Poetry Extra: The Horses

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Poetry Extra

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly opportunity for listeners to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

A brand new poetry slot on Radio 4 Extra gives listeners a weekly opportunity to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

The Horses

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Poetry Extra, The Horses

Daljit Nagra selects the best programmes from the BBC's poetry archive.

Daljit Nagra selects The Horses presented by Kenneth Steven who visits Orkney to explore poet Edwin Muir’s life. From 2016.

Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and chooses The Horses by Edwin Muir. Presented by Kenneth Steven who visits Orkney to explore the poet's life.   

Edwin Muir’s career was bookended by two poems with almost the same title - ‘Horses’ and ‘The Horses’ - and these two poems encapsulate Muir’s life and work. ‘Horses’ was published in his debut collection in 1925 and evokes Muir’s childhood home on the tiny island of Wyre in Orkney. ‘The Horses’, his post-apocalyptic fable, comes from his final collection published in 1956. Yet both poems highlight the same theme: a lost paradise. 

Kenneth Steven visits Wyre to explore the fears and dreams Muir distilled into those two poems. At the age of 14, Muir was forced to leave Orkney as his father sought work in Glasgow. The shock of encountering Glasgow, in his eyes an industrial Hell, had a profound effect on him. Worse still, his parents and his two brothers died in quick succession within a few years of moving to the city. Muir saw Glasgow as part of a fallen world and it brought about a breakdown from which he never fully recovered.  

Kenneth talks to poets, theologians and a psychologist. And we hear the voices of Orkney and a reading of his masterpiece, The Horses. 

Presenter: Kenneth Steven
Reader: Paul Young
Producer: Jeremy Grange

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.

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