Two striking and substantial new anthologies have been launched by husband and wife team Mark and Gill Connors at Yaffle Press. Poems inspired by the Best Songs of All Time was the brainchild of Mark, while Safety in Numbers, a poetic conversation, was Gill's idea. 

In the introduction to the anthology he edited - aided by judge Emma Purshouse - Mark Connors says: "Like many ideas that come to me as a writer and publisher, Poems inspired by the Best Songs of All Time arrived in my head in the wee small hours when I should have been asleep." 

Gill Connors says in the introduction to her anthology: "This project began as an idea for my PhD which is on the links and intersections between sixteenth and twenty-first century women. I envisaged a chain where the first poet would be sent a poem to respond to, then that poem would be sent to the next person in line, and so on ...  Each poet had one week to respond to the piece they received, and they didn't know the identity of the writer of the poem." 

To give you just a flavour, the songs that the poems in Best Songs of all Time often loosely refer to include Ticket to Ride by the Beatles; Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face; Celine Dion's Titnaic lament My Heart Will Go On; The Jam's Going Underground; Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, in memory of Yorkshire Ripper victim Jacqueline Hill; and Tina Turner's Simply the Best. The anthology is intended to to be the first in a Best of All Time series. 

In her introduction to Safety in Numbers, Gill Connors emphasises that the poets in the anthology are not "celebrities" but "ordinary, everyday women, living their lives with all its discriminations and barriers, all its joys and celebrations". She goes on to say: "I have marvelled at the fact that so many of these poets wrote their responses while coping with sometimes huge life-changing events: illness, grief, anxiety, hurt. That they were able to turn their pain into words or put it to the side and write about about other things. I hope it helped." 

Poems inspired by the Best Songs of All Time, edited by Mark Connors, Yaffle Press, £15

Safety in Numbers, a poetic onversation, edited by Gill Connors, Yaffle Press, £15