Almost nothing in "A Book" moves. The poem is a still life: a book, a hand, a window, a page, a rose. Skyril builds it as a catalogue, with six lines in a row opening on the same word, "A", each offering another object to look at. Only in the final line does a person step forward, and with her a decision: "She would never love another." The central idea is that grief doesn't need to announce itself. A lost love can sit quietly in a room full of things, and the loyalty it leaves behind can be put in one flat sentence.
The senses arrive one at a time. The first book is known by smell, "the scent of age and knowledge", which pairs something physical (old paper) with something abstract (what the pages hold). Touch follows in "a loving hand, gentle, holding close", though the poem never says whose hand it is. It could be a remembered giver's, or the woman's own cradling the book. Then comes sight: a window "brightly portraying autumn foliage". "Portraying" is a curious choice, because it turns the view into a painting, something framed and looked at rather than walked into. Autumn is the season of endings, yet "brightly" insists the colours are still vivid, which is a fair description of how a precious memory behaves. The "single, ancient rose" finishes the picture. Both adjectives press the same point: one flower, and a great age. I read it as a pressed flower, though the poem leaves that unsaid, and the page that "keeps" it seems to do in miniature what the whole poem does.
The rhyme scheme runs roughly ABCBDEDE. "Close" and "rose" make a near-rhyme, matching on the page but not quite in the mouth. "Lost" and "cost" rhyme fully, and the pairing quietly says that loss has a price. "Foliage" gets no partner at all, and its line is one of the longest in the poem, as if the leaves were spilling over the edge. The strangest effect comes at the end, where "another" rhymes with itself, closing both line 6 and line 8. In line 6 it names one half of a pair, "one akin to another", two kindred people. In line 8 it means anyone at all who might take that place. The same word first binds two people together and then shuts the door on a third. It is as though the poem, like the woman, cannot find anything new to put in that position.
Grammar does as much work as imagery. For seven lines there is no main verb. "Holding", "portraying", "kept", "forgot" and "lost" all describe rather than act, so the poem hangs in a suspended present. The first real verb, "would love", arrives in the last line, and it is both negated and conditional, a look forward across a lifetime. Punctuation works the same way. A semicolon ends nearly every line, linking one image to the next without ever concluding, and the hyphen after "another" in line 6 is a held breath before "The last". That phrase is pleasingly open. It could mean the last gift, the last book or the last love. "Cherished at such a cost" lets "cost" mean grief, loneliness, or simply what loving takes. The metre is loose, with no strict beat, but the lines swell to twelve or thirteen syllables around the window and the gift, then contract to eight and finally seven. The closing line is the shortest and plainest, with no adjectives, as if ornament has run out.
The poem is worth reading for its restraint. There is no "I", no tears, and no word like "sorrow". Apart from "love", "lost" and "cost", the feeling is left to the objects. For a student, it shows clearly how form can carry meaning: a list that cannot add a final item turns instead into a vow. The poem is also small enough to be pressed between pages, much like the rose it describes.