. It has a poem on it, one of Ewart’s more anthologised ones. On the page, it is worth a giggle. As a memorial, it’s heartbreaking:
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The Lover Writes a One Word Poem
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You
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Ewart isn’t, or wasn’t, an unknown or neglected poet. Although he published nothing between his first collection in 1939 and Londoners in 1964, for the rest of his life he was incredibly prolific, so much so that he was able to quit his job in advertising. His name was mentioned as a potential laureate in 1984. He was also a regular contributor to this magazine: one of his later columns complains that contemporary poetry was overwhelmingly po-faced. Kenilworth Court, one of the great red mansion blocks by the river in Putney, has a blue plaque in Ewart’s name, though it is a few floors high and you have to crane your neck to see it.
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For all that, I doubt I would ever have read Ewart properly if it weren’t for the haunting. Like many poets of his generation, Ewart exists in the dark space of the post-war period: their readers, critics and contemporaries are beginning to leave the stage, but academic interest hasn’t swung back round. It is the space in which second-hand bookshops come into their own: the stock usually arrives because someone has died. Ewart himself died in 1995 after a boozy lunch with a journalist from the Financial Times. Margo only passed away more recently: hence the books. Second-hand bookshops are ghoulish, then, but they are also a kind of heaven: where poets go next. With any luck, most of us will end up there. For many writers, it is also where they start, roaming shelves, trying to find ‘their’ authors, or just something cheap to read.
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The existence of second-hand trade poses certain problems for professional critics. As far as ‘the discourse’ is concerned, used books are an illicit commodity: the writer or commentator wants to know what people are reading, so that they can explain why they are wrong (or right). But there is no way of knowing what is selling second-hand. We don’t know who is reading these books either, though you can imagine the types – students, bums, poets. The kind of scrooge who will bristle at paying £10 for the latest prize-winning collection and walk out of a second-hand shop with twice that amount in obscure writers from the seventies.
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Why would someone rather hunt around in a second-hand shop than a new one? Is it just nostalgia? Fear of the present? If Instagram is anything to go by, what people want from a second-hand shop is a quirky sub-Tolkien hovel full of comfy moth-eaten armchairs and overflowing bookcases. The aesthetic is everything. But then, second-hand shops simply are more ‘homely’ than other shops, because they are less commercial. The second-hand shop hasn’t decided in advance what it wants you to read. It knows that you want to buy something, but it wants you to find that thing for yourself. Second-hand shops, junk shops, car boot sales: what all these spaces have in common is they offer all the joy of shopping (the anticipation, the surprise, the exercise for the roving magpie eye) alongside a feeling that you have somehow sidestepped consumerism. The other thing these spaces have in common is that they are, literally, spaces. That moment of physical encounter is increasingly hard to come by, but as Jason Guriel writes in On Browsing (2022), it is also the way in which we learn to form our own judgements and our own attachments. The internet promises to put you in direct proximity to your authentic desires – in the context of poetry, there is a constant churn of chatter about books on social media and it is usually possible to find more than a couple of examples of poems by a poet somewhere online – but none of this helps you get to know much about them. In fact, the opposite. A single poem here or there, chosen by someone who will inevitably have their own tastes and preferences, is no replacement for flicking through a book.
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When I was a teenager, I used to spend a lot of time on music review sites like Robert Christgau and Pitchfork. This was before streaming services. There was no record shop in my town and even if I could get to the local HMV, it was a long time since music shops had little booths where you could listen to anything. If you wanted to try something before buying it, you would have to risk the world of illegal downloads or hope someone had uploaded a version to YouTube. The mediated opinions of other people took on, in that context, an inordinate weight. One of the underdiscussed functions of the internet is the way in which it puts us constantly at the prey of other people’s opinions. A hastily typed review on Goodreads genuinely has the potential to turn a reader off, say, Middlemarch (over 150,000 readers, average 4/5). It is why writers hate critics. The connections we make with books in bookshops are more personal if only because there is no one else whispering in your ear.
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Then again, even here, some element of wishful thinking is involved. Second-handers aren’t so much checking out of consumer society as poking around in its entrails. Anyone who rummages around in junk shops and markets knows the feeling: at any moment, you might find something special, something overlooked, something placed there just for you. But the stock of a second-hand bookshop is not an infinite library – it’s a record of what has been read already. Sometimes I worry that by spending so much time with my nose in old books I am not only accepting the reading habits of the twentieth century, with all the exclusions that implies (white, male, safe…), but hankering after them. None of this is the fault of the books themselves. The second-hand trade might be a kind of selective memory, but at least it remembers. Perhaps they are even more important now, when the other ways in which cultures form their medium-term memory have all but disappeared.
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In theory, writers like Ewart will have their critical renaissance: there will be PhDs, republications, and rediscoveries. (In Ewart’s case, they will have to grapple with the manner in which he went out of his way to be offensive, even by the standards of his contemporaries). In reality, the humanities are being hounded out of universities, or else funnelled into narrow definitions of relevance, while literary criticism has all but disappeared from newspapers and magazines. One writer I spoke to recently had worked out that he was the only one of his peers – bright young things in the nineties – who had managed to make a living outside academia.
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The final charge that might be levelled at the second-hand trade is that it is a distraction from the living, breathing authors who need us to buy their books. Writers, after all, have a hard enough time shifting copies as it is. Isn’t there something perverse about only taking an interest in a poet after they have left the stage? On the one hand, this is a bad argument in general: people who buy second-hand books are probably quite likely the same people who are buying new ones and the increasing moral weight of ‘the contemporary’ in literary culture hasn’t done much to help living authors, whose incomes are in a steep decline. If anything, the idea that we should be most concerned with supporting new writers is well-suited to a publishing model that is devoted to churning out debuts by writers it neither has to support or pay.
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Worrying about the contemporary is particularly pointless when it comes to poetry, because of poetry’s peculiar relationship with time and money. All poetry, from the moment it is written, is a kind of attempted haunting, a text shorn off from the words around it, made into something memorable and loaded with enough feeling or imagination it might survive a little longer. Poetry collections sitting on the shelves in a dusty old shop might look forlorn but if they are any good they will still have much the same designs on the reader that they ever did. This is the challenge for anyone who wants to write something new. You are, in effect, in competition with everyone who has ever written. That challenge is part of the point. Poetry is a way of talking to the past, but also with it, and you cannot have a conversation with silence. Part of the promise of poetry is precisely the promise of a hand stretched through time, to reader and writer alike, whether an individual hand like Keats’s ‘warm and capable’ one or the anonymous ones of folk songs and epics. Such a thing will necessarily be difficult to commoditise, because the people who want it will always be wandering off in search of old things.

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