Planet Poetry

Send us Fan Mail Forging manfully through cyberspace just to be with you... Robin and Peter are back with another cracking episode featuring  Peter Raynard, who guides us through his elegiac, furious and moving book Manland from Nine Arches Press. We'll hear how Peter Raynard's experiences of growing up working class in Coventry has stimulated this bracing poetic reappraisal of what it m...

Send us Fan Mail A tantalising twinkle on your favourite device? Relax! It’s Planet Poetry surging back with Season Three! Onboard for Episode 1 is  Kim Moore , talking about All The Men I Never Married , from Seren — a powerful work... Compelling, complex and empathetic. No wonder it is currently Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.  Plus your favourite podcasters discuss their...

Send us Fan Mail Whew. What a scorcher! And the weather's hot too. Slip on your shades, and listen to our interview with the incredibly talented Fiona Sampson , about her subtly structured collection Come Down , and wander with her into organic and resonant evocations of nature infused with memories and undermined by loss.    And instead of hunching over their computer screens, Robin and Pete...

Send us Fan Mail Fasten your safety belt and jet with us over to New York where we try to get a grip on the elusive eel of postmodernism. Who better to talk to than Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino ? He edits the outstanding postmodern magazine eratio and is author of an impressive body of postmodern work, which takes poetry, novels and critical theory into its ambit. A selection is available in The...

Send us Fan Mail This episode of Planet Poetry sees us striding forth with our seriousness only outdone by the luminosity of our socks...   Caleb Parkin entices us with his seriously playful take on eco poetry with readings from his vibrant collection This Fruiting Body .  Meanwhile Peter wanders into the Roman ruins of Bath as we look at one of the earliest English poems The Ruin   (in its transl...

Send us Fan Mail Strap in! We're going boldly into interplanetary space -- and returning to see our own planet through alien eyes.  J.O. Morgan tells us about his lates poetry collection The Martian’s Regress from Cape Poetry -- an epic, gripping sequence about a martian and his pale companion investigating a dead and sterile earth. Next... Time travel. We'll whisk you back to those pass...

Send us Fan Mail Then what angelic vision is this? It's Sasha Dugdale sharing poetry from her award-garlanded Carcanet collection Joy  including an excerpt from the title poem in the voice of William Blake's wife Catherine. And in her latest work Deformations Sasha tackles, among other things, the conflicted legacy of Eric Gill. Plus Robin pines for more work by Sam Willetts, reflecting...

Send us Fan Mail You remember us. Of course you do! It's your pals at Planet Poetry!  Fascinating in-depth conversations with poets and poetry lovers, bardic banter and more . Now spring is in the air, we have a spanking new episode featuring writer and poet Jeremy Page. With him we'll delve into The Naming a collection that braves the shifting sands of unreliable memories and the words...

Send us Fan Mail Ding-ding. All aboard! In this episode we ride a big red bus into the heart of London's hidden histories.  Robin meets poetical dynamic duo Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire whose beautifully researched collaboration London Undercurrents gives voice to women at pivotal moments in their lives. We catch glimpses of criminal forgers, a clippie tasting heady freedom as she traverses the...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome home! Now slip off your raincoat and settle down in the flickering firelight.  Listening to Janet Sutherland will suggest summer snakes hissing in the hay, as you explore the rural upbringing that has shaped the quietly-magnificent world of her four Shearsman Books collections : Burning the Heartwood, Hangman’s Acre, Bone Monkey and Home Farm . Meanwhile, your pals Robin a...

Send us Fan Mail We see you. Covered in tinsel and cavorting with Dancer, Prancer, Vixen and the rest of those red nosed reindeers.  Luckily here is a treat you can open immediately!  Our interview with two inspiring poet publishers - Sharon Black of Pindrop Press , and Di Slaney of Candlestick Press - who share the proximity of goats but have distinct approaches to publishing. Plus Di Slaney trea...

Send us Fan Mail You know us. At Planet Poetry  we are always mooning around thinking about poetry instead of doing the laundry. But imagine if you had to haggle with a censor just to get your words read... Or had to account for your personal morality to an interrogator. Discovering the subtly devastating  poetry of The Kindly Interrogator by Alireza Abiz (Shearsman books translated by the author...

Send us Fan Mail Fabulous stories, overheard conversation and a panoply of characters? It's the sound of Planet Poetry basking in the glowing Technicolor of Martina Evans 's funny, moving and brilliantly inventive new collection American Mules (Carcanet). Meanwhile a  croaky-with-Covid Robin props herself up on one elbow to re-read a favourite collection by Kei Miller . As Cop26 is in th...

Send us Fan Mail Want to face the future with strength and empathy? Of course you do! So hop aboard Planet Poetry and jet over to New Orleans to meet Ashanti Anderson and hear from her exceptional debut, Black Under .  We'll also feature Robin's encounter with the work of Scottish poet George Mackay Brown , whose centenary is celebrated by Dark Horse magazine, while Peter is won over by...

Send us Fan Mail Kerpow! Planet Poetry is back for a second season, replete with box-fresh poetical guests, an assortment of musings on the muses – and even a new intro tune. We whiz across the Atlantic to meet Kim Addonizio and hear about her Vulcan mind meld with Shakespeare and Dante - and we can guarantee she will transform how you think about Florida forever. Kim's poems are featured in...

Send us Fan Mail Is that a fanfare of brazen trumpets? Why? Well, it's our season finale! Join our audience with the regal Rishi Dastidar who tells us about the declaration of sovereignty made by his eponymous hero Saffron Jack   - a hugely impressive long poem, glittering with biting satire, postcolonial thinking, humour and logical inevitability. Then, a tad wistfully, Robin and Peter wind...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back, poppets! Join us as we peer into the dreamlike cabinet of curiosities that is Helen Ivory’s The Anatomical Venus   where women are labelled  witches and hysterics, pathologised by medical science and surreally transformed into demure models with visible innards. Meanwhile, Robin enjoys the primal force of Nobel-winning poet Thomas Tranströmer in The Half-Finished Hea...

Send us Fan Mail Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Planet Poetry is swooping through the air with Hawthornden Prize winner John McCullough tucked under its origami wing. John entices us with his three poetry collections: The Frost Fairs (Salt Publishing), Spacecraft and Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins ), and praises the virtues of playful language and learning your craft. We'll take in...

Send us Fan Mail To publish or not to publish? Join us as we venture into the shadowy world of poetry publishing. Do instapoets endanger traditional publishing or help it to quietly flourish? Is the whole thing shapeshifting into something new and exciting? The person clutching the torch and heading into the dark is poet and academic JT Welsch who has written the first book-length study of the con...

Send us Fan Mail We’re back! In this episode we encounter esteemed poet, writer and scholar LeAnne Howe — who talks about the extraordinary Norton anthology of Native Nations poetry ‘When The Light of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through’ she edited with Joy Harjo and Jennifer Elise Foerster which highlights the untold stories of people from the Native Nations. She also gives us an insigh...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our translation special! Join Robin and Peter as we take a deep dive into the  Sarah Maguire Prize 2020. We ask Chairman of the judges, the Persian poet and translator, Alireza Abiz about poetry from Iraq, Korea, Japan, Mexico, and Syria and and ponder the nature of time, Mandarin and poetry with the legendary Chinese poet Yang Lian . Plus we speak to his long-term tran...

Send us Fan Mail Enigmatic hey? That's Planet Poetry for you. Welcome back!  This week we are delighted to hear from exiled New Yorker Kathryn Maris who shares her strange and sometimes hilarious tall tales (full of unheroic and unreliable protagonists) from her collection The House with Only an Attic and a Basement .  Plus Robin gets a bit starry and stripy reading US magazines Rattle and Po...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode Inua Ellams talks to us 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. Also, Peter sketches for us the story of the Négritude movement and its poets Aimé Césaire and Lé...

Send us Fan Mail Itching to get away? Then hop aboard Planet Poetry and we'll catapult you to Canada, where we chat with Rhona McAdam and delve into the many treasures of a back catalogue  punctuated by the arrivals and departures of a life spent between two continents -- and we'll sneak a morsel of her forthcoming collection 'Larder'.   Plus Robin and Peter discuss their readi...

Send us Fan Mail This week, hear Mary Jean Chan discuss and read from Flèche , her award-winning debut collection of growing up and coming out. Cultures clash, family expectations are questioned and identity is explored. What happens when the protective gear comes off?  We're going into combat, but in a spirit of peace-keeping and love.  Meanwhile Peter is in awe of feminist writer and activi...