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Poet
Stewart Conn
B. 1936
Stewart Conn is one of Scotland’s more softly spoken bards, but his particular Celtic muse is no less intense for all his quieter rhetorical flourishes and domestic asides. Indeed, his poetry has an affecting immediacy which comes from its easy…
Poet
Katrina Porteous
B. 1960
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to parents from North East England, and grew up in County Durham, where she attended Durham High School for Girls. She graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1982 with a double first in…
Poet
W. H. Davies
B. 1871 D. 1940
The Welsh poet William Henry Davies wrote the poem ‘Leisure’, which famously begins:‘What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare.’ The poem’s theme is reflected in Davies’s own outdoor life, which was unconventional….
Poet
Hugh MacDiarmid
B. 1892 D. 1978
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) remains a controversial and influential figure. Born a postman’s son in Langholm Dumfriesshire, he trained to be a school teacher in Edinburgh, then worked on local newspapers in Scotland and South Wales before enlisting in the Royal…
Poet
Edward Baugh
B. 1936 D. 2023
Edward Baugh is probably best known as a literary critic whose distinguished academic career has been devoted to West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of the towering Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott,…
The Classics
Sailing to Byzantium
Read by Maurice Riordan
Sailing to Byzantium - William Butler Yeats - Read by Maurice Riordan
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born,…
Poem
Last night I saw the sword Excalibur It flew above the cloudy palaces And as it passed I clearly read the words Which were engraven on its blade And one side of the sword said Take Me The other side…
Poem
One wet, early evening in the sheep-shearing season I saw that occasional, rare thing – A broken shaft of a rainbow with its trembling light Beyond the downpour of the rain And I thought of the last, wild look you…
The Classics
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Read by Simon Armitage
by Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of Reading Gaol - Oscar Wilde - Read by Simon Armitage
He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed….
Poem
GUINEP Our mothers have a thing about guinep: Mind you don’t eat guinep in your good clothes. It will stain them. Mind you don’t climb guinep tree. You will fall. Mind you don’t swallow guinep seed. It will grow inside…
Poem
Nothings’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day, the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up the scree-slope of what at high-tide will be again an island, to where, a decade since well-being staked the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us back, year after…
Poem
The temporary face I draw your face on the huge sand in the early morning, when small crabs run and hide in the holes I have provided for your eyes. I go away. Through the day people come and go,…
Poem
Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly, my grandfather is driving me through the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace at five a.m. He’s in the plaid dressing gown he wore to die in, and he’s shaved, badly, flecks of dark…
Poem
The Back Seat of My Mother’s Car - Julia Copus
We left before I had time to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny rivers down my face and legs, but…
Poem
Listening to music I don’t know because it doesn’t remind me of anything. This town is a different colour in the rain and the mood is evaporating quickly into pain that bypasses the synapses and goes for the heart, my…
Poem
Through the frost-hole of the passenger window your tenant’s house is ringed in winter. He’s turning the snow from the path that lay in the night. He can far less handle a spade than you, dipping the lug as…
Poem
I have never opened a book in my life, made love to a woman, picked up a knife, taken a drink, caught the first train or walked beyond the last house in the lane. Nor could I put a name…
Poem
Going Through the Old Photos - Michael Rosen
Me, my dad and my brother we were looking through the old photos. Pictures of my dad with a broken leg and my mum with big flappy shorts on and me on a tricycle when we got to one of…