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PODCAST

The Poetry Voice

Readings of poems from Old English to the present.

arts literature

All Episodes

00:03.34

David Jones from 'The Fatigue'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/06/26

David Jones (1895-1974) Why me? In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one? More generally, why did some soldiers sign up for the first world war and find themselves in units sent into action on their first day at the front while other, signing up on the same day find themselves transferred to garrison duties? Why me? What impossible string of accidents and co-incidences caused me to be here at that particular place and time? This extract from

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00:02:38

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'The City of Yes and the City...

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/06/25

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017) For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Perhaps even more visible than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued. Not in the case of this poem. Even if it

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00:00:38

Liam Guilar 's 'Shackleton's Grave.'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/06/18

This is the last poem in ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Shackleton’s Grave(A Wish) There will be peace and an end to traveling ,the colour of ocean under a polar sky, solid as mountains, to bear the brunt of storms that can no longer trouble the sleeper in the wind-raked earth. Time will be glacial, patient as icebergs where no rumours whisper, no duty calls, the strong heartbeat of spring and its flowers: the tides’ turn, the snow’s fall. (Liam Guilar) 'Rough spun to Close Weave' is available

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00:00:52

R.S.Thomas' 'Bravo'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/06/17

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admiration and enjoyment, ever since. In the twentieth century’s three horse Thomas race, I’d back R.S over Dylan and Edward. Over the course of a long writing life he produced a enormous number of high quality poems. ‘Collected Poems 1945-1990’ and ‘Collected Later poems 1988-2000’ combined run to over 800 pages. Most of the poems, like this one, take up

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00:00:54

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Whoso List to Hunt'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/05/27

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) When does English Poetry begin? You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen to it on the Poetry Voice: Caedmon’s Hymn isn’t written in English. You could argue for Chaucer, who is readable with patience by any literate modern English speaker. Or you could go straight to Wyatt. Who is perhaps the first English poet to sound like a modern poet. He has been the subject of two superb but very different, and therefore

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00:00:40

Sir Walter Ralegh's 'What is our life?'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/05/21

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618) The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it as a series of performances. It’s perhaps ironic that while his date of birth may be disputed, the place time and manner of his dying could probably be noted exactly. Even his execution had elements of performance.

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00:01:27

Robert Graves' 'Ulysses'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/05/14

Robert Graves (1895-1985) There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero. Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.

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00:00:46

W.B.Yeats' 'For Anne Gregory'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/05/07

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.

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00:00:38

Liam Guilar's 'You never asked me for the Moon'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/04/30

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me. My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva. Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does. Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the

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00:01:29

Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/04/23

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual. But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most

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00:00:58

Seamus Heaney's 'Postscript'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/04/16

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) RTE produced a box set of cds of Heaney reading his collected poems. And once you’ve heard him read them, they never sound right in any other voice. I’m no longer sure if it’s the poem or my memory of his performance which I admire.

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00:02:41

Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/04/08

Robert Browning (1812-1889) Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, received disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long. Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said,

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00:02:34

Liam Guilar's 'More than a broken token song'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/04/01

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’ But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes. In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, from sea, and

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00:01:17

Basil Bunting's 'Now there's no hope of going back'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/03/25

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem. The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.

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00:01:27

John Agard's 'Reporting from the front line of the...

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/03/18

John Agard (1949-) My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’. I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening. When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was

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00:01:11

John Clare's 'I Am'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/03/11

John Clare (1793-1864) Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum. But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts

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00:00:53

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/03/04

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise. Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase

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00:00:57

Louise MacNeice's 'Thalassa

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/02/27

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy and defeat and determination. Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey. This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful edition of MacNeice,

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00:02:15

Liam Guilar's 'The Ugly Little Man's Version'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/02/20

Rumplestiltskin. This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it. Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how inconsistent when you’re going along with the story. So here is the Ugly Little Man, Rumplestiltskin

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00:01:00

Percy Shelley's 'England 1819'

The Poetry Voice ·

2020/02/18

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder to believe in. It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or

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