Imagine a town centre in which every shop has its own poem on display. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? You’d certainly think it would silence those critics who say poetry is dead. Well it’s just happened, and the poems are all in a marvellous book, and they are anything but dead! This fabulous anthology, Poems In Shops, is testament, not just to the creativity of the many poets who responded to our call for poems to be placed in Bolton shops during the town’s arts festival, but also to the genius of Laurette Evans, the Bolton Arts Forum and their innovative arts trail.

 
The work was submitted to us via www.writeoutloud.net, which has become the nation’s most popular poetry website. We did it this way because the whole project only ran for just over a month from start to finish, giving very little time for the poets to be inspired, write their verses and submit them, and for us to go about curating the collection and getting them displayed in the shops.  
 
Poets whose work was displayed on the trail during Bolton’s Festival of the Arts, from Jessops to Costa, Greggs to HMV, and from Subway to Waterstones, included Linda Cosgriff, Harry O’Neill, Rowena Love, Margaret Holbrook, Jayne Brooks, Winston Plowes, Abigail Wyatt, Cate Greenlees, Phil Smith, Donna Pucciani, Nigel Astell, Ann Foxglove, Jeff Dawson, Alanna Rice, Pete Fisher, Geoffrey Hepstonstall, Andrew James Brown, Margaret Challender, Jane Wilcock, Abegail Morley, and Pat Whittaker.

The anthology, Poems In Shops, will be launched at An Evening with Write Out Loud, at Bolton’s Octagon theatre, on Monday 19 November.