With a poet's eye Book

Less than a minute is usually the most that is given to works of art encountered on a gallery visit. To extend this fleeting glance, into something more prolonged and reflective, has long been the ambition of gallery curators the world over. This ambition was pursued by the Tate Gallery in 1985 when it ran a series of events linking art with poetry. These included a national poetry competition for all ages, poetry workshops for children and adults, and a series of lunchtime readings of their work by many distinguished poets. This illustrated anthology of specially commissioned poems, written by more than fifty leading contemporary poets, followed naturally from these events. It also includes some of the winning entries from both the adult and children's sections of the open competition. The poems it selects are those in which the subject - either an individual work of art or some aspect of the Gallery itself - has been the stimulus to something more than simple poetical description. In them the poets, through a personal vision and expression, bring to the subject a wider, sometimes entirely unexpected dimension, which in turn evokes new visual images. There are the poems which most encouraged us to return to the works which inspired them.