podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 4 minutes. I discovered this poem in my early twenties, possibly while first living and studying in China where I also got to know the poems of Osip Mandelstam.  I loved its blithe life-loving adventurism, its disdain for danger and death, its...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: 3 minutes. Surely one of the sweetest love poems of all time (alongside this one), in which Adam and Eve enjoy each other’s company in perfect accord. These lines of Milton lift you on the wing of an inventory of beauty, then daringly repeated...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631) the night before he died. Drayton was a friend of Shakespeare and a student of Spenser. I can think of few more dignified and moving...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 3 minutes.The lovely opening line of this poem by William Carlos Williams creates a surprising contrast between the stillness of a rose and the tumult of war. The rest of the poem picks up, in rhythm and imagery, on the rose, filling out like a...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can’t remember how I came across it but after a few readings it imprinted itself on my memory. It’s by a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), and draws on one of the...
poems for my family, poetry mojo
Inspired by a high altitude test flight, this dazzling poem has added poignancy because John Gillespie McGee (1922-41) died soon after in an air collision with his Spitfire. It conveys the sweeping thrill and ethereal freedom of flying to great heights, with the plane...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 5 minutes. Durrell has long been a favourite writer and poet. When I first read his Alexandria Quartet in my twenties, I went back to the beginning and started again, something I’ve only ever done for one other book (The Tale of Genji). I...
podcasts, poems for my family
Listening time: under 3 minutes. The first time I heard this poem was when my mother recited it to my step-father in the kitchen. She had tears in her eyes but I wasn’t sure if it was because she was moved by the poem, or by the fact that it manifestly fell on...
