Hart takes her Poetry Hour to the classroom

Her poetry nights in London are glittering events, with the likes of Harold Pinter and Ralph Fiennes reading aloud verse. Now Josephine Hart, the author of novels including Damage, is taking her passion for poetry nationwide with a book and accompanying CD of readings by her Poetry Hour regulars, including Juliet Stevenson, Sinead Cusack and Bob Geldof as well as Pinter and Fiennes.

She has selected eight poets who measure up to T S Eliot's description of greatness - they have "something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before". The chosen writers are Eliot himself, W H Auden, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, W B Yeats, Sylvia Plath and Rudyard Kipling.

"They are all original minds who have hit the mark of genius, from Emily Dickinson, who's ecstatic, through to the icy-cool intellectual mind of Marianne Moore," Hart said. And thanks to support from the publishers Virago, the British Library and Hart herself, the £15 book will be sent free to every secondary school in the country. She said the CD was fundamental to what she wanted to do because poetry must be heard and not just read. "Yeats, when he was in his seventies, said he had spent his whole life taking out of poetry anything that had been written for the eye alone and had brought back syntax that was for the ear," she said. "I feel very strongly that this is a true joy in life and I'd really like to share it. Poetry has done so much for me. It's thrilled me to the core and often it's helped me."

She said she was saddened that the tradition of poetry recital was being lost. "When you hear a thought expressed at its ultimate level of expression - which is what poetry is - then it inspires you in your own form of communication." The lack of poetry reading in schools meant that generations were being deprived of "the gift of language".

"If it continues there will be no poetry in schools and that would be catastrophic for literature, period, because the beauty of language will be lost."

The book, Catching Life by the Throat - a title taken from a Robert Frost poem - was launched last night at the British Library, at a recital of works by Kipling read by Sir Roger Moore.

The forthcoming Sylvia Plath evening has been sold out for weeks even with no reader yet agreed.

The eight greats

From Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

From Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death -

He kindly stopped for me -

The Carriage held but just Ourselves -

And Immortality

From The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

From The Female of the Species by Rudyard Kipling

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,

He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.

But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

From This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

From Roses only by Marianne Moore

You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than An asset -

that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are

Justified in supposing

That you must have brains.

From Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

From Easter 1916 by WB Yeats

I write it out in a verse -

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.