The poetry of golf, anyone? National Golf Month, which begins on 1 May, has appointed its first golf laureate to help reverse the decline in the game and inspire people to take up the sport.

London-based poet and now laureate of the fairways Oliver Comins, pictured, whose poems have been published in the Spectator and Poetry Review, was encouraged to take up the game by his next door neighbour Agnes Booth, who he celebrates in the poem ‘Rose Bed, Wisteria and Apple Trees’.

It has been chosen by National Golf Month as its campaign poem to recognise the “vital role that women have and can play in getting young people to take up the game”.

Oliver said: “Golf is a sport, which inspires me as a poet. And ‘Rose Bed’ is a eulogy to Agnes’ tireless encouragement. As well as teaching me the mechanics of a golf swing, she also immersed me in the spirit of the game. “

As the poem indicates, Agnes taught young Oliver how to hold a golf club when he was aged 10. She had been playing golf throughout her adult life and was, by then, in her 60s and a widow. “By the age of 12 I was playing regularly and was a junior member at my home course in Kenilworth in Warwickshire.”

Doug Poole, project director of National Golf Month said: “Up and down the country, every week, lots of women work to get kids into golf. This fantastic poem recognises and celebrates those efforts. Behind the poetry is a serious point – family, friends and mums and dads are critical to getting kids involved in our great sport. Our message is this. In May, get your boys and girls out there on the nearest course or driving range and give golf a go.”

Oliver plays “wherever I can get a game – various courses in and around west London (where I live) plus others as and when the opportunity arises. Sadly, I do not play as often as I would like, which may explain part of the interest in writing about golf.”

Last year he published a poetry collection, Battling Against The Odds, which has at its heart a sequence of 18 golf holes. He launched it at Fortwilliam golf club in Belfast: “I had played Fortwilliam on the day of the launch and could speak from personal experience about some areas of rough and certain trees on the course!”

Battling Against The Odds “is all about the game of golf and the sport of life.  The first one that I wrote was about Tom Watson’s heroics at the Open Championship in 2009 which was followed a few weeks later by my first golf hole poem (‘Sidling Crabs’, which is now the seventh).  Once I’d written one hole it was clear there would be more to write, so the centrepiece of the collection is a complete course of 18 golf hole poems …  probably the most important poem (personally speaking) in the collection is the last one, written for Agnes. It is about being taught golf by someone who watched some of great players of the early and mid-20th century and was steeped in the game and the spirit in which it is played.

“There are quite a few poets who have written about golf.  Most memorably, Andrew Greig - whose prose work Preferred Lies (2006) is truly a poet’s book about golf, a Scotsman’s book about golf and a golfer’s book about golf.  It includes a putting competition between Greig and Don Paterson, but is really a book about the hands that play and the soul of the sport.”

One poem by Comins, published in the Spectator, ‘Herring Way (15th Hole, 321 Yards)’, describes the pleasures and perils of coastline golf, occasionally losing a ball “to the tide / or disappearing into camouflage / among like-sized pebbles on the beach below.”

Another laureate, Sir John Betjeman, also wrote about the joys of seaside golf. His poem celebrates a “glorious, sailing, bounding drive / That made me glad I was alive,” and concludes: “Lark song and sea sounds in the air / And splendour, splendour everywhere.”