Best Poems on the Underground

Best Poems on the Underground by Various Phoenix, HK$216

As the title suggests, this is not fiction, strictly speaking. But my new year's resolution is to read more poetry so what could be better than this compilation of verse that has graced the London tube? It is a brilliant idea: bored commuters, sick of reading the newspapers' blend of apocalyptic current affairs and Branjelina-fuelled gossip, can cast their eyes over works by William Blake, W.H. Auden and Basho instead. Unsurprisingly, many of the poems here are short, snappy and famous: sonnets by Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare, songs by Robert Burns. But there are many pleasing surprises: Merlin by the normally incomprehensible Geoffrey Hill; Patrick Kavanagh's haunting Memory of My Father; Judith Rodriguez's peppy Nasturtium Scanned. Quite what the effect this had on commuters is hard to tell: might a banker's close attention to The Song of Solomon have prevented the economic crash? Pity the unhappy traveller who encounters Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning. I'll bid you happy new year with Robert Herrick's Dreams: 'Here we are all, by day; by night we're hurl'd/ By dreams, each one into a several world.'