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The Classics
Porphyria’s Lover
Read by Anthony Thwaite
Porphyria’s Lover - Robert Browning - Read by Anthony Thwaite
The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in…
Poem
I’m looking at the white bunched head of a chrysanthemum when you arrive. The way the sunlight lops off half its hair is less of a mystery than you, leaning against sandstone, bisected by the string under your shirt….
Poem
(For Grace Mera Molisa) In this season of vegetables, the year you left us behind The Second Melanesian Festival swells Vila Black Brothers sing to wantok women in the solid dark at Independence Park a fourteen man string band…
Poem
Introducing that Most Marvellous Human Freak, the Bearded Lady Miss Lupin - Clare Pollard
So here you are, sir, in the shadow of the tilt, the tented dark, done with the stick and rag show: the dizzying plinky-plonk galloper tunes, the popcorn, piranhas & pin-heads, the Half-Woman – a bust on her pedestal…
Poem
Conductors of his Mystery - Anthony Joseph
for Albert Joseph The day my father came back from the sea broke and handsome I saw him walking across the savannah and knew at once it was him. His soulful stride, the grace of his hat, the serifs of…
Poet
Moniza Alvi
B. 1954
Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, came to England when she was a few months old, and grew up in Hatfield. The experience she describes in her recording of ‘growing up… and feeling half-Pakistani… on the edge of things’…
Poet
Imtiaz Dharker
B. 1954
Born in Pakistan and brought up in Scotland, Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker who divides her time between London and India. This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic…
Poet
Charles Wright
B. 1935
Charles Wright [b. 1935] is a poet whose work “catches the visible world at that endless moment before it trails into eternity” [Philip Levine]. This search for transcendence has sustained his long poetic career and has made Wright one of…
Poet
Adam O’Riordan
B. 1982
In writing at once intense and wistful, Adam O’Riordan deploys precise imagery and memorable music to poignant effect. His poems, concerned with erasure and the revivifying limits of verse’s charms, span from imaginative encounters with the past – the fear…
Poet
Bernardine Evaristo
B. 1959
Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south east London, the fourth of eight children, to an English mother, a schoolteacher, and Nigerian father, a welder and local Labour councillor. She was educated at Eltham Hill Girls Grammar School, the Rose…
Poet
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
B. 1947
Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998), as well as three of translations, the most recent one being Songs of Kabir (2011). In his…
Poet
Pascale Petit
B. 1953
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in Wales and France, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a…
Poet
Walter Raleigh
B. 1552 D. 1618
As a successful military adventurer and explorer, author and poet, Ralegh was a significant figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. He took expeditions to the New World, searching for El Dorado, and was an early colonizer, while also…
Poet
Kae Tempest
B. 1985
Born in south-east London where he still lives, Kae Tempest made his live debut as a spoken-word artist at sixteen. Having initially conceived of himself as a rapper, Tempest found his work was also extremely popular at poetry slams; he…
Poet
Seni Seneviratne
B. 1951
For Seni Seneviratne “the personal is political and they’re always intertwined” – a sentiment Seni embodies not only in her poetry but also across her life, advocating against war and for human rights, amongst various other campaigns. She is a…
Poet
Richard Murphy
B. 1927 D. 2018
Richard Murphy has been called a poet of two traditions, British and Irish. Born in 1927 at Milford, a small “Big House” of his mother’s Anglo-Irish family near Kilmaine, County Mayo, Richard spent five of his childhood years in the British…
Poet
Ahren Warner
B. 1986
Ahren Warner grew up in Lincolnshire before moving to London, then Paris. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Confer (Bloodaxe, 2011), which was both a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best…