The Arts Council has pushed the concept of a poet-in-residence to the limit in appointing a Derbyshire writer to this role for the England cricket team's Ashes tour of Australia.
David Fine, whose proposal for a roving residency was described by the Arts Council's Peter Knott as "refreshingly out of the ordinary", will be publishing 25 poems - one for each day's play of the five-Test series - at the close of play each evening on ashespoetry.net.
He'll also be engaging with the Barmy Army and writing a series of "poetical-anthropological" essays.
So what will the poems be like? Fresh from a grilling by John Humphrys on the Today programme he was anxious to stress the inclusive nature of the project, describing the poems he'll be writing as "easily accessible" and pouring scorn on poets who relish the incomprehensibility of their work - enough to raise the hackles of any self-respecting poetry snob.
But even a quick glance at his blog shows that Fine is no doggerel merchant. The poem he says gave him the idea for the project, an account of Shahid Afridi's Faisalabad disgrace, weaves together the poet digging in Derbyshire with the cricketer digging up the wicket in Pakistan - not a clunky end-rhyme in sight. Gaps and enjambments conjure up a quiet grief in a portrait of his home town's Remembrance Day commemoration.
All of which bodes well for his winter's excursion - though what the Barmy Army will make of a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned "I speak of bats, balls and wickets" in homage to Virgil's Aeneid remains to be seen.
