Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast

A Cornish castle built to answer the guns, then Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" on Armistice Day. Win a signed book below. Alden Carrow reads "Pendennis Castle" from Cornwall In Verse - Tide To Tor In Poetry, then explores Owen's First World War sonnet and the craft of the quiet answer: how a poem can turn on one word, from noise to silence, and how to write remembrance poetry without the...

Why did the sea chase Emily Dickinson up the beach? Her poem, plus my Kynance Cove. Suggest a guest poem to win a signed book! Kynance Cove, on Cornwall's Lizard peninsula, is made of serpentine, rock that began as ocean floor about 375 million years ago. Alden Carrow reads Emily Dickinson's poem "I started early, took my dog", then his own poem from Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry. Hear...

A bridge belongs to neither bank. It’s all middle. In Episode 49 we travel to the eastern edge of Cornwall, to Saltash on the River Tamar, where Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge (1859) and the Tamar Bridge (1961) now stand side by side, facing Plymouth across the water. First, a guest poem: three excerpts, shared with the poet’s agreement, from an untitled prose poem by living poet Richard Rathwell, a...

A garden that vanished under brambles. A poem about a chapel built where children once played. And a pencilled date on a wall: August 1914. In Episode 48, we open Cornwall In Verse and walk into the Lost Gardens of Heligan, above Mevagissey, where the gardeners went to war and the roots kept the garden. Our guest poem is William Blake’s The Garden of Love, twelve lines from Songs of Experience, in...

A blast furnace that ran day and night for years. A poem in which the machines talk as if they made themselves. And a seaside town that carried on. In Episode 47, we go to Redcar, where the River Tees meets the North Sea, eleven years after the fire in the furnace went out, and ask how a poem can honour what a town made without turning it into a museum piece. Our guest poem is Rudyard Kipling’s Th...

A waterfall with no water. A cliff that remembers the river that made it. And a poet who refuses to say farewell. In Episode 46, we stand beneath Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales, an eighty-metre curve of limestone cut by Ice Age meltwater, and ask how a poem can describe something that is no longer there. Our guest poem is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's section 123 of In Memoriam, twelve lines from th...

A city remembers nothing of itself. A tower stands broken on purpose. And a poet, four hundred years dead, argues that only verse survives — while his own house burned in Ireland. In Episode 45, we travel inland to Helmsley, a market town on the edge of the North York Moors, where a castle holds a question every ruin asks: *What good is it that I was?* Our guest poem is Edmund Spenser's "The Ruine...

On a Yorkshire headland above the North Sea, one ruined abbey produced two unlikely legacies: the first named poet in the English language, and the legend that became Dracula. This week, poet Alden Carrow pairs Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 poem "The City in the Sea" — a drowned city where nothing moves and Death alone presides — with his own poem "Whitby Abbey," from North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To S...

In a corner of a farmyard, a rusty harrow, a worn-out plough, and a stone roller have vanished under nettles for years. Most poets would mourn that. Edward Thomas doesn't. In eight quiet lines, written during the war that would kill him within months, he simply confesses a preference: "This corner of the farmyard I like most." No metaphor, no lesson, no grief. Just liking, stated plainly. Thomas c...

Beneath the Pump Room in Bath, water rises at forty-six degrees, more than a million litres a day. It fell as rain on the Mendips around ten thousand years ago, travelled three kilometres down into the earth's heat, and is only now finding its way back into the light. It has never once altered its behaviour on anyone's account. And for two thousand years, people have stood at its edge and asked it...

9th September 2026. It is a special day tomorrow, so this week's episode — which would normally reach you on Wednesday morning at six — will instead arrive on Thursday morning at the same hour. One day later than usual, and then we return to our regular rhythm the following week. This podcast keeps a steady time on purpose, and I know many of you listen on a particular morning, on a particular wal...

Tomorrow, the book comes out. Before that: we go back to where it all began. John Clare's Emmonsail's Heath in Winter—written by a farm labourer watching a heron flap off, a crow swing on a rotten branch, twenty long-tailed tits hang on a twig and start again. Nothing in it performs for him. Nothing waits. His first appearance on the show, and worth the wait. Then Somerset Awaits, the opening poem...

What does it take for a drowned thing to stay readable, instead of just staying intact? We begin with the Titanic. Thomas Hardy's The Convergence of the Twain, written nine days after the sinking for a charity matinee at Covent Garden—a poem so cold about human loss that it never once mentions a body. Jewels lie "lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind," and the fish who find the...

What do you do with the most mythologised hill in England, when your own poem refuses to mention the myth at all? We begin with the legend at full volume: Tennyson's Avalon, from The Passing of Arthur—an island where "falls not hail, or rain, or any snow," promised to a dying king who admits, in the same breath, that he isn't sure it's real. Then we climb the real hill. Glastonbury Tor: a residual...

What do you do with the ten thousand years underneath your feet, while half a million pairs of shoes wear the path above it smooth? We begin in 1858 with Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill—a poem built as pure dialogue, one voice growing more anxious with every question, the other never once changing its temperature. Rossetti's first appearance on the show, and overdue. Then we descend into Cheddar—a vi...

What do a Victorian priest praising a spotted cow and a wind-scoured Somerset hilltop have in common? Everything doesn't have to match to hold together. We begin in Wales, 1877, with Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty—ten and a half lines praising the dappled, the "counter, original, spare, strange"—a poem that finds God not in perfection but in mixture, unpublished until 29 years after Hopkins's...

What happens when a storm stops being a threat and becomes a release? This week, we climb. We begin on a Yorkshire moor in 1836, with eighteen-year-old Emily Brontë—a poet who walked the moors alone for hours, in weather that sent everyone else indoors, and came back each time not diminished but restored. Her poem High Waving Heather doesn't watch the storm from safety. It finds freedom inside it....

What turns a ledger into a home? This week, we explore the space between a posting and a place—between empire's measurement and the small, unmeasured things that root us to somewhere for good. We begin with Rudyard Kipling's Roman Centurion's Song—a centurion recalled to Rome after forty years in Britain, discovering that he can no longer leave. His love for this cold, wet, provincial frontier has...

On the Solway coast sits a town that was never discovered, only designed. Silloth's dock gates open for exactly two hours around every high tide — no more, no less — and its whole working life has been built around that narrow window for over a century.. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what real mastery actually looks like, when the thing you are mastering was never yours to command. The guest...

On a fell above Buttermere, a mountain is quietly coming apart. This is Haystacks — Alfred Wainwright's favourite fell in all of Lakeland, the one he asked to be scattered upon when he died. In 1991, near the tarn called Innominate, he was. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks a question that follows every walker eventually: is anything ever truly lost, or does it only change its form? The guest poe...

Some towns are built to do one thing. Cleator Moor was built to dig iron. Beneath this small West Cumbrian town runs hematite — the rich red ore that, in the nineteenth century, turned a quiet rural settlement into a boom town almost overnight, so busy and so Irish it was known for a time as "Little Ireland." Then the ore ran out. The mines were capped. The work was shipped to the coast and never...

Beneath the streets of Camborne, the engines once roared. This was the capital of the Cornish mining world — the town of Richard Trevithick and the Camborne School of Mines, whose engineers sank shafts on every continent on earth. A place that genuinely changed the world. And a place that paid for it, in lungs full of dust and lives cut short in the dark. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks one of...

In 1770, Oliver Goldsmith stood in the ruins of a village and wrote its elegy. The mill was silent. The brook was choked with weeds. The people were gone — driven off their own land so a wealthy man could enlarge his private park. Ill fares the land, Goldsmith warned, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. He was describing one English village. He could have been descri...

In the autumn of 1817, exiled from England and on the run from a continent's worth of scandal, Lord Byron sat at a desk above the Adriatic and addressed the sea. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll! He had watched his reputation collapse, his marriage break, and a society close its doors against him. And in the ocean he found, with something close to relief, a force that had noticed none...

On a rocky water-edge in County Sligo, a young William Butler Yeats hears voices on the wind. They are not human voices. They are the faeries of Irish folklore, and they are calling a human child away — out of his mother's house, into the wild lakes and woods and waters, beyond the reach of a world that has grown too noisy with its grief. Come away, O human child, they sing, four times across the...