ISBN: 9781915108197

Publication Date: 26 March 2024

Lydia Harris performs the not inconsiderable feat of blurring the boundaries between books and the natural world, words and the things themselves. These poems are testimony to how reading with attention can be a gateway to a compassionate and wise sensibility.

The Library at Trenaby

(Westray Free Library founded 1890)

formed from loop and digit
from a blank of two hundred years

this library rose from psalms delivered as a set
contains the words of ‘one newly returned from the dead’
this library grew from two scraps of vellum
from a cargo swung onto a deck

this library is formed from the difference
between a 6 and an 8
a half moon, one stroke of the pen
a blink and this library rose

“In the magical world of Lydia Harris’s poems, books are transformed into windows, hearts, birds, ghosts – even stars. History, landscape and love are woven together in poems which are celebratory, uplifting, reverential and sublime. Lydia Harris is a poet who brings new meaning to the word unique.” —John Glenday

“What better moment than this, on the brink of a digital, screen-facing age, to recover the almost supernatural power of early books – how physical materials, calf skin, pigment, quill pen, ink, could be alive with other times and presences, and all our human feelings, maybe even God? These poems perform that paradox – to be small, alertly at home in particular place, while opening on a wealth of worlds beyond. In them, boundaries dissolve – between the local and the universal, fact and fable, the colloquial and the biblical, the human and non-human, between the 16th century and today. Through the opening Henrietta steps, both grave and playful, with a bright rapt curiosity that feels like praise.” —Philip Gross

“What a delight it is to enter Henrietta’s world. Collating an imagined repository of knowledge from, and for, ‘the whole wide world’, she draws manuscripts, stones, seals, herons, boats, the earth and sea into her linguistic inventory. Like a word-farmer, she shepherds, cares for, and cultivates texts. Through Henrietta, Harris explores language and books as containers, explainers, archives, descriptors, and exchange. Her lightness of touch creates joyously airy music, fresh as a ‘newly caulked boat’. Precise, compassionate, and buoyant, Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World reminds us of the hope inherent in the creation and collection of books, and our fundamental quest for shared experience and understanding.” —Heidi Williamson

Henrietta's Library of the Whole Wide World by Lydia Harris

£10.00

Quantity

Three Thousand Volumes

she calls them her constellations
sometimes they press against
the window as if to escape

she frees them to do their offices
between the scarecrow
and the whitethorn

*

William Tyndale teaches Henrietta Hebrew

on the Old Road to Piggarth

from the cave of his mouth
he utters scores and dashes

this tongue of holiness
this twelve geese risen
from the field’s mound

some letters crowned
some vowels scalpings
under their feet

the very thing meant
is the one whaup singing
a silver garland

the first breath over waters
is the blackbird’s alarm

gorse petals murmur
we are what we are
to the pimpled mushroom

she lags, he strides
she can’t tell cloud from sky

he vaults the fence
plucks a glossary, the sun makes him blind

what can she tell him but promise
no gap between word and thing

*

Henrietta’s Dead

she shuts them between leather boards
stitches their spines to cord
weights them flat
stacks them
row upon row
one end of the shelf to the other

afternoons in the sun
she riffles the leaves

her dead rise from the space
between pages
whisper to the window panes
breathe on her skin
they smell of ink gall

when she forces each volume shut
she stops their ears
locks their jaws
Lydia Harris lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Orkney was home to the oldest public library in Scotland and Lydia mistakenly believed that Westray hosted its own 17th library. There was a Henrietta in Westray who lived at Trenaby and she surely could have had a library. In the present day island Lydia hosts Westray Writers in her living room. Her first pamphlet Glad Not to be the Corpse was published in 2012 by Smiths Knoll. She held a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award in 2017 and Maquette Press published a second pamphlet Unbolt the Door in 2018. Another pamphlet A Small Space won first place in the Paper Swans Pamphlet competition 2019. Lydia’s first full collection Objects for Private Devotion published by Pindrop, was long listed for the Highland Book Award 2022. Most recently, another Westray inspired pamphlet collection, Hardly a Trace has been highly commended in the 2023 Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition. From her study window Lydia sees the Atlantic and North Sea and her house sits between a standing stone and a broch. Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World is Lydia’s second full collection.

Henrietta's Library of the Whole Wide World by Lydia Harris

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