The importance of libraries cannot be overstated. Access to books and knowledge, especially for those unable to afford to buy, or without a local bookshop to hand, is essential and should be a right.

Even more so, when authoritarian regimes defund them, close them down and their followers try to ban books they don’t like. Local libraries are also very often the first casualties of cuts, in supposedly more enlightened democracies.

My parents were second-hand book dealers, so while frequently short of money, we were rarely short of books. However, whether it’s the historic Bath Stone of Bristol Central Library, where I sometimes went to do homework, the Brutalist grandeur of Nottingham University’s Hallward Library, where instead of attempting to decode Spenser, I pored over articles on Tolkien on the microfiche, or the municipal red brick of Stroud Green & Harringay Library, where my eldest used to screech in delight at a wooden kitchen range, mostly ignoring the books, I love a library, they must be cherished wherever they’re found.

A little while back, I wrote a kind of love letter to libraries, in the form of a poem. It was longlisted as a commended poem in The Plough Prize 2022 and later published in an anthology by my local Stanza group – Brixton & Streatham Hill Poets.

I think some of my blog, or poetry readers, might enjoy it too (Yes, Mat Riches, I know, it’s a bloody tercet again). Here, for you delectation –

Library stamps

Mostly, we fly over the fly leaf, race headlong 
into the arms of opening lines, but what if 
we took out a book, then stopped at the stamps? 

Traced its story in due dates, as if suitors lining up 
at the front – frequent when new, reflecting first flurries 
of interest, caressed by fresh hands, month after month: 

carried out, taken home, slung onto beds, 
slipped under pillows, devoured by the page, 
fondled and stroked, quoted, enjoyed 

by dozens of readers, some careful, others brazen, 
scrawling notes, underlining, turning down corners; 
fingers leaving odd greasy streaks, paper worn thin 

at the edges. A few come again, to suck comfort 
from favourite chapters, all eyes united by lust 
for shared language, in a sensual history of lending,

until the gaps start to lengthen, as the title gets old, 
overlooked, half-forgotten, at the back of the shelf,
love life a series of numbers, recorded in fading blue ink.