Poetry Programme preview - poems to stay human rte.ie - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rte.ie Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Burns night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like this current pandemic and lockdown So here, to help you through, are twenty of Scotland’s greatest poets, who aren’t Robert Burns.
William Dunbar (circa 1459-1530) “Back to Dunbar!” was a favourite phrase of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the man he was talking about was a Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James IV, who wrote works that were rhetorical and lyrical marvels. Dunbar was one of a group of medieval Scots known as the “makars” and for him the writing of poetry was making . He created poems for his patron, such as The Thrissil and the Rois, a celebration of James IV s marriage to Margaret Tudor. But Dunbar was about more than creating snapshots of court. He created poems that have resonance now. Lament for the Makaris, with its frequent refrain, timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death troubles me), still has an extrao
Youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman reads The Hill We Climb at Biden inauguration – video
The ecstatic response to Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”, the poem she wrote for Joe Biden’s inauguration last week, was a potent reminder of the power of poetry to inspire change – within individuals, and then outwards, into communities and societies. Prose only gets us so far, before souls need to be stirred to make things better, ignite revolutions: which writer doesn’t hanker to be “the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over”, as Walt Whitman put it in “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire”? Any change starts with resilience, and the grit and knowledge that many things can be borne. The Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli shows us this: “I fall and fall again, stumble and fall, get up / then fall again, relapses are / my speciality.” And while she claims that
In Cerys Matthews native Welsh, the word cerdd can refer to both poetry and song. This juncture forms the beating heart of the BBC Radio 6 Music presenter and musician s latest project - an album that uses both to dig deep into the British psyche.
She takes my call in a less than rock and roll setting - a local climbing centre (we speak in late 2020 when coronavirus restrictions allowed such things). Poetry feels different at the moment, the Cardiff native declares in her bright, husky, radio-friendly voice. It feels like it s not just an academic endeavour, it s not just for the establishment, it s not just for things to be written, to be hidden in books, to be learnt by rote, or by force.
Album: Cerys Matthews, Hidden Orchestra & 10 Poets - We Come From The Sun | reviews, news & interviews Album: Cerys Matthews, Hidden Orchestra & 10 Poets - We Come From The Sun
Album: Cerys Matthews, Hidden Orchestra & 10 Poets - We Come From The Sun
An evocative soundscape of poetry and music
by Katie ColombusWednesday, 20 January 2021
In such a somnolent time
We Come From The Sun is an awakening – the immediacy and presence of poetry urging you to listen, and pay attention to the beauty of now.
In such a somnolent time
We Come From The Sun is an awakening – the immediacy and presence of poetry urging you to listen, and pay attention to the beauty of now. For her latest album Cerys Matthews selected 10 poets to record their work and composed background music to accompany it, alongside Joe Acheson of Hidden Orchestra. The result is a sound journey that orbits the theme of Genesis by way of present British heritage.