Ruth Padel's landmark series exploring the pleasures of writing and reading poems comes this time from The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, where Ruth leads a workshop with the Junkbox poetry group.

To warm up their poetry muscles, the group try out some writing exercises. These will be available on the website for anyone who wants to give them a go. Then they work on developing and refining poems from two members of the group; acting (as Heaney describes it) as "the reader over my shoulder." The poems are Milking Time by Becky Lowe and Still Life with Wine Glasses by Alan Kellerman. Both have a sense of loss or longing. The group discuss line endings, alliteration and adjectives, and the effectiveness of their use in the two poems. They also enjoy and respond to a poem by Gwyneth Lewis that evokes that peculiarly Welsh phenomenon 'hiraeth'.

Producer: Sarah Langan. Show less