Staff working at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital have been meeting weekly since September 2008 to read and talk about contemporary poems. Poet/tutors Jane Anderson & Michael Laskey have led twenty lunch-hour sessions with a small group that included speech therapists, lab technicians and nurses - all of whom were poetry ‘novices’.

Each meeting followed a general theme - for example ‘plants’, ‘animals’, ‘being a woman’, ‘abroad’ - and poems under discussion included work by Fleur Adcock, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Durcan, Vicky Feaver, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Derek Mahon, William Matthews, Elma Mitchell, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Theodore Roethke, R S Thomas and Chase Twichell.

Open discussions with the group brings different perspective to poems I would have missed on my own. I also read poems I would probably have dismissed from their title or opening lines.

At the end of March, at their last official Poetry Treatment session, the group expressed an intention to continue to meet regularly, to share poems as well as their sandwiches.

It’s been a wonderful experience and I feel I have gained tremendously from it. Particularly in looking for meaning beyond just the words. Can we do it again?!