A 12-part series on Sundays 16:30 - 17:00 (repeated Saturdays 23:30pm)
20 February - 8 May
Sundays 4.30-5.00pm
A personal journey around the landscapes of British poetry presented by Andrew Motion. Find out the poems featured in each programme, and those suggested by listeners.
Programme 1: Sunday 20 February
Borders.
Thinking about the places where one thing ends and becomes something else.
Programme 2: Sunday 27 February
Heartlands Is there a connection between the geographical middle of the country and our sense of its emotional core?
Programme 3: Sunday 6 March
Landscapes of the Mind Poems which establish a manifestly invested world in order to advance recognisable truths about human nature..
Programme 4: Sunday 13 March
Mountains The mountains of the mind as well as those on a map. Fog, effort, fear and ice..
Programme 5: Sunday 20 March
Labyrinths The city experience above all - to be lost in a twisting jumble of streets. The mishmash of people, places and things - beguiling or threatening, liberating or oppressive. The fear of the tunnel and the maze. Ancient or modern?
Programme 6: Sunday 27 March
Coasts/Edges Does our islandness still define us? Why do we want to go down to the sea; why can't we leave a beach without picking up something?
Programme 7: Sunday 3 April
Not England
So much of British poetry isn't 'English', but is much of that poetry about not being England? The poetry of immigration and opposition, of occupation and imperialism, the Celtic song and fringe revitalising the centre from the edges, the south from the north.
Programme 8: Sunday 10 April
Flatlands
Big skies and featurelessness or a wealth of detail at ground level. Are people dwarfed by flatlands or made to stand tall. Is flat empty? What do poets like in flatlands?
Programme 9: Sunday 17 April
Crowds Modernity defined. Crush and anonymity. Energy and speed. Dreary oppression and uniformity - the crowded city has been evoked as all these by poets.
Programme 10: Sunday 24 April
Exile/Rootlessness
A clearer sense of here by going there? Home thoughts from abroad. The warm south; a refuge for free thinking, free living, free love? Poets as people who don't want to belong to any club.
Programme 11: Sunday 1 May
Rivers From the source to the mouth - a parable of a poem. Lives flow, poems do the same. The rhythms and cycles of water. Poets and swimming. A mapping of the living arteries of the island.
Programme 12: Sunday 8 May
Off The Map What have we missed out? Love poems, hate poems; poems of god and of war. And what do our listeners think we have missed. From Sir Gawain as he was first described to Simon Armitage's new retelling of the story.
