The seventh month of the Gregorian calendar saunters into mid-summer. Temperatures rise still further. The landscape may wilt under oppressive heat but is still a spectacle of colour and structure that only Mother Nature has the resources for.

The pens of our remarkable poets including Walt Whitman, John Keats, Anne Bradstreet, W B Yeats, Amy Levy and a wealth of others move words in sometimes dizzying ways to create testament to the human condition; its people, their work and worries, their dreams and their hopes on this most joyous of months.