Taking Flight - Menu of Poems

Every year, the Arts in Health organisation commissions a pamphlet of poems. They are for distribution in hospital wards, in waiting rooms, Community and Day Care Centres and other health settings for patients, visitors and staff all over Ireland. They even come with some Meals on Wheels. This year, I curated the pamphlet. I took as my theme, Taking Flight.

In particular I was thinking of how reading a poem can take out of where you are for a short time. How your imagination can take you somewhere else, how sometimes you can even fly.

Bearing in mind the sometimes stressful environment of the readers, I was looking for poems that were not so gloomy, more uplifting. I only had a small amount of space to play with so I had to leave some lovely behind. I could have filled three of four pages with no problem at all.

You can read more about it here and download a copy for yourself or your organisation. Try reading these poems aloud. Try writing your own. And we'd love to get feedback, especially from people who've read them in a health setting.

We're launching on Wednesday 8th October at lunchtime in Naas Hospital.