Welcome to the month of Spring!

As well as celebrating Spring - with A E Housman, Robert Frost, Salvatore Quasimodo. e e cummings and John Burnside - we also celebrate Lady Day with Denise Levertov's Annunciatiion.

Central to this month's schedule is the beginning of an exploration of story-telling in poetry.  We start with perhaps the most famous - Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, spread over the 7th and 10th - and continue with story poems by W H Auden, Ovid (in a translation by Ted Hughes), Brendan Kennally, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, Derek Mahon and the brilliant new English poet Frances Leviston.

The month starrts by celebrating the birthdays of five American male poets and two American women poets and - remembering that Spring is also the season of love - we revisit Anna Akhmatova's wonderful poem Cinque and explore the nature of love with Colette Bryce, Elizabeth Barrett Browniing and Michelangelo. as well as through two Forward Prize-winning poems from Kate Bingham.

February - as is appropriate for the month of St Valentine's - is all about love.

We build up to Valentine's Day in England with Brian Patten and in America with Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore and Judith Viorst, celebrate it with Sharon Olds, then, returning to Europe, remember Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to his Love and continue with versions of his lyric by Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, C  Day Lewis, Ogden Nash and W D Snodgrass.

Also on the subject of love we hear the experts - Edna St Vincent Millay, W H Auden, Sylvia Plath and A R Ammons.

In between we cross the continents with poems from India, Pakistan, Iran, France, Greece, Italy and Ancient Rome.

A fantastic feast of wooing, anticipation, ecstasy and their aftermath ....

Enjoy! 

As is appropriate for the month of Christmas, December centres on the point of view of the child, with versions of Christmas from the perspectives of children.

We also celebrate the month with lyrical descriptions from John Clare,  John Donne,  Carol Ann Duffy and Richard Wilbur and make frequent visits to Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.

Apart from this, the view of Christmas is alternative rather than traditional - taken from views across the centuries, aerial perspectives, St Stephen's martyrdom - and of course interpreted by children.

We also have fine poems from a newcomers Helen Dunmore and Edwin Brock as well as old faithfuls such as Robert Graves, Carolyn Kizer, Muriel Rukeyser, Zsuzsa Rakovsky and Adrian Mitchell.

The month closes, as it begins, with the "peasant poet" John Clare.  We hope it makes a pleasant accompaniment to the stuffing and crackers, as well as the wrapping ... and thankyou letters.

November consists of an exploration of the way we live, epitomised by Vicki Feaver's poem of that title, central to the month, and Edmund Blunden's Report on Experience on the 1st and George Szirtes's Rough Guide on the 29th.

Interspersed with these observations, we have speculations on how the world will be without human beings and what the world to come will be like from poets across the world:  Brazil, Germany, Eastern Europe Ghana, Ecuador, Scotland, Ireland and of course England and America.

Then there are a number of very personal poems:  about love (Robert Graves, Kwame Dawes), homelands (W S Graham, Marianne Moore), relationships (Sharon Olds, Nina Cassian)  and personal exploration (Anne Sexton, Arthur Hugh Clough).

And November 27th is the (wholly unsung) 250th anniversary of the great poet, painter, philosopher William Blake.  We celebrate it with an excerpt from America.

Brighten the encroaching evenings of Samhain (the Celtic winter festival of November 1st) with Poem for Today.

October continues our autumn theme with poets from America, China, Wales, Germany and Serbia meditating on the Fall.

This year's endless summer rain in the UK is producing leafage of a splendour and longevity to rival Pennsylvania and those metal biscuit tin-lids.

If this goes on, there will be tree-gazing coach-tours of Somerset conducted by poets leading workshops in autumn poetry-making.

Poets new to PfT include the English Fiona Sampson, Tracey Herd and John Mole, the Americans Mary Oliver and W S Merwin (with whom we pay an extended visit on the 1st and 2nd) - and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert and German Durs Grünbein.

Enjoy!