Bookworm: Poets Cornered

WEEK One of Edinburgh's Carry a Poem campaign, and if its website (carryapoem.com) is anything to go by, the poet whose work is most carried around by Edinburghers is American poet Robert Frost. "Poetry," he once said, "is a way of taking life by the throat" – and if that's the aim, Edinburgh's campaign has already started to deliver.

Visitors to the city after dark might have noticed the odd verse projected onto the City Chambers, the Usher Hall, the National Library of Scotland and the Poetry Garden at St Andrew Square. By day, they might pick up the free Carry a Poem book produced by the Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature Trust in the city's libraries, cafes and cultural centres.

When the 13,000 copies have all been snapped up, there'll probably still be some of the "Carry a Poem" cards left. They're as small as credit cards, and have a madly poetic range too: everything from "Jabberwocky" to "The dead don't go till you do, loved ones/The dead are still here holding our hands" from "Darling", by Jackie Kay. The campaign's events are similarly wide-ranging and too numerous to list here, but see the (excellently designed) website for details.

Both the book and the cards have a blank space for you to write down your own special poem. So too does Ten Poems About Love, a lovely little booklet produced by Candlestick Press at 4.95. It's intended as an alternative Valentine's card, comes complete with an envelope and bookmark, and is on sale at all branches of Watertone's.

The only poem short enough to include here is Wendy Cope's "Magnetic":

i spell out on this fridge door

you are so wonderful

i even like th way you snor".

KATIE AND THE RECLUSE

FINALLY, news of two books that are being rushed into print. Following this week's news of the marriage between Katie Price and Alex Reid (note to readers: both are winners of celebrity reality TV shows; one is a cage fighter and the other famous for silicone implants), Michael O'Mara is straining all sinews to bring us Alison Maloney's Katie and Alex: The Inside Story early next month. "The time is now ripe for intimate analysis of this fascinating duo," the publishers assure us.

Following his death last week, the time is also ripe for an intimate analysis of the singularly fascinating JD Salinger, which is why publishers Pamona are – also next month – bringing us Kenneth Slawenski's JD Salinger: A Life Raised High. No, they assure us, it's not a quick cut-and-paste cash-in, just fortuitous timing: Slawenski has been toiling away at his biography of the Great Recluse for the last seven years and has conducted more than 60 interviews as part of his 150,000-word magnum opus. This, we are told, looks at Salinger's work in "phorensic" detail, whatever that is.

Somewhere out there, perhaps there's a reader who is already tempted to buy both of these books. If it's you, congratulations: you've just passed Bookworm's ultimate highbrow/lowbrow challenge.