Poems on the Underground

This book, edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, is a collection of the poems that have been being displayed on the London Underground for the last few years. It's a brilliant means of injecting enjoyable, brief spurts of accessible art to the public sphere and I am greatly in applause of it as an initiative.

    The range of poems are all quite short, as one would expect, as they are all selected to be readable by people who might merely be hopping onto the Tube for a stop or two, but they are all powerful pieces of poetic form and their diversity in theme is satisfyingly broad. Though I can't estimate how many actual poems have graced the walls of the Underground since this scheme came into being, the two hundred or so of them scraped together for this published collection are organised neatly into a sequence of categories: love, London, the wider world, exile and loss, seasons, the natural world, families, "out there", dreams, music, sense and nonsense, the darker side, war, the artist as "maker", the poet as prophet, and finally a defence of poetry itself. There is a rewarding diversity of names benefiting this collection too, from such Romantic stalwarts as Williams Blake and Wordsworth to more modern figures like Carol Ann Duffy or William Carlos Williams to four or five dozen artists I'd never heard of.

    While obviously the preferred mode of encountering these poems would have been when one is bleary-eyed, coffee-hazed, and lacklustrely dreading another drudging day of work in the grim smog of our capital, and thus in great need of a random poem to drag your mind into spaces more transcendent than it currently finds itself - reading them all together in a book like this was still a special experience. I liked imagining how my commute may have been transformed in profoundly different ways depending on whether I'd read Siegfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang or Judith Wright's Rainforest on a particular morning, and the subtle (or not!) impact that may have had on my mindset for the rest of the day. A daily injection of poetry, especially for those who might not consider themselves especially fans of the art form, can be something unpredictable and transformative, and so I am very excited that this is a thing that happens. I look forward to my next trip to London on the off-chance that I see one of these plastered in-between the Tube maps above the doors of the subway trains, in place of an inevitable advert for a department store sale or an insurance firm. Even in lieu of reading them in their intended habitat however I think this book is a worthwhile and well-selected collection of quality poetry. Recommended for enjoyers of the form.