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Last broadcast on Sat, 17 Sep 2011, 23:30 on BBC Radio 4 (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
Roger McGough introduces a wide range of poetry requests, read by Mark Meadows and Catherine Cusack.
Michael Longley, Jean Sprackland and Clare Pollard also read their own work.
Bicycles, skips, alarm clocks and public statues all feature in poems today. Topics include travel, faith, and political power, with work by Percy Shelley, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, Jenny Lewis and an archive recording of Michael Donaghy who died in 2004. There are poems by two members of the Rhymers' Club, founded by Yeats in 1890. One is by Ernest Dowson - listen out for a phrase that became a famous film and book title. Robinson Jeffers and James Fenton consider existence with the help of vultures and skips, and there is an elegant story by David Scott of how the Marquis of Ripon rescued an Italian church from the brink of destruction.
Producer: Sarah Langan.
This week's poems
Feelings
by Jean Sprackland
From Tilt
Pub: Cape
Machines
by Michael Donaghy
From Shibboleth
Pub: Oxford University Press
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson
From The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950
Pub: Oxford University Press
Epitaphium Citharistiae
by Victor Plarr
Taken from The Grangers website
Vulture
by Robinson Jeffers
From The New Oxford Book of American Verse
Pub: Oxford University Press
Hysteria
by TS Eliot
From The Oxford Book of English Verse
Pub: Oxford University Press
The Marquis of Ripon Purchases the Convent of San Damiano
by David Scott
From Playing for England
Pub: Bloodaxe
The Collar
by George Herbert
From George Herbert – The Complete English Poems
Pub: Penguin
The Caravan
by Clare Pollard
From Changeling
Pub: Bloodaxe
The Skip
by James Fenton
From James Fenton – Selected Poems
Pub: Penguin
Pushkin is Everything
by Jenny Lewis
From Fathom
Pub: Carcanet
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From The Rattle Bag
Pub: Faber and Faber
Alarm
by Jean Sprackland
From Tilt
Pub: Cape
White Farmhouse
by Michael Longley
From A Hundred Doors
Pub: Cape
Broadcasts
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Sun 11 Sep 201116:30
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Sat 17 Sep 201123:30
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