Planet Poetry

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 abo...

Send us Fan Mail 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! If you enjoy the podcast,...

Send us Fan Mail 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 2...

Send us Fan Mail 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 o...

Send us Fan Mail 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! If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee! 

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 F...

Send us Fan Mail 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 bo...

Send us Fan Mail We revisit the Spring of 2021 and Robin's interview with Kathryn Maris , principally about her collection The House with only and Attic and a Basement  (Penguin, 2018). Support the show Planet Poetry is a labour of love! If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee! 

Send us Fan Mail Another absolute sparkler from our trove of first season interviews. Charlotte Gann talks about her exceptional Happenstance Press collections, Noir , and The Girl Who Cried .   Back with season four on October 12 2023 Support the show Planet Poetry is a labour of love! If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee! 

Send us Fan Mail Another gem from the archives to tide you over the long, hot (?) summer of 2023...the brilliant Clare Shaw was our second interviewee on the podcast back in 2020, and here she is talking to Robin about her 2018 Bloodaxe collection Flood. Support the show Planet Poetry is a labour of love! If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee! 

Send us Fan Mail 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! If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee! 

Send us Fan Mail 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?...

Send us Fan Mail 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 (Macmilla...

Send us Fan Mail 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 cal...

Send us Fan Mail 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 importa...

Send us Fan Mail 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 abou...

Send us Fan Mail 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. R...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail Hop aboard! And join your Planet Poetry pals as we bravely embark on a new year. Strap in beside a child of six -- flying away from her family, culture and language -- to arrive, wordlessly, in a new country and a new life.  Mimi Khalvati shares poems from her exquisite Carcanet collection Afterwardness and relives the journey that utterly changed the course of her life. Robin and...

Send us Fan Mail What's that? The airy caper of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and their mates? No it's Planet Poetry bringing you Matthew Stewart, who - by some uncanny podcast magic - is sheltering from the sweltering heat of the Spanish sun. His collection The Knives of Villalejo provides clues to what could have coaxed a poet from the cul-de-sacs of suburban Surrey to the vineyards of Extre...

Send us Fan Mail What's that popping and blazing from your favourite podcast device? A plethora of lightbulb moments, that's what.  This episode features an in depth conversation with Sarah Barnsley whose bravura first collection The Thoughts has been published by Smith | Doorstop.  With immense originality she deals with the intrusive thoughts that are a hallmark of  obsessive-compulsiv...

Send us Fan Mail Here we go again, blazing through the vast firmaments... We go all starry and stripy this week as we meet Shane McCrae - one of the US's most celebrated new poets - to be awed by the Miltonic vastness of an imagination that electrifies his collections  Cain Named The Animal and Sometimes I Never Suffered . Meanwhile Robin continues the epic theme in St Lucia, by embarking on...