If you'd like to suggest a particular poem for possible inclusion in the programme, contact us - don't forget to tell us why you'd like to hear your choice...
Sunday 27 January 2008 1630
(Rpt on Saturday 2 February 2330)
This week, a selection of poems that you love and have asked to hear again, from Yevtushenko to Yeats, read by actors including Stephen Rea, Judi Dench, Paul Scofield and Ronald Pickup. Felix Dennis reads his poem The Hornbeams.
Poem of the Week. Each week you will be able to read the text of one of the featured poems. This week the poem is Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Click on the title of the poem to read it.
Featured poems
Colours by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Robin Milner Gulland
From: Selected Poems
Publ: Penguin
Cinders by Roger McGough
From: Collected Poems
Publ: Viking
The Midnight Skaters by Edmund Blunden
From: Poems of Many Years
Publ: Collins
The Hornbeams by Felix Dennis
From: Lone Wolf
Publ: Hutchinson
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by WB Yeats
From: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Publ: palgrave
The Landscape Near an Aerodrome by Stephen Spender
From: New Collected Poems
Publ: faber
Pledge to the Freight Canvasser by Carol Rumens
From: Hex
Publ: Bloodaxe
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
From: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Publ: palgrave
It Was Long Ago by Eleanor Farjeon
From: The Oxford Treasury of Time Poems
Kubla Khan by Coleridge. This is the 'Poem of the Week' - you can read the text by clicking on the title
From: Poems
Publ: Everyman
A Disused Shed in County Wexford by Derek Mahon
From: Selected Poems
Publ: Penguin
Coming Up
3rd February. 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is among the requests for poems by two great and original Victorian poets - husband and wife Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Gabriel Woolf and Rosalind Shanks are the readers.
10th February. Not Love Perhaps. Poems that take a wry look at love and relationships with works by Wendy Cope and RS Thomas among others. The readers are Mark Meadows, Kate Littlewood and Gabriel Woolf.
17th February Featuring poems by writers perhaps better-known as novelists – such as DH Lawrence, Muriel Spark, Robert Graves, and Dermot Bolger. Also rare archive of the Welsh poet WH Davies introducing and reading his poem Leisure – with those famous lines:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
The readers are John Mackay and Bonnie Hurren.
17th February marks the end of this series but we'll be back on 18th May. Please keep the requests coming in - and it's always good to hear the reasons behind your choices.
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