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© 2024 Planet Poetry
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Love poetry? Join Robin and Peter and their guests as they read poems, chat about all things poetry and generally explore the bedazzling world of Planet Poetry. Since we started this podcast in 2020 we've interviewed dozens of poets and poetry editors, discussed all the thorny issues about the poetry world and delved into our favourite poetry past and present. We don't have sponsors and we don't interrupt the flow with ads, so if you like what we do, please buy us a coffee or two at buymeacoffee.com/planetpoetry to help keep the poddy going! Thanks!
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Send us a Text Message.Silent faces and displaced lives. Seni Seneviratne gives voice to overshadowed Black children, exotic pages and servants in the portraits of nobility and the mercantile class in 18th Century paintings. Other of her poised and beautiful poems, from The Go-Away Bird from Peepal Tree Press, are infused with bird imagery, and the migrations of travellers going deeper into themselves. Meanwhile Robin jumps into the world of online poetry magazines, looking at the long-...
Send us a Text Message.Staring at the mark on the wall where that painting once hung? Wondering why the moon, seen by others, has been hidden from you? You've entered the world of Absence (Cheerio Poetry 2024) by Ali Lewis. He guides us through this exceptional first collection, from the painful ache of lost love, to the possibilities unleashed by running over a pheasant.Robin talks about poetry & walking, via Robert Frost's poem Acquainted with the Night. We also ventur...
Send us a Text Message.Hop aboard. No time to idle in green pastures here, instead let’s follow Roy Mc Farlane as he guides us through his collection Living by Troubled Waters from Nine Arches Press weaving the toxic legacy of slavery in the complexity and warmheartedness of his own personal history. Plus we glance at a gorgeous poem, Leaves, from Ursula K. Le Guin, mull over the latest winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition, The Time I Was Mugged in New York City, by Imog...
Send us a Text Message.We’re back with global ambitions for World Poetry Day. First we skip over to Dublin to interview Seán Hewitt about his gorgeous second collection Rapture’s Road, published 2024 by Cape. Enriched by the traditions of Irish poetry, Seán’s work speaks unflinchingly to contemporary issues as well as conjuring moments of absolute beauty from language. Robin and Peter learn more about International Poetry Day, and Robin discovers a fabulous poem by Netherlands poe...
Send us a Text Message.A classic interview from the archive: Inua Ellams talking about his extraordinary book The Actual (Penned in the Margins, 2020), a powerful, personal and often very funny collection that pokes a sharp stick at the legacy of British Empire, foolish machismo, hero culture, relationships and much more.Support the Show.Planet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!
Send us a Text Message.Go on. Press the button. Paul Stephenson guides us through a choice of his varied, formally diverse and moving elegies in his Carcanet collection Hard Drive -- written in the years following his partner's sudden death -- and find a curiously life-affirming exploration of grief and its aftermath. Robin and Peter also make their way across Europe (simultaneously in both the 21st and the 19th Centuries) in the company of Janet Sutherland whose The Messenger Ho...
Send us a Text Message.We are back and delighted to bring you more wonderful poetry in 2024. So let's illuminate the new year with Tamar Yoseloff, whose long engagement with visual art has created a poetry that blazes out against a black backdrop. We’ll hear poems from two Seren collections A Formula for Night her New and Selected poems and The Black Place (2019). Plus we will get a preview of her forthcoming collection Belief Systems from Nine Arches.And we disc...
Send us a Text Message.Happy New Year! We're on our festive break, but wanted to share with you another classic interview from the archive. Here's Kim Moore talking about her Forward Prize-winning collection 'All the Men I Never Married' from Seren Books.Support the Show.Planet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!
Send us a Text Message.Psssst! Here's a moment of reprieve from the festive frenzy... Follow Jane Clarke wobbling on an oak log slick with frost, then she smooths us down a butter path to a place of poetry. Here we revel in the beauty and quiet authority of Jane's collection A Change in the Air shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot prize among others.Peter finds listening to a Christmas carol to be a slippery slope to goblin greengrocers and secretive Christina Rossetti, while Robin rouses the ...
Send us a Text Message.Go on. We dare you to reach across the gulf to Planet Poetry. This time you'll find Martyn Crucefix, reading poems from his Salt collection Between A Drowning Man. This ambitious, timely work depicts the isolation and polarisation brought about by Brexit, Populism, social media and more. A deep and subtle work that reflects these troubled times, and yearns towards empathy. Then let's delight in a poem from Clare Best’s new book Beyond The Gate a...
Send us a Text Message.All aboard! Planet Poetry is going to rattle you into a Belfast haunted by absence. Here you'll meet Leontia Flynn and discover how the upheavals of Brexit and the pandemic have been echoed by ruptures and aloneness in her own life. Her magnificent response is the spare and intensely-moving collection Taking Liberties from Cape. Meanwhile Peter has been reading I will Not Fold These Maps by the Bidoon (stateless) poet Mona Kareem, whose refreshingly di...
Send us a Text Message.Hush your vuvuzela! Barnsley's own Ian McMillan lobs the keeper and helps Planet Poetry's fourth season start with a belting win. He treats us to selections from To Fold The Evening Star, New and Selected Poems from Carcanet as well as his smith|doorstop pamphlet, Yes But What Is This? What Exactly? Plus your podcast pals Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny strap on their boots and shin pads, and discuss everything from Spitfires to a Welsh shrine-like display for R. S...
Send us a Text Message.Summertime. Ho, hum. But wait! What's this on your device. Planet Poetry? Robin and Peter have descended into The Vaults to present a conversation first broadcast in October 2020 with the fabulous Pascale Petit. Enjoy!Support the Show.Planet Poetry is a labour of love, paid for out of our own pockets.If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!
Send us a Text Message.Follow us as we slip into le Quartier asiatique through a noirish wordscape, when the flutes in the musique concrète are interrupted by David Bowie, Kate Bush and Genesis… Suddenly you realise you are hearing Richard Skinner sharing poems from his collections Dream Into Play (Poetry Salzburg 2022) and White Noise Machine (Salt 2023). Wait! What’s he doing with those scissors? Oh my God… Is that the future leaking out?Cut to a potting shed of an English garden:...
Send us a Text Message.Pens down, everybody! Now look at me... Today we meet poets Kate Wakeling and Rachel Piercey, editor of Tyger Tyger Magazine, who will share insights about writing poetry for children -- the language, considerations and freedoms. We'll hear Kate read from Cloud Soup and Moon Juice (from the Emma Press) and Rachel read her poems from the Big Amazing Poetry Book (Macmillan) We contrast this with their work in publications for grown-ups, such as Rachel's ...
Send us a Text Message.Did you ever repeat a word so often that its meaning ebbed away? Or look so hard at an object -- say a glass of water -- that it began to hint at unknowable mysteries? No? Then you should join us as we meet Greta Stoddart and hear poetry from her new Bloodaxe collection Fool which will take you to an extraordinary place in your imagination where 'nothing might be what is called for'. Meanwhile Robin and Peter, invigorated by talking to third year creative wr...
Send us a Text Message.If you have endured a childhood overshadowed by profound betrayal and abuse, how do you learn to trust again? What kind of bravery must this take? We feature Clare Best reading from her poetry collections, Excisions and Each Other and also discuss her memoir The Missing List - written during the last illness of the father who had abused her as a child – described as ‘an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement’. Plus we enjoy an ...
Send us a Text Message.Keep the carriage curtains open as we chug into the post-industrial midlands of The Black Country. We're in the company of Liz Berry as she coins resonant new myths from her midland's dialect word hoard. But next stop is Liverpool, following orphaned Eliza The Home Child as she sets off for Nova Scotia in Berry's heartbreaking, just-published novel in verse about a girl sent to work as an indentured servant. Peter and Robin also report back on the winning po...
Send us a Text Message.Strap on your toughest boots. Now dodge the speeding cars as we match strides with Robert Hamberger. We discuss two works: his exceptional poetry collection Blue Wallpaper and his memoir A Length of Road -- recalling a time when Robert (facing a life crisis) retraced the footsteps of the 'peasant poet' John Clare who had, in 1841, escaped an asylum in Epping Forest. Robert walked the same 80 miles as John Clare, who had walked to Northamptonshire in th...
Send us a Text Message.Stop polishing that halo for a moment and listen to this! It's Mark Fiddes reading from his Live Cannon collection *Other Saints Are Available - a series of vivid and memorable footnotes to an increasingly polarised world... All via men roaring into flame from the neck up, the haircuts of Burnley defenders, brash parakeets and much more.And what do you do, as a poetry lover, when you just can't face reading another poem? Read something about poetry of course. Pete...
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