Forget thrillers, bring poetry to the beach — it fits in your hand luggage
Poetry isn't generally seen as holiday reading. Airport bookshops don't tend to stock the latest collections. But if you're going away exhausted and desperate for refreshment, you can't just stick to thrillers. This is the time to give poets a chance.
Anthologies, in particular, are worth packing. In a wide selection, you're bound to find a handful of poems to learn and treasure. Nature Matters, a new anthology of nature poetry edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf (Faber £14.99), is intriguing. You start with Zaffar Kunial's Foxglove Country, 22 subtly beautiful lines on the word 'foxglove' ('deeper inland/ is the gulp, the gulf, the gap, the grip/ that goes before love'). You end with Jay Bernard's perfect magic spell Flowers : 'Will anybody speak of this/ the way the common does,/ the way the fearless dying leaves/ speak of the coming cold?'
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