The Collections available
Poems for…Waiting consists of 50 especially commissioned poems. Each poem explores the topic of waiting. The collection was designed specifically for display in NHS waiting rooms and was the project’s first collection. The late David Hart, poet, undertook the commissioning task.
Poems for…All ages consists of 50 favourites old and new. Most of the poems come from ‘The Rattlebag,’ a fine poetry anthology selected by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes and published by Faber and Faber. The collection also includes a dozen poems for young children.
Poems for…One World is the project’s largest collection, consisting of well over 100 poems, with more to come. Most are bilingual, with fifty languages represented, ranging from Arabic to Vietnamese.
Poems for…Self at sea is a collection on mental disturbance and consists of 30 poems.
Poems for Bridges to Learning Disability consists of 20 poems.
Poems for…Rising Ten is for children still in primary school and combines text with visual imagery. It consists of 25 poems.
Poems for One World includes Michael Rosen’s poem “These are the Hands.” This was originally commissioned by the NHS to celebrate its 60th birthday in 2008. Rosen was Children’s Poet Laureate at the time. He gave me his permission to reproduce the poem as one of our posters. In addition, I then had it translated into several languages – Greek, Turkish, Somali, and Punjabi (the latter in two scripts). The reason, of course, is that the NHS employs and serves people of many mother tongues. Rosen’s original and the various translations can all be found among the One World collection.
Once you have registered or logged on, all the project’s poems become available to you for viewing and downloading. Just click on the various collection title on the Collections menu. To reach them, pull out of these explanatory notes and back to the collection titles. Click on each or any of these to gain access to the poems.
You will then see onscreen three examples from each collection (click on each one to enlarge it as necessary).
Each complete collection can be downloaded as a folder.
But poems can also be viewed and downloaded individually. Just scroll down the contents list in each case and you will see the pdf of each poem to the right of its title and author. Click on this and the poem will open up for you. Then look for the Print icon, click on it and your printer will do the rest.
Copyright
Some of the poems featured here are old enough to be out of copyright and for others (the commissioned ones) this project itself holds the copyright. However, please note that many of the poems have required and obtained copyright permission from publisher, the poet’s estate, or relative, or from the poet him or herself.
That permission has been given on condition we acknowledge on each poster the poem’s source – and we display the poem-poster free of charge and not for material gain. In making the poems available online we are passing on that condition to all who download them.
That is partly why we have asked you to register, since the process requires you to tick the “agreement” box. The other reason we ask you to register is that it allows us to keep track of where the poems are going, and stay in touch with you for any suggestions you have or feed-back you can give us.
