Reading the Small Print

Three pocket-sized books of poems that contain whole worlds

Go, litel bok

Chaucer

It’s a hazard of buying things online that you don’t always appreciate their size. Somewhere at home we have a pretty cardboard container that my wife bought for storage purposes which turned out to be as big as a box of cook’s matches. Conversely, during lockdown, we became the proud owners of a farm-scale bale of hay, when all we needed was the pet-shop one (“That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw”, as Robert Browning puts it).

It happened again this week. I went looking for a copy of the poems of Agha Shahid Ali, having been reminded by Anthony Vahni Capildeo in the latest

PN Review

of how his “unpretentious, wild, learned and moving art” bears witness to the violent history of Kashmir, where his family remained after he moved to the United States. I found his 1987 collection, The Half-Inch Himalayas, for a few pounds on eBay. When it arrived, though, and I tipped out the contents of the envelope, I felt like Alice in Wonderland: The Half-Inch Himalayas were precisely 3 inches by 2.5.

Although not advertised as such, I had bought the Wesleyan University Press Miniature Edition of the book, published posthumously in 2013 (Ali died in 2001). The seller, appropriately enough, offered 20% off, so I kept it. I love a little book, even when the point size of the type is smaller than the bottom line I recently failed to read on an optician’s chart. So, as I wait for my new prescription lenses, I’ve been reading it with a magnifying glass — the thick rectangular one that came with a two-volume set of The Oxford English Dictionary. And there is something very poignant about the way these microscopic words loom up as the curved glass moves over the opening poem, “Postcard from Kashmir”:

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I’ll ever be to home.