App Of The Day: Tales From The Woods

Felix Dennis' latest poetry collection comes to iPad with extra audio and video.

Felix Dennis may be best known for his media career, taking in the infamous Oz obscenity trial, and building up Dennis Publishing into one of the key magazine publishers based in the UK. However, he's also a poet with six published collections under his belt, and plenty of critical acclaim.

The latest of those, Tales From The Woods, was published in 2010, but has now been turned into an iPad app by the team at Dennis Publishing. With T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land having been a bona-fide hit on the App Store earlier this year, there appears to be a decent number of iPad-owning poetry lovers, so can Felix's app tap into it?

It's certainly well designed, presenting the poems and illustrations from the book in an elegant and readable way. However, like The Waste Land, one of the key selling points here is the inclusion of audio and video to complement the text.

Tapping on the little headphone icon starts playing an audio reading of whatever poem you're currently on, while there is also video footage of Dennis himself reading the poems, on one of his regular performance tours. Overall, it's a slick package, with the big difference to The Waste Land being the price: rather than a tenner, Dennis is charging £0.69 for his app.