Over the last year or so I’ve been having conversations with colleagues and friends (most of them poets themselves) about how to read poems and even more particularly about how to inhabit poems – and how to think inside them. One of the topics which has recurred across these conversations is the experience of working or reading backwards through poems. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture on Keats at the Ledbury Festival in Herefordshire and as I was considering the endings and beginnings of his famous odes I remembered that these were the poems which first made me think properly about the need to move backwards as well as forwards through a poem. Their complex, cryptic nature and their density of meaning – their celebrated well-wroughtness – had something to do with it, but so did rhyme. The fulfilment of a rhyme is at once forwards and backwards. Rhymes not only push forward, but also promote a retroactive energy. This idea of reading poems backwards as a resistance to the straightforward assumption that they are, well, simply straightforward, seems to me to be a more hard-wired feature of verse than is often assumed and something which extends well beyond the current vogue for ‘reversible’ poems. Indeed, the sub-genre of the reversible poem might be said to lie at an extreme end of the formal spectrum of this poetic characteristic.

In his fascinating memoir Once – which creatively splices mountains, fishing, and poetry – Andrew McNeillie offers an anatomy of the self in time which includes the following ...