This 106 page volume thumped its way through our letter box today.
Here’s some bumf on the anthology.

A new Collected Edition of Poems in the Waiting Room has just been published. The book presents every quarterly issue of Poems in the Waiting Room published from autumn 1998 to winter 2010, fifty short collections of poems selected for their power to help the patient. This is a collection for everyone who feels that poetry can raise the spirits.
The Introduction sets out a brief history of the arts in health charity that started as a simple scheme in and around Kew Gardens Richmond but which spread, often by word of mouth, to become the most widely read national poetry publication and the most extensive arts in health programme in the NHS. The notion too has spread around the globe reaching as far as the Scott Base in the Antarctica.
Each issue of the quarterly series is presented, generously laid out. The collection concludes with a note on the Cit Lit Poetry Group where the notion for the project originated; the current submission guidelines, which proved to be the key to the success of the project; and, three pages of comments from grateful readers illustrating the extent to which Poems in the Waiting Room is appreciated, but also marking the great demand and desire there exists in the community at large for poetry appropriately presented.
Poems in the Waiting Room Collected Edition 1998 – 2010 can be obtained by direct mail from PitWR Box 488 Richmond TW9 4SW price £15.00 inc p&p (Cheques payable to Poems in the Waiting Room) or orders for copies with invoice by email pitwr@blueyonder.co.uk

My poem ‘Believe’ which appears in the THE WRONG JARROW can be found nestling in the collection. I wrote the poem about the flowers that you used to appear in the front garden in our last house in Blaydon.

Believe

It’s happening, the odd crocus
edges out between rocks and trees,
blue tongues licking crisp sunshine
at the feet of near-stripped trees;
telling us it’s becoming warmer and lighter,
forcing us to believe
that there’s life after hard-bitten hail,
snow and frost that sprayed our breath
in those black mornings.

Tom Kelly

Smokestack Books

http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/book.php?book=32