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Professor John Carey has just published ‘A Little History of Poetry’ (Yale), a book which aims to introduce poetry to teenagers. Carey explains which poets might be able to help us most in times like these, from Emily Dickinson to John Clare. However, for John, Stevie Smith is the poet who speaks most to isolation, particularly in her famous poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning’.

Verb regular Kate Fox always thought she wrote on her own, and only now is realising that she needed the hubbub of a café in the background. Kate has written us a brand new poem ‘Two Meters’, that examines the way we are all trying to ‘stay safe’ by staying apart.  

We asked Singer-songwriter Boo Hewerdine to write and perform a new a song especially for The Verb on the theme of communicating with put loved ones from afar. The song he wrote for us is called ‘The Language of love’. Boo’s recent albums include ‘Swimming in Mercury’ and his latest, ‘Before’.

As someone who is used to spending a lot of time on her own writing novels, in many ways the day to day experience of isolation is very familiar to A.L Kennedy, however, like all of us she is now experiencing isolation alongside uncertainty. A.L Kennedy’s latest book is a short story collection, the aptly named ‘We Are Attempting To Survive Our Time. (Cape)