Explore Poetry
Not sure where to start? Who to listen to? What to read? The links below will help you - simply search below using names or key words to explore all our poetry recordings, texts, interviews and a huge range of other materials.
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Poet
Michael Hamburger
B. 1924 D. 2007
...as both poet and translator he has succeeded over many decades in placing the best silences in the best order. - Dennis O'Driscoll
Poet
Brendan Kennelly
B. 1936 D. 2021
A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he's interested in capturing it. - Brendan Kennelly
Poet
Andrew Motion
B. 1952
My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. - Andrew Motion
Poet
Poet
George Szirtes
B. 1948
Poetry's only obligation is to the truth. Whether this truth is widely popular or not is irrelevant. It should be the best truth possible and that is the only quality that gives it any hope of survival. - George Szirtes
Poet
Ian Duhig
B. 1954
I do mock literature and take it seriously at the same time, but anyone who is passionately attached to a football team will have similar mixed feelings - Ian Duhig
Poet
Ruth Padel
B. 1947
Go for it, petal. Nothing's as real as what you write. (from Writing to Onegin, Ruth Padel)
Poet
Jean Binta Breeze
B. 1956 D. 2021
wen yuh see she walk//holdin freedom water//balance pon she head - 'caribbean woman', Jean 'Binta' Breeze
Poet
John Ashbery
B. 1927 D. 2017
For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture. - John Ashbery
Poet
Margaret Atwood
B. 1939
With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen. - Margaret Atwood
Poet
Alan Brownjohn
B. 1931
I've always been concerned to get into [my poetry] the details of daily living which portray - or betray - human strengths and weaknesses and oddities. - Alan Brownjohn
Poet
D. J. Enright
B. 1920 D. 2002
As a new empire swells into the full glare of the global limelight, its novelists and balladeers could very well take a good lesson from Enright: Look long and hard. Write clearly. And keep it sharp. - James Norton, Flakmag