Poetry Worth Hearing : Episode 43
- kathleenmcphilemy8
- 7 hours ago
- 14 min read
This episode will be the last before the summer break. Poetry Worth Hearing will return in September. It is particularly satisfying that this last episode for the season should have had such a strong response. The prompt for submissions was 'trees' and it elicited a vast number of excellent poems, such that I could have filled the episode several times over. In addition, I asked Peter Larkin, Katharine Towers and Harry Man to record some of their work for the episode, in which you will hear some very different approaches to writing about trees. In his introduction, Peter Larkin talks about the pleasure of 'protuberancies or lumpy side effects' in poetry, and to some extent, it is those lumpy, unsmooth surprises I am looking for when I choose poems to include. Lumpy or smooth, you will hear poems by Lucy Ingrams, Will Staveley, Sue Wood, David Cooke, Liz Murray, Liam Aungier, Kate Young, Matt Bryden, Sarah Westcott, Rowan Reddington, Ronan Reilly, Maria Isakova-Bennett and Claire Collison.
You can listen to this episode at https://open.spotify.com/episode/22gvCTbn35lmCDJQFfclB8?si=HU4QlhivRw6zRZ6L_8htOw This and all previous episodes are available on You Tube, Audible and Spotify podcasts. I hope you enjoy the episode and that you will tell othr people about us. New prompts will be posted in August and the next episode will be in September. In the meantime, have a lovely summer.
Peter Larkin says he was born in the New Forest and spent his first 17 years only a few miles outside it, 'so that might account for something, both the proximity and the being outside'. Poet, scholar, librarian, philosopher, Peter Larkin has published more than eighteen pamphlets and books of poetry, the most recent being , Scarcely Carry All Vast Woods, Shearsman 2025.
Seven Leaf Sermons was published by Guillemot Press but is currently sold out. Pending any possible republication or reissue, Peter Larkin has allowed me to reprint the first sermon to allow listeners and readers a flavour of the written text.
Leaf Sermon, 1
Trees won’t be miracle-filled, but can be leaf-willed.
Is leaf not to be a weight to tree? How
do leaves come to weigh out the entire trunk? Questionless
once at arbour-point, might stir anything but a listlessness
of root. They are the one element that won’t pass
through a tree, too many straws in the wind. A
leaf’s tail is opposite its stalk, it never sleeps except
in the dawn of bud. The tree was soon parted
from its leaves, but not its wintering seed: what’s this
casts off any distress of tree, simply wrinkles in leaf?
Lacking leaf a tree is not unhoused, but homeless enough
a leaf at last turns its page. It became apron
only to the unclothing of indigent tree, litter for free.
Saw-leaves, no longer interior scapes of trunk passed across
branch-scrape, but sole sly ratchet in gear above tree
Katharine Towers lives in the Peak District. She has published four collections with Picador, most recently The Worrying Rose (June 2026) https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/katharine-towers/the-worrying-rose/9781035087945
Previous collections are Oak (2021) which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian, The Remedies (2016) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and The Floating Man (2010) which won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize.
In 2023 The Maker’s Press published let him bring a shrubbe, a pamphlet about the life and work of the English composer Gerald Finzi. HappenStance Press published The Violin Forest in 2019.
Harry Man is a poet, playwright and translator. His poetry has been translated into over 11 languages and has won both the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award, a Northern Writers Award and The Stephen Spender Prize. His collection Popular Song is available from Nine Arches Press and his latest pamphlet, impressions, is published by If A Leaf Falls. He teaches at the University of Oxford. www.manmadebooks.co.uk
Lucy Ingrams
sunglasses
may-shine glinders
through a nave of
woods – amber-filtered –
springs lightnings
of ignited green, stirs
flour-gold gnats
above a flower floor
of garlic— or did :
one sunglass-lifting hand’s
one distracted gesture
and depth, tone, a flying
bell-dimension
drain to
direct light –
the contrast curt
as summer’s passing
straight
to winter
without the count
of leaf threads
letting go—
Lucy Ingrams’ collection, Signs, (Live Canon) won the 2024 Poetry Book Awards. A pamphlet, soft this morning (Live Canon), is forthcoming in September. |
Will Staveley
Kodama
Business man, middle aged,
the Fuji side of the train.
Nice suit with chequered pattern.
His eyes above his mask
Scanning down the page
As if warding off sleep
As I am, under the spell
of some train or tree spirit,
fast running out of money
on the night side of the world
from my waking prospects.
I have often fought off sleep
behind the hills of Hyogo
which rise and rise a forest green
I want to run within.
Will Staveley’s poetry has been featured in over 30 journals, including Acumen, Poets’ Republic and Poetry Scotland. He was runner-up for the 2021 and 2024 Erbacce Prizes, and his latest collection was shortlisted for the 2024 Templar Straid Collection Award. |
Vesica Piscis Druid symbol of interconnection between man and nature, sky and earth
Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us. Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn
I
Dawn points star on stone a willow man woven at midnight
holds
a bloodied man
gift for light
for hope
Oak Ash Thorn and the bonny ivy tree
Duir Nion Huath a time to be born, a time to die
a time to kill a time to heal a time to laugh a time to weep
Yule Beltane Litha Mabon Samhain
Turn! Turn! Turn!
II Duir ‘door’ to see
Oak sky head spy head eye behind the gods’ sunset arras
listener at Odin’s keyhole Thor’s conspirator
lightning wrestler thunder’s sound box
earth-rooted Hades compatible
wired message de-coder
a handful of acorns the acrid tang of the future
in their ancient mouths
gods’ gift of mistletoe parasitic along sappy nerves
berries white snot-beads
the wren rustling oak leaves her divination ‘trick, trick, trick’
to eager ears
Saint Branden’s boat pushing out to the world’s edge
green-limbed Robin under the oak
Tree trunks are composed of layers of growth. Meaningful expressions are composed of layers of words. Say something meaningful. D’Andre Lampkin
III Nion
Ash
Of all the trees in England Only the Ash, the bonnie Ash
Burns fierce while it is green
Druid King bind earth to sky bring your ash staff here
Does Odin’s eight-legged horse still gallop between Nine Worlds?
His scallop hooves grip
the tree bark
as easily as Ithaca’s goats
while Odin hangs the spear in his side waiting
for the runes to speak
for warrior to turn poet
for darkness to shimmer
into light
Only the Ash, the bonnie Ash
Wolf-time, wind-time, axe-time, sword-time, shields-high-time
Yggdrasil ‘friend of the clear sky’,
Four deer browsing, four winds blowing, a squirrel, a snake,
a golden cockerel on its topmost branch
No-one knows where its roots run
Wolf-time wind-time axe-time
ash sap before mother’s milk for newborns
a leaf under your pillow for a new lover
ash leaf close to the skin for boils
World Tree Yggdrasil Nion
A’r glasfor oedd lly gaid
Gwen hardaff Llwyn Onn
the ash burns green at the end of time
‘’I shall go and sit under a tree…” “Which tree, Mama?...” “Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one”. Alexander McCall Smith, The Woman Who Walked In Sunshine
IV Huath Fear or love and affection
Thorn Hawthorn
By a rock a well a spring bent on the wind the thorn crouches low
a cuckoo echoes itself
under the thorn the Faerie beckon ‘Come see, come see’
Thomas the Rhymer under the hill for seven long years
his mouth stitched into silence words stopped on his tongue
that he might know
not the fawn under the bush nor the ghost owl’s stoop
but the language of stars the great dark the great light
Thorn
sprung from strange roots carrying Christ’s agony in a circlet of pain
blossoms startling midwinter with Spring a blizzard in May
on Glastonbury’s cold Tor
Thorn
hung with our sighs dreadlocked in rags by St Madron’s Well
in the arms of maidens ribboned decked for the dance
banned in the house
for the wrath of the Faerie its plague stink of death
bed sheet scent lust in the air
carrion-trap for flies
a circlet of pain
May-day girls and boys endless dance on the gathering green
“Come see, come see”
Sue Wood’s poetry has been published in many anthologies and magazines. She won a Cinnamon Press Award for Poetry, leading to her first collection, Imagine yourself to be water, 2010, first prize in the Oxford Poetry competition, second in The Basil Bunting Award, commended the Hippocrates Prize, 2015 and twice long-listed in the National Poetry competition. Her new pamphlet ’Winter Journey’, May, 2026 is published by Grey Hen Press.
|
David Cooke
HUSBANDRY
I am out on one of my walks around
Peatmoor Copse, when, unexpectedly,
a cadence occurs: like sunlight filtering
through refurbished trees –
as, once more, enthusiasts gather,
our local community ‘at its best’ –
gregarious, inspired, and unaware
of how their endeavours reproach me.
Establishing growth, preserving
the old, they are unfazed by saplings
that fail, the sprawling giant
brought down by a storm.
Retirees who like to keep busy
or the conscience-stricken young,
they are trying to find a lost connection.
Renewing the paths and hurdle fences,
cleaning out the streams, they enhance a space
that others can savour.
One step, one line at a time,
I may have gleaned something.
David Cooke was born in Wokingham in 1953, although his family comes from the West of Ireland. He won a Gregory Award in 1977 while he was still a student at Nottingham University. For many years he was the Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school in Cleethorpes. He has punished numerous individual volumes of his poetry and In 2023 his Collected Poems were published by Littoral Press. Until this year he was the editor of the online journal, The High Window, which he founded in 2016. |
Liz Murray
Today
She brought it to the wake in December.
She had picked it, she told me,
on the estate where he used to paint.
A spray of larch dotted with tiny cones
leaning untidily from the bouquet:
grasses, tall stems of late autumn flowers
lilac pompom dahlias (so unusual)
tied up loosely with green velvet ribbon.
He would have loved it of course
the messy wild gather-togetherness of it
the way it collapsed into the vase
in a happy muddle.
When the flowers had withered
I propped the larch spray
in an old glass bottle at the window
behind the kitchen sink.
It’s late February now.
Today the larch burst into life,
lime-green starry leaf-buds.
His favourite colour.
Aged 83, Liz Murray SSA RSW is a Scottish artist living in Fife. Her artwork often has a narrative element to it and she enjoys reading and writing poetry. |
Arboreal
For my nieces Mia and Ellie.
My wish? To plant for you an arboretum:
On some drizzling April morning
To break ground with spade or shovel
And tamp down hazel and willow, saplings
Supple as young eels and swaying in the breeze.
And then to see them bud and blossom,
Mature into the offspring of a grove
Their topmost branches holding up the sky,
Their ages written down in rings - so that
On a summer's morning a Western wind
Would wake all my greenwood trees, set all
Their green tongues prattling in the air.
Liam Aungier has had poems published in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review and elsewhere in Ireland and Britain. His second collection, Landfall, was published in 2025 by Revival Press. |
Kate Young
His name is Tree
rooted in soils of St Lucia,
bamboo joints supple as willow.
He bends a branch of calabash,
plucks a husk of Ital, places flesh
in his pharmacy of fruit and spice
laid out in bronzed copper pots –
guava lychee mango ackee
colour my eyes in rainbow juice
ginger nutmeg lemongrass leaves,
scented air catching my breath.
Tree speaks of healing, inside-out,
rubs, scrapes at skin and pith
passes health among his guests,
slender fingers lifting, sifting.
Paused, Tree raises lips to light,
drinks in the bananaquit trill –
it speaks of freedom, soft-winged,
to a place of peace and flora.
Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. Her work has appeared in Stand, The Ekphrastic Review, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Sea Changes, Snakeskin, The Alchemy Spoon, Fly on the Wall Press, Poetry Scotland, The Lake and Littoral. She has also been published in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate are published with Hedgehog Press. Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk |
Matt Bryden
The Divorced Mother
tells me to take
my pleasures
where I find them
has her daughter tilt
me back into
the circular swing
and grip the seat
as she rocks me.
Close your eyes, she says
and transports me
to a fallen tree
polished by rain –
stripped of bark by deer,
grooves wound into
its trunk
slippery even
on the level
surfaces –
would have me
lay down my daughter’s coat,
take purchase.
Miscanthus
These razed fields are like the cloudscape atop
the Faraway Tree before a new land revolves.
For a while, we did our handovers here.
The miscanthus would whisper our presence
at the edge of things. You’d run towards the grasses,
find the deer corridors and hide within mere feet of me.
But now the cropped stems scratch your ankles.
The three young deer we’d spot have probably been thinned
in the cross-hairs, almost see them lippety lippety
half-stepping in the detritus. And this forest of whispers,
the guard hairs trimmed stunned back to their haunches.
All will come back in a year and we’ll be this much older.
Your four-year-old brow that much tauter, broader.
Matt Bryden is a teacher who lives in Devon. His most recent collection is The Glassblower’s House (Live Canon, 2023) which details fatherhood against a backdrop of personal catastrophe. He co-hosts Uncut Poets, a reading series at the Phoenix Arts Centre, and is Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Exeter. |
Sarah Westcott
Acorn
What lies inside, so palely?
Cleft along the grain the kin of itself
(and rushing over the body, mites)
it stirs, stone rolled from a tomb’s mouth —
Now a body too large for its bindings
all shouldered, hums and heaves
never-turning-back.
A wide, smooth face -
A waistcoated rotund gentleman.
He leaves behind his bed
and across some boundary
he shoves
cumbersome and plucked,
so vulnerable.
With designs on himself he begins to set about it -
A root! A chord. The nerve of it!
To look about like that,
his feathered head
twitching, frayed with sensitivities,
quite sure of his direction
(the little gonads opened, a jewellery box)
the jewels now ignored.
One tip, just one, o tenders!
Rudely, bravely
pushing into new lungs.
*
Two leaves
So very new,
so soft and keenly-made.
A pause,
to taste the light and air
and answer —
This?
Oak Flower
How do you awaken like a language comes to speak of itself?
Roll me into the heartwood, take my pulse into your own
Slow me to the woody lengths of breath so slowly rising.
Let the ants be meticulous, let the wind take me like a song
Leave your echo in the wet earth, let the dark be dark of my hair.
Let woodlice lace me so I might line a leaf edge, sift as pollen
Sarah Westcott’s latest pamphlets are Pond (The Braag, 2024) and Almanac - a hand-stitched pamphlet with Coast to Coast to Coast (2025). She has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry and is currently researching inter-species poetry as part of an AHRC-funded PhD. |
Rowan Reddington
Birch Song
If noontime moonlight shivers
In wintery silver slivers
It’s only you, bright pioneer
Of the frigid wood.
As short-lived as us,
Leaving jagged, your sap
Is an early riser, tapped
And boiled to syrup
Or brewed to wine by ancient
Mooneyed foresters.
Six million seeds per catkin,
Scourge of the weepy-eyed,
Though you, too, have been known
To weep. Betula pendula,
Your twig fingers a feathery,
Pendulous cascade,
In your surge for the sky you bend
And bend till you break in the wind.
Your skin that was starlight
Is corked now, dimmed.
Rowan Song
Sorbus aucuparia: bird-catcher,
Highest up the mountain
& deepest in the cul-de-sac
You offer your protection.
Once a Roman hunting lure
Snaring birds in your cage of air;
Well, the Romans are gone & you’re still here
Fatting robins in frigid crags,
Dropping berries on the neighbours’ car.
Each a blooded globe; opposite each stalk
A five-pointed star. Pentagram clusterbombs
On Suburbia’s lawns.
O Strange, silver, & ancient goth tree,
Like rumoured swingers,
Like shoplifting kids,
Like bad skateboarders,
You solace the domesticate heart.
Though we cannot see it
Spring is boiling in the root.
Willow Song
You weave just like a hex.
You douse this land: feet deep
In riverbank. Salix, salix,
Towering water antenna.
Quick & big,
Queen of the Bog
Student of Johnny Cash.
(Didn’t he teach you to cry cry cry?)
Well, I caught that bent
in your gunslinger Stance
in this Tower Hamlets Cemetery sky.
If Spring ever returns,
you’ll burst your buds: sunbright, yellow.
Drooped with the weight of all that loot.
A fling for the bees
In fields fallow,
in sallow hollow,
on loamy pillow.
You wallow.
You hum,
you thirst,
you burn.
Old, wild giant
Walking the line.
Rowan is a poet and tree surgeon living in East London. His work has been featured in 14 Magazine and Acumen Poetry. Rowan is currently working on a series of poems based on Robert Graves’ Ogham tree calendar: Tree Songs is an exploration of myth-making and a celebration of trees. |
Ronan Reilly
Metastasis
After your call,
I found myself gazing
out the window
at the moon's descent,
its thin crescent
fragile as hope,
tenuous as the filaments
that held you to earth,
slipping slowly from view
behind the plum tree;
blossom laden,
ablaze with life.
Incident in the Botanic Gardens
The river shoulders the bend
in a movement,
muscular and silent,
its ripples carrying the sky
in arc after arc
beneath arching trees.
On a surface scattered with light,
over a dark heart swollen by rain,
a wind shivers,
leaves blanch,
a bough
crack-thumps
to earth.
Roofless in Autumn
Meandering home
from school
in the cool shade of
Mount Merrion Avenue
after another day of
his casual cruelty,
I thought of taking refuge
in the densely leafed crown
of an avenue beech.
Swaddled in a luminous
leaf blanket
I’d be safe from his taunts
and those of his kapos.
But like many of my plans,
it wasn’t thought through.
What to do
when autumn came?
Years later,
I saw him interviewed on TV,
a dispossessed victim
of the Celtic Tiger.
But pity had withered
in his classroom
and I exulted
in his abrupt
autumnal
rooflessness.
Ronan Reilly is a retired academic based in Ireland. |
Maria Isakova-Bennett
Birch, Liverpool
Some people say she is weeping, but she is dancing,
briefly lemon-yellow like spring, fragile like Chantilly lace,
full of now and tomorrow; at night — long nights, black
as mystery, as wonder. Pregnant all summer, olive-green
and laden. She quicksteps like a girl, like a woman
in a fishtail gown, slow slow, quick quick in a breeze,
in a gale, hot nights, carries on through autumn, shushes,
whispers, knows my scribble, in an effort, my stitches
in an effort, a gouge of pastel, an effort, smears of paint,
an effort to leave a line on torn linen. Still he left.
Someone said my words lack drama. Afraid to begin,
I cannot speak, look to her instead,
try not to shift my eyes from her girlhood,
try not to shift my eyes to the dead beech beside her,
try not to remember the hawthorn murdered by winter,
try not to notice brittle, bare, empty, maybe hollow,
try not to remember something lush like kisses, face
her dress of gold and red, autumn bride, face her refusal
— last one to undress, last one to let go, keep myself
indoors, looking out
Maria, from Liverpool, has a Poetry Society Peggy Poole and a New North Poet Award (Judges, Vona Groarke and Clare Pollard), has six pamphlets, the latest, Subcutaneous (Wayleave Press, 2025), was a winner of Lancaster Litfest (Judge, Ian Duhig). Maria creates the hand-stitched poetry journal Coast to Coast to Coast. |
Claire Collison
Dolomites
Especially hard hit were the spruce trees of the Paneveggio park, beloved by Antonio Stradivari as the place to find wood for his stringed instruments. (The Times, Nov 2, 2018)
I almost blinded a cellist once, in St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was performing the Bach Suites from memory. Sunlight ricocheted from my pocket mirror, just missing his eye. When I dream I am flying, it is modest and domestic: I take off from a chair, breaststroking over dining tables and kitchen work surfaces. Omniscience has always been cherry pickers, the first five minutes of Citizen Kane. Drones give feeble God-view, but we can’t resist. How unevolved we are, compared to flies, or root hair! There are cellos in the trees. We wear paper hats and complain like squirrels, feeding our leftovers to the wolves.
The title of this poem is taken from a book of found black-and-white photographs of women in trees.
Frauen auf Bäumen
All the women in trees,
picked up for a song in flea markets—
there are armies of us
peering through leaves,
from crooks in branches,
or swinging, upturned,
legs hooked, our skirts over our faces
like those dolls.
We’ve been doing this since we were saplings
in engravings,
sleeping in your
Box Brownies,
exuberant and irregular our souls
birds nests,
our best kept secrets hatching
between bark-scratched thighs.
Claire Collison won the inaugural Women Poets' Prize, 2018 and has been placed in Resurgence, Hippocrates, Winchester and Gingko prizes. Her poetry is published widely, and her debut pamphlet, Placebo is published by Blueprint. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet. |
To repeat what I wrote at the beginning:
You can listen to this episode at https://open.spotify.com/episode/22gvCTbn35lmCDJQFfclB8?si=HU4QlhivRw6zRZ6L_8htOw This and all previous episodes are available on You Tube, Audible and Spotify podcasts. I hope you enjoy the episode and that you will tell other people about us. New prompts will be posted in August and the next episode will be in September. In the meantime, have a lovely summer.
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