A WEEKLY online film-poem, Late Love Poems, was launched last week by acclaimed poet Ludlow-based Steve Griffiths and respected documentary makers Park6Productions. The poems celebrate the recovery, more than three decades on, of the love of his 20s. They have been filmed in a range of settings with evocative music by famed battle rapper Ogmios, who takes his talents as a composer in a surprising new direction and John Hywel, composer and conductor from the same Anglesey shores as Steve.

The Late Love Poems project, across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, aims to engage with a wide audience online and is supported by social media partners and friends from the arts including libraries, community networks and more, from Orkney Library to the Poetry Society, Wales Arts Review and FilmPoem.

The poems featured in the films are a series of celebrations and meditations, poems of playfulness and tragedy, loss and recovery. Late Love Poems tell a story of two young people who were together in the 70s, went their separate ways, made their lives and had families; and came together again in their mid-50s. The project culminates with publication of the collection of the same name by Cinnamon Press in January next year.

Griffiths says: “I hope that with these Late Love Poems films we'll have created a format with an intimacy, an immediacy, and something of the quality of a live reading, which can be savoured and shared. With poems as with people, there are so many levels of attention. I look forward to an expanding conversation online, with some rather different audiences coming together as this set of very different films go live.

Peter Knott, area director, Arts Council England, said: “Poetry is a powerful way for us to share stories and one of the Arts Council’s ambitions is to invest in projects which connect audiences with new writing. By using social media to share Steve’s films, they will be available for people to see all over England and around the globe, offering greater opportunities for everyone to hear and enjoy his poems.”