How to download poems

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.

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.

Collections available

There are five main collections available on this site. The first three emerged one by one over a period of several years, and in this order :  “Poems for… Waiting”, “Poems for… All Ages” and “Poems for… One World.”
The next two collections were launched together in 2015. One is a collection of thirty poems on mental disturbance called “Poems for…self at sea.” The other consists of twenty poems on learning disability and is called “Poems for…Bridges to Learning Disability.” These collections emerged, in a sense, from out of the “One World” collection and are part of the same concept. But they are displayed and made available on this website as separate items, along with the earlier three.
Within “Poems for…One World”are the nuclei of several further collections which may yet be developed further. One would be called “Poems for…the art of nursing.”  It would bring together poems that celebrate caring in general and the NHS in particular. The poet Michael Rosen is strongly represented in the material we have so far on this subject. His poem “These are the Hands” was 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 it as one of our posters. In addition, I then had it translated into several languages – Greek, Turkish, Somali, and Punjabi (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.

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