SO, I GUESS THE ANSWER’S YES, then. Last week I asked whether you thought there should be more poetry (reviews, poems themselves) in the Books section, and received a pretty emphatic response. Emphatic and, I should say, occasionally more than that. I am now the proud possessor (if you can put it that way) of a villanelle, no less, with my very own name in it, exhorting me to greater efforts:

Dear Erica, if you could squeeze into your weekly book reviews more poetry, we’d like it, please.

We really think you’d earn your fees by blocking out the gloomy news, dear Erica, if you could squeeze in more of poets such as these, Hughes, Fanthorpe, Motion, Kay. You choose more poetry. We’d like it, please.

Thanks for that, Maureen Sandler. It was inspiring to see how many of you take poetry to heart, or want to: David Davies wrote: “I find an empathy with what I think poets such as Larkin or Whitman are saying but so much of it I simply do not understand.” Mr Davies asks for a context (biography, criticism) so that he might better comprehend; though I don’t know if context always works that way with poetry. Read it once, wait. read it again. Keep reading. Don’t give up. Sometimes the language can simply be itself, a solid thing to cling on to, “like the stone in the pocket”, Madeleine Heaney says, “to be taken out and examined, turned over and over in the hand to feel its shape and texture, or simply held still in the palm as comfort.”

Certainly poems can give comfort; Jeanette Winterson has mentioned an initiative called “Poems for the Waiting Room” which provides — free except for postage — poster poems for hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. No, poetry is no cure, but how can anything beautiful do harm? The latest set comes from many languages and I would rather read a poem than an ancient copy of Take A Break! Anne Adams tells us that poetry is “an important part of therapy” at the Hospice of St Francis at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.

It was a pleasure to have such strong answers to my questions; but we always want to know what you think about what you see in the Books section, whatever the subject.

For information on Poems for the Waiting Room, e-mail r.wolf@hyphen-21.org

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