The Poetry Programme returns to RTÉ Radio 1 for a spring series in its new slot of Sunday at 7:30 pm. In the first programme, on Sunday 25th March, presenter Olivia O’Leary meets two poets with distinctive and powerful voices: Leanne O’Sullivan and Jackie Kay.
Leanne O’Sullivan is from the Beara peninsula in West Cork and has published four collections of poetry. She has won many awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, and she teaches in the Department of English at University College Cork.
Her latest collection, A Quarter of an Hour, which has just been published by Bloodaxe, is an extraordinary narrative of her husband’s loss of memory through illness and his long, two-year recovery. In the Poetry Programme on 25th March, she reads a selection of poems from the collection that reflect this frightening time, thoughts on loss and memory, and the role of animals, both the imaginary creatures that seemed to guide her husband back, and the real animals threatened by climate change.
Here she is reading the opening lines of her poem His Vision - you can hear the full poem in the programme.
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Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, and adopted as a baby by a loving and feisty white couple. Jackie is an award-winning writer of not only poetry, but also fiction and plays, and her subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life. She is currently Scottish Makar, AKA the National Poet of Scotland.
Here she is, reading the opening lines of a poem written to welcome newborn babies - again, you can hear the full poem in the programme:
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The Poetry Programme, Sundays at from March 25th at 7.30pm
