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The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage meets different animals (he looks into a tiger’s eyes, holds a giant African land snail in the palm of his hand, stands in the middle of a room full of spiders, and tracks a fox) as he drafts a brand new poem across this series.

Simon’s written a lot about animals in the past, but always at a distance. He wants that to change, and to feel that he has captured the spirit of an animal, and done it justice. Across different creaturely encounters, meetings with poets, and some of the most vivid poems about animals ever written ( including Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought-Fox’ William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Sharon Olds’ ‘The Connoisseuse of Slugs’ , and Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘The Host’ ) Simon asks whether a poem can bring an animal closer to us, and if poetry can help us grasp what other animals really mean to our species, in an age when so many species are under threat.

In this episode Simon is on the trail of mythical beasts like unicorns and dragons - to try to understand why we need them, in a world where many real species are yet to be discovered.