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
Cilla McQueen
B. 1949
In the face of loss - human, natural, temporal - McQueen finds salvation in language. Often her work is about artistic endeavour itself: the desire to freeze time, the realisation that this is impossible - Sarah Quigley
Poet
Jeremy Hooker
B. 1941
I think of poetry as an art of seeing, an art by which, in my blindness, I learn to see. - Jeremy Hooker, 'At the Edge'
Poet
Seamus Heaney
B. 1939 D. 2013
And here is love / like a tinsmith's scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin - 'Mossbawn Sunlight', Seamus Heaney
Poet
George Mackay Brown
B. 1921 D. 1996
The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light. - George Mackay Brown
Poet
Kathleen Jamie
B. 1962
...if poetry is a method of approaching truths, and each of us with a human soul and 'a tongue in oor heids' can make an approach toward a truth, poetry is inherently democratic. - Kathleen Jamie
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
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
Kathleen Raine
B. 1908 D. 2003
Young or old / What was I but the story told / By an unageing one? (Kathleen Raine, from 'Ah, many, many are the dead...')
Poet
Sean O’Brien
B. 1952
I hope to write poetry that uses the full keyboard, claiming its full range of method and subject. - Sean O'Brien