In her forties Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis decided to trade in her landlubber life -- a nice house in Cardiff and a sensible job at the BBC -- for life aboard a small yacht with her husband Leighton, a former bosun with the Merchant Navy and now in his mid-sixties.

"A Hospital Odyssey" is a book-length epic poem by one of Britain's leading younger poets, universal but also highly topical in what it says about cancer, caring for loved ones and the workings of the NHS.

This is a light-hearted novella exploring the strange case of a Swansea woman who is apparently possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn't really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.