Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
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Poem
Look – it’s the Lively, hauled out above the tideline up on a trailer with two flat tyres. What – 14 foot? Clinker-built and chained by the stern to a pile of granite blocks, but with the bow still pointed…
Poem
It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom… I was a weaver, and I wove The moody fabric of my dream. By day I laboured at the loom And glimpsed the image of a love I…
Poem
How hard it is to take September straight – not as a harbinger of something harder. Merely like suds in the air, cool scent scrubbed clean of meaning – or innocent of the cold thing coldly meant. How hard the…
Poem
Old Man
Read by Helen Thomas
Old Man - Edward Thomas - Read by Helen Thomas
Old Man, or Lad’s-love,—in the name there’s nothing To one that knows not Lad’s-love, or Old Man, The hoar-green feathery herb, almost a tree, Growing with rosemary and lavender. Even to one that knows it well, the names Half decorate, half…
Poem
IV I wish there were a passage underground That led by magic to your house and bed, So I could be beside you at a bound When I had made the journey in my head. Then I should disappear and…
Poem
The Sea at evening moves across the sand. Under a reddening sky I watch the freedom of a band Of soldiers who belong to me. Stripped bare For bathing in the sea, they shout and run in the warm…
The Classics
Sonnet 143
Read by Fiona Sampson
Sonnet 143 - William Shakespeare - Read by Fiona Sampson
Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay; Whilst her neglected child holds her in…
The Classics
Sonnet 49
Read by Bernard O'Donoghue
Sonnet 49 - William Shakespeare - Read by Bernard O'Donoghue
Against that time, if ever that time come, When I shall see thee frown on my defects, When as thy love hath cast his utmost sum, Called to that audit by advis’d respects; Against that time when thou shalt strangely…
Poet
Nigel McLoughlin
B. 1968
Nigel McLoughlin was born in Enniskillen in 1968. In 2005 he moved to take up post at the University of Gloucestershire where he is now Professor of Creativity & Poetics. He has published five poetry collections and written many contributions…
Poet
Maurice Riordan
B. 1953
Maurice Riordan (born 1953) grew up in Lisgoold, County Cork. He was educated at University College Cork and at McMaster University in Canada. He lives in South London. He has published four collections of poetry, all with Faber and Faber:…
Poet
Charlotte Smith
B. 1749 D. 1806
Charlotte Turner was born in 1749 into the landed gentry. Her father owned two prosperous estates, Stoke Place in Surrey and Bignor Park in Sussex, but gambling losses destroyed his fortune; aged fifteen Charlotte was married off to the wealthy but…
Poet
Mark McWatt
B. 1947
Mark McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and attended schools all over the country, including mission schools in interior districts, as his father was a District officer in the colonial government of the time. He studied English at the University…
Poet
Anne Bradstreet
B. 1612 D. 1672
Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in England. In 1630 she emigrated to Massachusetts, with her father Thomas Dudley and her husband Simon Bradstreet. They sailed as members of the expedition led by John Winthrop, eventually the first governor of…
Poet
Anthony Joseph
B. 1966
Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, musician and lecturer. He began writing as a young child, and cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the spiritual Baptist church that his grandparents attended, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech….
Poet
Frances Leviston
B. 1982
Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982 and grew up in Sheffield. She read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2006. Her first collection, Public Dream, was…
Poet
F. W. Harvey
B. 1888 D. 1957
Frederick William Harvey is remembered today as a poet and central figure in a circle, including Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells, which emerged in Gloucester before the First World War. In the inter-war years, working as a solicitor, Harvey became…
Poet
Sinead Morrissey
B. 1972
Sinead Morrissey is the author of five collections of poetry, the last four of which have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award. Her most recent, Parallax, won the coveted prize in 2013. Her work has received numerous accolades including the Patrick…
Poet
Janet Frame
B. 1924 D. 2004
Known primarily as a prose-writer, Janet Frame’s passion since the age of nine was for poetry. She never stopped writing poems, expressing the recurrent themes of nature, animals, people, death and writing itself, and aiming for a “truthful vocabulary of…