Fiona Benson
Fiona Benson joins Roger McGough to make a selection of listener requests, including poems by Liz Berry, Sharon Olds, Walt Whitman, Lucille Clifton and more.
Fiona Benson joins Roger McGough to make her selection from listeners' requests. She chooses poems by Lucille Clifton, Sophie Herxheimer, Robin Robertson, Liz Berry, Walt Whitman, Sharon Olds, Hannah Hodgson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Fiona has published three collections of poetry: Bright Travellers, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Prize for First Full Collection; Vertigo & Ghost, which won the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection; and a new collection, Ephemeron.
The extract from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself is taken from a Drama on 3 production for BBC Radio 3, broadcast in 2021. The reader was Eleanor Bron and the Producer was Emma Harding.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio
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This Week's Poems
‘London’
By Sophie Herxheimer
Taken from “Velkom to Inklandt: Poems in my Grandmother's Inklische”
Published by Short Books Ltd
‘cruelty, don't talk to me about cruelty’
By Lucille Clifton
Taken from “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton”
Published by Boa Editions
‘Mama Cockroach, I Love You’
By Fiona Benson
From Ephemeron
Published by Cape Poetry
‘Song of Myself’
By Walt Whitman
Taken from “The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman”
Published by Wordsworth Editions
‘The Windhover’
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Taken from “The Major Works”
Published by Oxford University Press
‘Her First Week’
By Sharon Olds
Taken from “The Wellspring”
Published by Knopf Publishing Group
‘The Republic of Motherhood’
By Liz Berry
Taken from “The Republic of Motherhood”
Published by Chatto and Windus
‘At Roane Head’
By Robin Robertson
Taken from “Grimoire”
Published by Picador
‘Life Matures Like a Well Established Fruit Tree’
By Hannah Hodgson
Taken from https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/life-matures-like-a-well-established-fruit-tree/
Broadcasts
- Sun 29 May 202216:30BBC Radio 4
- Sat 4 Jun 202223:30BBC Radio 4
