Genevieve Foxs book club

By Genevieve Fox Published: 3:18PM GMT 08 March 2010

Reading communication is not the nations dim tip after all. Following last weeks column, in that I bemoaned the actuality that I frequency conduct to convince my book groups to plead poetry, lots of readers have created in observant they are insane for it.

Jerry, who belongs to a living room celebration of the mass organisation in Bromley, marvels that Ive met such resistance. "I am really lucky," he tells me, "my organisation needs small persuading. During the 7 years together, 3 of the monthly meetings have been communication specials. The initial was Yuletide poems. The subsequent was fight poems. The majority new was womens poetry."

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Lorraine from Cardiff says the the men in her book organisation who are quite keen. At their last session, they each review their prime poem aloud and afterwards non-stop up the discussion. She asks for tips on how to make up destiny sessions because, she says, "we know really small about poetry".

I dont think you need to know anything about poetry. There are no manners for how to proceed a pick up either, though I say and a small will remonstrate that the value meaningful a bit about the poet. You need to know that Emily Dickinson was a hermit and that WH Auden was gay. You dont need to know that Simon Armitages "The Not Dead" is about the fight in Afghanistan, or that people find Geoffrey Hill difficult, though it would be beneficial if some-more people certified to as much. When charged to review Elizabeth Bishop, Jerry from Bromley was "underwhelmed". He told his partner Fred as much, who forked out that she was "an peculiar fish… any one would be put off by her initial book. Persevere." And so he did.

Theres never a right response, as Jerry creates clear. "Like you, I have hitherto found small delight or consequence in Carol Ann Duffys poems," he writes. "However, I do think that her outlay has been outstandingly great since she became Poet Laureate. By outlay I not usually meant her new published poems but additionally the sort of form that she has since to communication as a whole."

If were articulate about giving communication a great image, I commission the producer Oliver Bernard for a gong. I met him at a celebration recently. He let me share his pipe, that we smoked in the garden, in in between recharging the eyeglasses and plotting all demeanour of mischief.

When we parted, he gave me his CD, Poems (see www.oliverbernard.com). The list of people he interjection reads similar to a hurl call of the excellent poets, together with Elizabeth Smart, injured but lustful Stephen Spender, and the man Bernard, similar to so many, would have had for producer laureate, John Heath-Stubbs.

I played Poems over breakfast the following sunrise a seditious action opposite the restraint of those droning voices on the Today programme. Bernards, by contrast, was captivating.