SEAN O'BRIEN IS POETRY'S man of the moment - the good thing about poetry is that its moments tend to be long. On Monday he won the T.S. Eliot Award, one of poetry's most prestigious prizes, for his collection The Drowned Book (Picador); this on top of the Forward Prize that the same collection won last year, the third time he had won that prize.

In the run-up to the prize each of the shortlisted poets read their work and talked about it on the BBC Today programme. Listening as I got dressed each morning, I heard more than one get asked if poetry might have to work a little harder to be more accessible; what could it do to stop people being put off?

It's true that poetry rarely climbs to the top of the bestseller lists. Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters did, but no doubt that a had great deal to do with readers' fascination over what the poems were “about” - the late Laureate's marriage to Sylvia Plath. A book of poems can have the same problem, presentationally speaking, as a volume of short stories: it is hard to encapsulate what it's “about” in the way that you can, usually, with a novel or a biography. Happily, the “about” rule is not iron-clad; a fine exception is Neil Astley's fine anthology Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (Bloodaxe) and its successor, Being Alive.

The answer to the problem of “about” is simply, I think, to relax. Speaking after his win, O'Brien said: “We live in a prose world where poetry is an experience. People have to let themselves off the hook, absorb it, be with it and not expect to understand it.” Being told that we shouldn't expect to understand things is - in a world of exams and target-setting - not necessarily comfortable. It can also, to be frank, sound like guff or snake-oil - so does he mean he can write any old rubbish and pull the wool over our eyes by saying we don't have to understand it, trust me, it's good?

No, that's not what he means. Poetry is like music; it can speak to us in ways that are not simply about “meaning”, and, as with music, that relies on trust, both from the writer and the reader. Sometimes it's true that poems can tell stories - as can paintings, as can music, as can novels, but always with true art, there is something deeper and truer than the story alone. It's there in the art - it's there in you, too.

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