Are you a member of a poetry reading group? You can get reading group discounts from our bookselling site www.poetrybookshoponline.com.

If you’re keen to share some poetry with members of your reading group, here are some ideas you might like to try out in a future meeting.

Familiar Favourites
Get members to bring copies of their own favourite poem to a meeting. Talk about your selections in relation to Simon Armitage's 10 top tips or discuss your general poetry reading experience from the following perspectives:

• What encounters, positive or puzzling, have group members had with poetry? One PBS member tells us he reads poems when he's waiting for his potatoes to boil!

• What successful approaches to poetry reading can members of the group recommend?

• Do you know any poetry by heart? What's the difference between knowing a poem and simply reading it?

• When do the poems you know spring into your mind? Do you read them to yourself or to others?

• Which discussions are most stimulating: the ones about poets you admire, or the ones about work you don’t like?

Novelists and Poets
Focus on a writer who writes both novels and poetry (Try Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, John Burnside, Raymond Carver, Fred D'Aguiar, Helen Dunmore, Sophie Hannah, Tobias Hill or Jackie Kay). Contrasting and comparing gives your group a way to explore ideas about the differences between poetry and fiction reading.

Anthologies
There are dozens of poetry anthologies edited thematically - from love to war, gardens to science. What themes unite your previous reading group choices? Could your poetry reading relate to these? If you'd prefer to read chronologically, tackle a century, a generation or even a decade at a time.

Whatever poems you read, try varying your approach to them from one meeting to the next. Think about discussing the craft and construction of individual poems, or comparing one poem (or poet) with another, or looking at the poems against a background of other literature of a similar period or theme.

T S Eliot Prize
Every year, the PBS awards the T S Eliot Prize for the best new poetry collection. There are always ten books on the Shortlist, providing a ready-made structure for a reading group meeting. Pick a poet each. You could read the poems out loud, discover more about the poets' previous work, attend poets' readings (try publishers' websites for details) or even award your own prize. There are more than 200 literary prizes awarded every year in the UK. Do the results affect your reading? Have the judges' surprise decisions ever infuriated you?

T S Eliot Prize winners

Reading group discounts