Poetry trails

If you look at a rack of postcards on sale in any Irish tourist site, a few themes emerge. Guinness. The Cliffs of Moher. Old men with no teeth. Old women with no teeth. Photos of a few cows ambling down the road, with the caption "Dublin traffic jam." And those Great Irish Writers ones, featuring usually some combination of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce and Beckett, with perhaps Roddy Doyle thrown in the odd time. Our literary heritage is one of those things we are known for around the world.


This won't magically end the recession, but is a nice little tourism idea. The village of Polesworth in Morth Warwickshire is developing a poetry trail. In a nice touch, they are using poems from both nationally (in the UK) known and unknown poets, rather than just the Great Works, and have run a competition for those many many many wannabe poets out there. Given our much-trumpeted literary heritage, perhaps similar schemes would work well here. Obviously the Ulysses trail in Dublin is a similar idea - but the openness to new and unknown poets is interesting....