Poetry is taking a larger role in my reading life than it ever has before, and I don't know why. If indeed I should ask myself that question and not simply accept is as fact, and enjoy exploring hitherto unknown worlds.

It's crept up on me. It did n't knock on the door. It just appeared. For some reason a casual glance at a forgotten book of poetry - Penguin's Contemporary American Poetry - and that's it. Quiet minute by quiet minute, absorbed.

Stolen and transported into lands of tightly compressed metaphors and deeply felt imagery. The delicacy, the almost orchid like elegance of poetry fascinates me more and more; handfuls of disparate words raked into patterns where the sum of the parts is far more meaningful than the parts.

It's an extraordinarily relaxing voyage I'm on. For a good part of this afternoon I sat on a stool in Chiswick's Oxfam bookshop rummaging through their poetry section: new lands sighted.

Most evenings over the past month, I've read a poem aloud just before I turn in for the night. My nightcap.