AN ELDERLY woman in Ilminster is celebrating this week after a book featuring more than 80 years of her poems was published.

Freda Cave's new book, Enjoy Your Words, has more than 100 poems in it, with the earliest dating back to when she was 12.

Freda, who has won a number of awards for her poems, said: "I was talking to a friend and she had read a lot of my poems. She said we must get these out. There are well over 100 there. she started making enquiries and we found a publisher who was happy to put it out.

"They were very interested right from the off. It was about six months between when we started and now.

"The oldest one is from when I was 12 and I am 93 next month. I write about anything at all, all kinds of poems. Serious ones, funny ones, all kinds of things. Anything that takes my mind.

"The publishers presented me with 100 copies and I am letting people take them and if they would like to give a donation to cancer research then that is what they are doing."

"The title comes from the first poem in the book which is a sonnet. I used to live in Bath and i used to go and enter the Bath Festival and one of the things you can do is write poems and stories.

One year it had the theme anagrams. The adjudicators at Bath Festival used to offer two words you could write about. One year it was smiles and mile which are anagrams of each other, and so I wrote the poem anagrams, which had in the last line, Enjoy Your Words.

I won the silver cup that year, and I've won it 11 times in total.

Mike Hill, who works at Vaughan Lee House where Freda lives, said: "I work here as the activities coordinator so I get to see Freda quite a bit.

"She has been writing poems for quite some time now, since she was a little girl. I think it is absolutely fantastic."