1 - Living Ghosts

2 - The Gift

3 - The Swimmer

8 - Poem From A Three Year Old

15 - Street Corner [From "Poetry Me Arse"]

16 - The Dinner [From "The Book Of Judas"]

17 - We Are Living

18 - I See You Dancing, Father

19 - Getting Up Early

20 - The Singing Girl Is Easy In Her Skill

29 - Proof

William Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East England, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the mythology and sacred sites of India, via a passionate political engagement that never limits song to mere rhetoric. He also drew on children’s games, ballads and street songs in poems showing both political anger and a wider concern for a society losing its common ground, its rituals and rites of passage.

02 - The Bald Ship

01 - The White Christ

Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters in farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 35 years. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are The Hat (2008), Fruitcake (2009), People Who Like Meatballs (2012), which was shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award, The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014), and Jutland (2015). All these titles are published by Bloodaxe Books. These recordings - made at her home in Dorset (on 3 August 1998) and drawn from books later collected in Gloria: Selected Poems (2008) - were released on cassette on The Poetry Quartets 2 (Bloodaxe Books/The British Council, 1998).

Hill 07 Please Can I Have A Man

Hill 01 Being A Wife

Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was one of Britain’s most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She also wrote movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. Her Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books on her 90th birthday in 2024, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid’s Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. 

These recordings of Fleur Adcock reading and talking about her poems were made by North-South Digital at Fleur Adcock’s home in East Finchley, London on 30 July 1998 as a set to be included in a double-cassette, The Poet Quartets: 2, published in 1998 by the British Council with Bloodaxe Books. This double-cassette – one of a series of nine – also featured sets of readings by Carol Ann Duffy, Selima Hill and Carol Rumens. Recordings from The Poetry Quartets series made by poets whose copyright and audio rights are controlled by Bloodaxe Books can now be made available on SoundCloud: from original audio masters preserved at the British Library, used by permission.

11 - Counting

03 - Witnesses

08 - The Chiffonier

14 - Smokers for Celibacy

07 - Halfway Street, Sidcup

13 - Bed and Breakfast

05 - From the Demolition Zone

04 - The Prize-Winning Poem

12 - The Video

02 - For Heidi with Blue Hair

09 - My Father

10 - Where They Lived

01 - Things

Brendan Kennelly is one of Ireland’s most distinguished and best loved poets, as well as a renowned teacher and cultural commentator. Born in 1936 in Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for over 30 years, and retired from teaching in 2005.

He has published more than 30 books of poetry, including Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004 (2004), which includes the whole of his book-length poem The Man Made of Rain (1998). He is best-known for two controversial poetry books, Cromwell, published in Ireland in 1983 and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1987, and his epic poem The Book of Judas (1991), which topped the Irish bestsellers list: a shorter version was published by Bloodaxe in 2002 as The Little Book of Judas. His third epic, Poetry My Arse (1995), did much to outdo these in notoriety. All these remain available separately from Bloodaxe, along with his more recent titles: Glimpses (2001), Martial Art (2003), Now (2006), Reservoir Voices (2009), The Essential Brendan Kennelly: Selected Poems, edited by Terence Brown and Michael Longley (2011), and Guff (2013).

These recordings are taken from The Essential Brendan Kennelly [http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-essential-brendan-kennelly-999], which is published both in paperback with an accompanying audio CD and as an enhanced ebook with audio, both editions including 36 audio files of Brendan reading his poetry. This posting is made on his 80th birthday, 17th April 2016.

Brendan Kennelly: My Dark Fathers

The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke’s debut collection, The River, convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on.

Originally from a farm in the west of Ireland, Jane Clarke now lives in Co. Wicklow. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015, and is shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction evoking the spirit of a place. Jane also won the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry with three poems from The River, and received the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Prize in 2014.

For more information, see http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-river-283

Jane Clarke: Dry Stone Wall

Jane Clarke: Among The Cows

Mark Waldron’s poems sometimes pretend they’re joking but they never really are. And what is it they’re not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don’t actually know who we are, and the fact that we don’t truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter. Sometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It’s no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there’s a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we’re lost.

Mark Waldron was born in New York in 1960 and grew up in London. He works in the advertising business and lives in East London with his wife and son. He began writing poetry in his early 40s. He published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), and his third collection, Meanwhile, Trees, from Bloodaxe in 2016. These readings of poems from Meanwhile, Trees are from his performance at Newcastle Poetry Festival on 6 May 2016.

See www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/me…ile-trees-1117

Mark Waldron No More Mr Nice Guy

Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. Ken Smith’s poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection, that shift marked by his long poem about alienation in London, 'Fox Running' (1980). His Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2018. This recording of Ken Smith reading the whole of 'Fox Running' is from a cassette recording he made himself. A slightly shorter version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please - taking up a whole programme - in 2016.

Ken Smith - Fox Running (complete)

Bloodaxe Books is Britain’s premier poetry imprint, internationally renowned for quality and diversity in literature, for digital innovation, and for making as wide a selection of poetry available to as wide a readership as possible. Our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry.

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