If you believe it’s better to have drunk and lost, than never to have drunk at all, then Yorkshire's latest pub project could be for you.

Selected pubs across the region are taking part in a new initiative, which sees short poems printed on beer mats, to encourage people to read and enjoy poetry as they go about their lives.

The mats are being distributed ahead of the publication of Half Moon: Poems About Pubs.

The first deliveries in York have gone to Brigantes in Micklegate, The Golden Ball in Cromwell Road and The Eagle and Child in High Petergate.

York Press:

Oz Hardwick, above, one of the poets whose work features in the book and on the mats, said: “I think it’s a great idea, as anything that puts poetry into unlikely public spaces – like the Poems on the Underground scheme, to name the most famous – has to be good.

York Press:

“There can be a sense that poetry is somehow removed from ordinary life, but the poems here are all communicate very directly with the reader. So I’m decidedly chuffed that one of my poems has been selected.”

He added: “My own beer mat poem, ‘The Plan,’ is about those conversations in the pub where you plan to change the world, or just your own life, and which may fade overnight, but could equally be the seeds of something in some way important. It’s an acknowledgement – and a celebration – of the pub as a social space, a place for human exchange that, in so many ways, is very significant.

"I’m making sure my own favourites in town have a stock of the beer mats that will, maybe, start off a few conversations in themselves.”

Details of the book& the beer mats can be found at http://www.owfpress.com/