A POET is offering a creative service to members of the public and writing them personalised poems for their loved ones.

Helena Johnson, of North Berwick, had written poems for greetings cards for nearly 20 years and decided to turn her hand to a more tailor-made service.

And the warm-hearted wordsmith says it’s a service that people are finding particularly poignant during lockdown, when they’re unable to see friends and family.

Helena, 56, said: “Because people can’t get together, with the personalised poems people are doing all sorts of different things with them.

“They’re either having them printed out and framed and sent as a gift, or making videos and sending them to their loved ones.

“If it’s someone’s birthday, people are having a Zoom meeting and reading out the poem, so it’s almost like being with somebody, even though you can’t be with somebody.”

Helena’s move into poetry came out of the blue, since she had been working as an insurance underwriter in Harrogate for some years.

But, she said, she became interested in creating her own rhymes when she had been signing leaving cards for colleagues.

She said: “Sometimes a company goes though phases of loads of people leaving and there were all these cards coming round, and I was looking at the verses inside and I thought: ‘I could write those.’”

She wrote to card manufacturers to offer her skills as a freelancer, which she did for several years before getting a full-time manager position when one of her contacts at a greetings card company left his job.

Helena said: “One time, when I’d sent some stuff through, the email bounced back and said ‘user not found’. So I rang up the company and asked if the editorial writer had left and they said he had.

“I said: ‘Can I have his job?’

“For being really cheeky, I got an interview and I got that guy’s job.”

However, when the company relocated to the south of England, they parted ways and Helena continued working freelance.

In 2017, she moved to North Berwick to be with partner Matt Armstrong; the couple now live on Craigleith Avenue. It was soon after this move that Helena decided to personalise her poetry offerings.

She said: “I thought it’s all very well freelancing for card companies but I’m perfectly certain that people would enjoy poems written for them specifically, so I started doing that.”

It began as a service for people she knew; they would fill out a questionnaire about their loved ones, and Helena tailored a poem to them.

But, with lockdown, Helena realised there would be a wider desire for her intimate poems, and she set up a website, streamlining her production process.

She said: “I think [creative writing] is immensely useful [for mental health]. I really enjoy writing them anyway but I think, at the moment, if people are struggling and they can’t see the people they want to be with, if they can offer something really personal, whether it’s a get well card or a cheering up poem or whatever, it’s really great because it’s sometimes hard for people to put into words what they’re actually feeling.

“I think if somebody can step in and say ‘OK, you tell me all about your loved one, you tell me all about the occasion, and I’ll write something on your behalf’ then it’s a really nice way to reach out to people that they’ve maybe not seen for months.”

Find out more at wonderwordspersonalisedpoems.com