poetry quartets

Poetry Quartets online
Over two hours of audio extracts from the British Council/Bloodaxe poetry recordings. You can also view flash movies to accompany some of the poems:

New animated poems:
Don Patterson's The Eyes; animation by Ian Kirk.
Benjamin Zephaniah's London Breed; animation by Kristina Hedderly
Jo Shapcott's Mrs Noah: taken at the flood; animation by Kristina Hedderly.

Selma Hill's My Sister's Poodle is Accused of Eating the Housekeeping Money (From my Sister's Sister)
George Szirtes' The Button Maker's Tale
W. N. Herbert's A Difficult Horse
Moniza Alvi's I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro
Helen Dunmore's Those Shady Girls.

Download Flash Player 7

Produced in partnership with Bloodaxe Books, this is a new series of recordings of contemporary poetry. Each two-hour double cassette is a poetry quartet of four poets reading and talking about their work, each with a half-hour selection. This project revives the classic recording archive (now housed in the National Sound Archive) set up by the British Council in the 1960s under Peter Orr in which many leading poets of that time were recorded and released on a series of LPs called The Poet Speaks.

We have selected a number of poems from a range of poets in the series (around 6 or 7 minutes of audio for each). The audio is available in Real Audio and Windows Media Player formats; you can download the players here or on any of the pages. Each poem is split into a number of parts. Playlist files link together the Introduction and Poem parts.

The Poetry Quartets: 1
Simon Armitage, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Glyn Maxwell
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 468 2 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 2
Fleur Adcock, Carol Ann Duffy, Selima Hill, Carol Rumens
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 468 2 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 3
James Fenton, Tony Harrison, Peter Reading, Ken Smith
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 470 4 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 4
Paul Durcan, Brendan Kennelly, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 498 4 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 5
Helen Dunmore, U A Fanthorpe, Elizabeth Jennings, Jo Shapcott
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 499 2 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 6
Moniza Alvi, Michael Donaghy, Anne Stevenson, George Szirtes
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 519 0 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 7
John Burnside, W N Herbert, Liz Lochhead, Don Paterson
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 520 4 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 8
Andrew Motion, Charles Causley, David Constantine, Lavinia Greenlaw
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 550 6 £11.75 ]

The Poetry Quartets: 9
Benjamin Zephaniah, Anne Rouse, Ian Duhig, Matthew Sweeney
[ Audio Cassette Bloodaxe ISBN 1 85224 551 4 £11.75 ]

For The Poetry Quartets, the British Council is recording today's leading poets, drawing on a wide range of writers to establish an authoritative series which reflects the diversity and excitement of contemporary poetry thirty years on.