And what of the poems themselves? Like any big-themed anthology, Hollow Palaces is necessarily a mixed bag of brilliance and dross. Geoffrey Hill’s spirit-of-England sonnet “The Laurel Axe” and Patience Agbabi’s Browning-esque monologue “The Doll’s House” are poems everyone should read; that this book includes both is a testament to its eclectic spirit.
In sections loosely organised by theme – “Dreams & Secrets”, “Ghosts & Echoes” – we encounter many of the obvious names (Heaney, Yeats, Plath, Betjeman), but Hollow Palaces is also peopled by the shades of unread writers: does anyone still enjoy Sacheverell Sitwell? Did anyone ever? Of the now unfashionable cohort, Vita Sackville-West’s hypnotically musical “Sissinghurst” was a pleasant discovery: the house becomes an underwater landscape of “wandering fronds”, where “The night-time and the night of time have blent/ Their darkness, and the waters doubly sleep.”
There are a number of poems by writers not primarily known for their poetry: Bernardine Evaristo, Robert Conquest, Open All Hours star Juliet Aykroyd, Agatha Christie. I couldn’t help imagining them all as suspects at one of Christie’s overcrowded country house crime-scenes: just imagine the murderous looks over the breakfast table between, say, working-class warrior Tony Harrison and the late Tory peer Lord Gowrie.
But these motley houseguests have much in common. Looking around, they see the same “air of dignified decay” (Wendy Cope), a sense of “what is left when mythologies disappear” (George Szirtes), a feeling that “the living always come too late” (JC Hall). The attitude toward these fading piles’ owners (if still in residence) is never envy, occasionally anger, often pity. When the National Trust has become a culture wars battleground, these poems’ insistence on ambiguity, empathy and nuance feels essential.
Why do we keep visiting such places, with their often tenuous claims for historic importance? They matter because we imagine that they matter. Penny Boxall’s witty “The King’s Bed”, written in the voice of a tour-guide or placard, captures this to a tee. “In 1665 the King slept in this bed, or one quite like it,” we are told, a boast that’s instantly watered down (“1665 or thereabouts”) until the final concession: “What is known is that he was the monarch/ living in those times, and so slept somewhere.// Nearby houses will make their own claims./ By reading this you have brought him to this bed.”
Hollow Palaces ed Kevin Gardner and John Greening is published by Liverpool University Press at £19.99
