The book arrived by post: a gift from a friend, beeswax reading candle included. Yes, post. The weight of a song is one thing, but poetry is obviously another level. The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter remained unopened for a week.

"It was scary and I didn't wanna touch it," Angie Hart says. "I just wanted to control everything. Get drunk for a few nights, do a few little personal ceremonies, tell this grief how it's gonna be. Of course that didn't work."

Like the close friend the Frente singer had recently lost, Porter died of breast cancer in 2008. The Bee Hut was her last testament. "I opened it one day and it was on," Hart says. "It was so visible. She didn't flinch … It felt so alive and so joyous, sharing this art form that got her through."

For the grieving songwriter, it was a turning point. Set to her own tune and arrangement, two of those poems appear on Borrowed Verse, a new multi-artist album of poems made songs. "The melody and the meter, they're in there," Hart says. You just have to be in tune with them.

That's kind of how it works for Simon Munro, too. Whatever tune arrives on first reading is hard to shake, he says. Borrowed Verse has been his baby for around three years of sporadic touring, with a snowballing roster of musicians, from Tinpan Orange's Emily Lubitz to classical singer and composer Paul Bonetti.