As is appropriate for November, our theme is the supernatural ... living on the edge between life and death, the presence of death in life and of life in death.

Celebrating Halloween,  we look at the possibilties for afterlife with Jo Shapcott and, a poet new to the program, the American Dana Gioia.  Patricia Beer talks about her relationship with her dead mother in The Lost Woman and the Portuguese poet Sophia de Mello Breyner talks of her late husband's approach to death in The Small Square.  While we commemorate the dead of war with Karl Shapiro's Elegy for a Dead Soldier.

Robert Graves bridges the gap from this theme into our celebration of married love with No More Ghosts.  Then we have poems to wives from Graves, George Szirtes, W S Graham and - to Shakespeare's wife - from Carol Ann Duffy.

And to husbands or other partners from Sharon Olds, Margaret Atwood, Vicki Feaver and - Sophia de Mello Breyner.

Sadly it looks unlikely that the show will continue to receive funding ... and may have to finish at the end of the year.

Enjoy it while you can ...

Autumn is perhaps a good time to think about losing things ...

We have Elizabeth Bishop on the art of losing, Edna St Vincent Millay, E J Scovell and the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion on losing people ... joined later in the month by Pamela Gillilan and Denise Levertov.

The Irish poet Paul Durcan expresses his anger at losing friends through terrorism and Elizabeth Jennings looks at an old man and an old woman on the very brink of existence.

But there is hope too:  the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August, celebrates his country in In This Land and gives us a hope for the future in Another Day Will Come.  Philip Booth and Selima Hill celebrate the joys of sharing existence with others and Robert Herrick, Anne Sexton and - a new voice - the New Zealand poet James Baxter all delight in the pleasures of everyday events.

Enjoy ...

A wide international selection of poets this month - from South America:  a Colombian living in the US, an Ecuadoran and two from Chile  including the great Neruda.  Two each from Canada, Italy, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Poland, Jamaica, Israel and the Czech Republic are all represented, along with the customary sprinkling of American and English voices.

We commemorate the 7th anniversary of 9/11 as well as mourning the passing of summer ... hoping for an Indian one.

Last month saw the death of the poet known as the voice of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Darwish.  We'll revisit his work next month.

Enjoy ... 

As summer begins to wane, we observe its passing with Emily Dickinson and Edward Arlington Robinson, and comment on the gradual fading of human relationships with a number of poets new to the program - Medbh McGuckian, Thomas Blackburn, Esta Spalding, Michael Laskey, Mairi MacInnes and, from America, Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

Old favorites are here too - Shelley and Tennyson, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, Dorothy Parker and John Betjeman ...

Enjoy! 

Celebrate Summer with Poem for Today!

We have summer poems from across the world, interspersed, as always, by meditations on the human condition.

Sadly, my attempt at sympathetic magic - to bring summer conditions to the UK through evoking images of warmth, fruitfulness and languor - has only succeeded in bringing yet further downpours.

I thought it might be time to build an ark but the hardware stores are all out of gopherwood. 

Ah, well ... 

June's poems group themselves around the theme of living with suffering.

The theorist Theodor Adorno famously said that to write a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric.  We discuss this thought on the 18th and 19th with poems from Geoffrey Hill in memory of the holocaust and a poem by Paul Celan about being in a work camp.  Earlier Thomas Hardy and Dom Moraes envision the end of things, Franz Kafka examines the strange fact that desire can be the only affirmation of life, and James Fenton, John Gillespie Magee,Stephen Crane, W B Yeats and Anna Akhmatova speak of living through conflict.

We also have poems celebrating new life - from Kate Clanchy on the 11th, and Amy Clampitt on the 16th, as well as famous memorials of death from Thomas Gray, Paul Muldoon and Anna Akhmatova.

The month ends with summer and boyhood - descriptions from Britiish poets including Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and BarryTebb and Americans - Charles Simic and James Whitcomb Riley,

Enjoy!