´óÏó´«Ã½

The composer and sound artist Scanner has composed a piece of music especially for The Verb on ‘White Noise’. For many people, white noise means noise that is unwanted, for Scanner, it is a tool. Scanner’s pioneering work has been presented around the world, in venues such as the Tate Britain, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Hanoi Opera House.

Born in New York, the poet  Michael Donaghy settled in London in 1985 and published three collections ‘Shibboleth’, ‘Errata’ and ‘Conjure’ (winning prizes such as the Forward and the Whitbread) before his sudden death from a brain haemorrhage in 2004. He was also an accomplished musician, playing the tin whistle, the flute and the bodhran. David Wheatley wrote of him in : "The death of Michael Donaghy in 2004 at the age of 50 has been one of the most deeply felt losses to the poetry world in recent years. Not since almost half a century ago had an American poet living in Britain so decisively entered the bloodstream of his times.’  Michael Donaghy’s ‘Collected Poems’ is published by Picador.

The poet Paul Farley considers the challenge of writing an elegy for another writer and explores the strange and multiple poetic strategies used by W.H.Auden in ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’. Paul’s latest collection of poetry is ‘The Dark Film’ (Picador) -  he is also the presenter The Echo Chamber on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4.

The poet Don Paterson met Michael Donaghy in the 1980s when they attended the same writing workshop and became his friend and his editor. In a new book ‘Smith: A Reader's Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy’ (Picador,) Don presents essays on fifty of Michael’s most important poems, considering how his  charisma obscured some of the complexities of his work during his life-time, and exploring  his fascination with time, identity and favourite symbols such as ‘white noise’.

Michael Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman has written ‘The Great Below: A Journey into Loss’ (Garnet), a book that examines the loss of Michael as  husband and father as well as poet. Maddy discusses the ways in which grief can play tricks on your memory, the feelings she experienced of being ‘outside time’ and how we lack the language in our culture to deal with death.