Memorise – DaneCobain.com

Deborah Alma – The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology | Review

Title: The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology

Author: Deborah Alma

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 194

Rating: 4*/5

Deborah Alma – The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology

I’ve already read one of these mini collections of poetry from Deborah Alma, the emergency poet, and so I kind of knew what I was in for. Alma does a great job of pulling together a huge variety of both classic and contemporary poetry and the result is this stunning little hardback collection that’s so aesthetically pleasing you won’t want to put it down.

I also like how Alma includes some further recommended reading at the end, as well as the fact that one of the poems she recommended was by Charles Bukowski. But I also found a bunch of classic poems that I now want to memorise, including one that it turns out my granddad also knows – and he’s a working class dude from a small town. I can’t vouch for whether these poems actually help you to beat stress, but I will say that I enjoyed reading it and would read more in this series if and when they came out. So yeah!

Deborah Alma

Click here to buy The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology.

Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert – Poems on the Underground | Review

Title: Poems on the Underground

Author: Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 272

Rating: 8/10

Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert – Poems on the Underground

If you’ve spent any time in London then you probably already know about the project that this book was born from. As you travel around on the tube, you see a number of different posters that contain poems on them, from old classics to contemporary pieces by unknown or up-and-coming poets.

This book, then, collects some of the best pieces that were featured over the years, and whilst the book itself is a little bit outdated, the kind of poetry that it features is the kind of stuff that never ages.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this collection is culturally significant, more so than most anthologies that you’ll find on the market. And then there’s the fact that the poems here span all sorts of subjects and genres, as well as several hundred years of work. I loved it.

Poems on the Underground

In some ways, it was like being back at school, because the book introduces you to the work of a whole heap of notable poets – like Shakespeare, Shelley, Seamus Heaney and Maya Angelou – that you might not come across otherwise. But it doesn’t have the residual boredom of a lesson that you don’t want to be in, and the fact that each of the poems are short means that it’s easy to pick it up, read a couple and put it back down.

I even earmarked a couple of the poems for me to memorise, so it must be good.