The People's Favourite Poems

A charming, funny and unusual poetry anthology cum memoir: a must for poetry lovers everywhere!

Can you make a living from poetry? Gary Dexter had to. Career scuppered by a debilitating eye condition, newly married and mortgaged, and the proud owner of a 20-year-old degree in Modern Verse, he did the only thing possible. He learned by heart as many poems as he could, then hit the streets, offering passers-by to recite them in return for a voluntary cash donation. To his surprise, it became a regular job, bringing in a much-needed £12.45 / hour. More surprising, though, were his encounters with the nation's poetry-lovers and -haters (often after closing time).

The thirty most-requested poems are presented in this collection, along with the people who asked for them. And the people who didn't. And the people who told Gary to go away (in impeccable Anglo-Saxon). Or gave him tuppence. Or followed him home. A drunken soldier mourning a fallen comrade in Afghanistan requests Auden's 'Funeral Blues' and turns nasty when the nervous performer fluffs a line. At a service station on the M1, a lady orders Gary to sway 'like a daffodil' as he recites Wordsworth's classic. A security guard marches him out of Primark as he defiantly intones 'Invictus'.

Whilst making a modest living, Gary discovers the richness of life itself and, in these remarkable meetings of poetry and people, it's all here, from the poignant to the plain barking and everywhere in between.

About the Author

Gary Dexter is a literary original. The author of several acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Why Not Catch-21? ('Dexter's gift is not only to uncover the stories behind the titles, but actually to shed light on the mysteries of literary creation' - Guardian ), he also writes comic fiction.