Poetry began to creep in a more self-aware fashion when I was a teen, albeit poetry by the dead. I’m sure these stories cultivated a love of lyric, image, and language. I think I blubbed my way through ‘The Happy Prince’, ‘The Selfish Giant’ and the title story about the little boy who dies of a broken heart. When the pampered infanta announces, “For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts”, it came as such a blow! As a child I didn’t care much about the differences between poetry and prose both genres seemed to comfortably sit together. There were not many books in our house when I was a child, so this stood out among the red-top tabloids, William Hill slips and TV Guides. You’ll see an oversized book here, The Birthday of the Infanta, a book of abridged short stories for children by Oscar Wilde. They have meant so much at different times of my life a parallel life to the real one. Putting together this bookshelf has made me realise how much the books I’ve read have been like friends over the years. British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor takes a snapshot of her bookshelf and tells us why these books are important to her
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