Shelf Life
Shelf-Life Questions
Miriam Gamble was born in 1980 in Brussels, but grew up in Belfast. She is a poet and critic, and studied at Oxford and Queen’s University Belfast where she completed a Ph.D in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. She has been a Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry while at Queen’s University Belfast. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and her pamphlet, This Man’s Town, was published by the tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her poems have appeared in The Rialto, The Yellow Nib, Succour, Gallous, Fortnight and The Ulster Tatler.
Favourite book from childhood
I didn’t have a single favourite book as a child: I read a lot, and I liked lots of different things. If I had to be selective, though, I’d probably say that, when I was really small, The Quangle Wangle’s Hat by Edward Lear was top of my list; then, when I got a bit older, it’d have been a war between The Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, James Herriot and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I absolutely loved Herriot’s stories when I was about 11 or 12; even when I was younger.
Book I didn't make it through
The Hobbit: I read until about three pages from the end, then abandoned it in a fit of total apathy. I don’t think I made it through The Catcher in the Rye either: again, I was too old when I read it. Some things have an age window, after which they aren’t going to make any impact, but within which they’re supremely forceful.
Secret reading vice
I sometimes read fashion magazines – things like ‘Closer’ and ‘Look!’…sorry! In my defence, I am mainly interested in the clothes, but if I happen on one of those awful ‘true life’ stories, I will read it…especially in the hairdresser’s. I always take a respectable tome with me to the hairdresser’s, then spend the entire time lasciviously devouring magazines.
Most under-rated book
I’m very fond of Muldoon’s first collection, New Weather, which normally gets short shrift in critical responses to his work as a whole. And I love Longley’s third collection, Man Lying on a Wall, which he himself doesn’t set much store by for some reason. Outside of poetry, I once read a stonking novel by Joseph Heller called God Knows, which no-one I mention it to has ever heard of. Catch 22 is another book I’ve never managed to finish, but God Knows was cracking – intelligent, hilarious, a real swashbuckler.
Most over-rated book
The Hobbit? I think I’ve already given my reasons for that one.
Irish writer I always look out for
But there are so many! I love MacNeice; I also love rare edition books, and I prefer to read poems in individual collections as opposed to selected and collected volumes. So I’m always looking for anything by him that I don’t already own. And Beckett, of course. Does Graves count as an Irish poet? Prose-wise, I’m very fond of Anne Enright’s books, and of Bernard MacLaverty’s: Cal and Grace Notes are among my favourite novels.
One book I'd love to have written
Again – obviously – there’s more than one. I do have a wish list of first collections I’d love to have written: it includes For the Unfallen by Geoffrey Hill, The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes, Night-Crossing by Derek Mahon, These Days by Leontia Flynn and Public Dream by Frances Leviston.
The book I go back to time and again
When I was younger, I’d probably have said Prufrock and Other Observations, but these days it would be the Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop; also, though to a lesser extent, her prose. It doesn’t matter how many times I return to Bishop, her poems still maintain the ability to surprise me.
