As a poet, I owe a great deal to one particular book...This review won first prize in the writelink reviewing the situation contest in June 2007.

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The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry, hardback, 220pp, Hutchinson, £10.99.

Stephen Fry is probably best known as an actor. But he is also a closet poet, an incredibly skilled one, as this guide to writing and appreciating poetry shows.

Once upon a time, I would have dismissed most modern poetry adopting a formal structure as dated and old-fashioned. But this book changed all that. It opened my eyes to both the continuing possibilities of forms I already knew and the beauties of new structures I'd never heard of. And, although the book deals with many potentially overwhelming technical terms, it does so with a light comical touch and Fry's own examples, such as:

Let's hear it for the SAPPHIC ODE
An oyster bed of gleaming pearls
A finely wrought poetic mode
Not just for girls.

This is an enjoyable and useful book for any poetry reader. But for a writer, it is more than that. Read properly (yes, that does mean doing the exercises), it is the best value for money poetry writing course I've ever come across. And that's saying something!