大象传媒

Roger McGough introduces a wide range of poetry requests, read by Mark Meadows and Catherine Cusack.
Michael Longley, Jean Sprackland and Clare Pollard also read their own work.

Bicycles, skips, alarm clocks and public statues all feature in poems today. Topics include travel, faith, and political power, with work by Percy Shelley, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, Jenny Lewis and an archive recording of Michael Donaghy who died in 2004. There are poems by two members of the Rhymers' Club, founded by Yeats in 1890. One is by Ernest Dowson - listen out for a phrase that became a famous film and book title. Robinson Jeffers and James Fenton consider existence with the help of vultures and skips, and there is an elegant story by David Scott of how the Marquis of Ripon rescued an Italian church from the brink of destruction.

Producer: Sarah Langan.