![]() So next weekend I biked into Oxford and bought a copy in Blackwell’s. ![]() I wanted to borrow it, but I couldn’t Mr Way was still reading it. “It’s just come out.” (This would have been the winter of 1969.) “It’s his second book.” ![]() Noticed because I wasn’t sure how you pronounced “Seamus”, because the title was so alluring, and because the lettering on the jacket was very beautiful. One day, standing by his desk to return whatever it was I’d borrowed that week, I noticed at his elbow a copy of Door into the Dark by someone I’d never heard of before – Seamus Heaney. My parents were bemused, but Mr Way was pleased and began lending me books of his own: Wordsworth, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Larkin. Within a few weeks my old life seemed to have fallen away (though not the subjects it contained), and all I wanted to do was to write and read poems. Then I began doing English A-level, and was taught for the first time by Peter Way, who walked straight into my head and turned the lights on. W hen I was a child, there were two books of poetry in the whirligig at home: a collected Tennyson that had once been given to my great-grandmother by my great-grandfather, and a Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke which my mother had won as a school prize. ![]()
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