Poetry Please

Poetry Please - 01/02/2009

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests for poems by Emily Bronte, Sheenagh Pugh and Linton Kwesi Johnson. With readers Nadia Williams, Burt Caesar and Adjoa Andoh.

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Poetry Please - 01/03/2009

Roger McGough introduces poems by Ernest Dowson, DH Lawrence, Laurie Lee and popular contemporary poet UA Fanthorpe.

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Poetry Please - 01/04/2007

Roger McGough introduces a collection of comic poems requested by listeners, including John Betjeman, Stanley Holloway, Roald Dahl, Wendy Cope and Ogden Nash.

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Poetry Please - 01/06/2008

Roger McGough introduces a special edition, recorded at The Hay Festival. Listeners' requests are read by Richard Mitchley and Manon Edwards. Special guest is poet Gwyneth Lewis.

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Poetry Please - 03/02/2008

Roger McGough presents a selection of poetry by husband and wife Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Readers are Gabriel Woolf and Rosalind Shanks.

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Poetry Please - 03/10/2010

'Home' is the theme for National Poetry Day 2010. Roger McGough shares poems by TS Eliot, AA Milne and RL Stevenson.

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Poetry Please - 04/07/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including work by Keats and Martin Armstrong. The readers are Kenneth Cranham, Jonjo O'Neill, Maura Dooley and Henry Sandon.

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Poetry Please - 04/10/2009

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems that chime with the theme of 2009's National Poetry Day, that of heroes and heroines.

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Poetry Please - 05/10/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. Including verse by Keats, Patrick Kavanagh, Alan Ahlberg and Louis Simpson. Read by Richard McCabe, Brigid Zengeni and Jonjo O'Neill.

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Poetry Please - 06/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces Lord Byron's comic satire Beppo. Set in Venice, where Byron was living in 1818, this romp parodies English and Italian attitudes towards marital infidelity.

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Poetry Please - 06/06/2010

Roger McGough explores Siegfried Sassoon's powerful First World War poems, held at Cambridge University Library, in the company of actor David Bamber and librarian John Wells.

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Poetry Please - 06/07/2008

Roger McGough introduces requests for the work of Alexander Pope. Renowned for his biting satire, other aspects of his personality are revealed in the love poem Eloisa to Abelard.

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Poetry Please - 07/02/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. He guides us through a poetic landscape cast in frost, with requested poems by Ted Hughes, William Morris and Raymond Carver.

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Poetry Please - 07/03/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests.

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Poetry Please - 07/06/2009

Roger McGough presents a programme dedicated to the poetry of the Old Testament Book of Psalms, in old translations and new, read by Kenneth Cranham and Henry Goodman.

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Poetry Please - 08/02/2009

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests for poems on the subject of love. Burt Caesar, Mark Meadows and Adjoa Andoh read poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Sophie Hannah and WH Auden.

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Poetry Please - 08/03/2009

Roger McGough celebrates the work of Vernon Scannell and Stevie Smith, and looks forward to spring in a selection of listeners' requests including the work of MR Peacocke.

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Poetry Please - 08/04/2007

Roger McGough celebrates the arrival of spring with poems by Walt Whitman, Charlotte Mew, Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes. Readers are Adjoa Andoh, Cian Murchu and Trevor Peacock.

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Poetry Please - 08/06/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including poems about parenting and friendship. Readers are Stephanie Cole, Rebecca Smart and William Hope.

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Poetry Please - 09/08/2009

Roger McGough presents a special edition devoted to the poetry of Tennyson, as part of the poet's bicentenary celebrations.

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Poetry Please - 10/02/2008

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems taking a wry look at love. Featured poets include Wendy Cope and RS Thomas. Readers are Mark Meadows, Kate Littlewood and Gabriel Woolf.

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Poetry Please - 10/10/2010

Roger McGough introduces a miscellany of requested poems about autumn, rain storms and migrant birds. Anton Lesser and Eleanor Tremain read.

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Poetry Please - 11/01/2009

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. Including poems from Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Carol Ann Duffy, Brian Patten, William Blake, Matthew Arnold and Harold Pinter.

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Poetry Please - 11/02/2007

Roger McGough visits the Bodleian Library in Oxford for an edition that focuses on requests for the work of two of the greatest Romantics, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley.

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Poetry Please - 11/07/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including poems by Kipling, Shelley and Yevtushenko. The readers are Kenneth Cranham and Jonjo O'Neill.

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Poetry Please - 11/10/2009

Roger McGough celebrates the programme's 30th birthday from the Theatre Royal at Bristol Old Vic with a selection of the most frequently-requested poems from the past 30 years.

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Poetry Please - 12/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces Lord Byron's comic satire Beppo. Set in Venice, where Byron was living in 1818, this romp parodies English and Italian attitudes towards marital infidelity.

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Poetry Please - 12/07/2009

Roger McGough introduces poems including works by Milton, Ben Okri and Mary Oliver.

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Poetry Please - 12/09/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. Featuring poems by DH Lawrence, including his great late masterpieces The Ship of Death and Bavarian Gentians.

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Poetry Please - 12/10/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. Including poems by Gillian Clarke, Keats, Robert Frost and Pablo Neruda.

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Poetry Please - 13/01/2008

Roger McGough presents a selection of wildlife poetry including DH Lawrence's Snake, Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish and Edwin Morgan's The Starlings in George Square.

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Poetry Please - 13/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces requests for works with a nautical tang, including a poem by Andrew Motion about a merman. Readers are Daniel Hart, Bonnie Hurren and Iain Mitchell.

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Poetry Please - 13/06/2010

Roger McGough presents several modern flower poems and a trio of pastoral masterpieces by Seamus Heaney. The readers are Jasmine Hyde and Finbar Lynch.

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Poetry Please - 13/07/2008

Roger McGough introduces requests for some classic ballads, including the sorry tale of Sir Patrick Spens. Readers include Jimmy Yuill and Lesley Stone.

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Poetry Please - 13/09/2009

Roger McGough presents requests for much-loved poems that contrast the joy of living with the experience of memory loss.

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Poetry Please - 14/02/2010

Roger McGough introduces a selection of poems for Valentine's Day. Including poems on extraordinary manifestations of love by Edson Burton, Anne Sexton and John Updike.

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Poetry Please - 14/03/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, read by Henry Goodman and Selina Cadell.

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Poetry Please - 14/06/2009

Carol Ann Duffy and others pay tribute to the poet UA Fanthorpe, who died recently. Describing herself as a 'middle-aged dropout', Fanthorpe only began writing at 50.

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Poetry Please - 14/09/2008

Roger McGough spotlights poetry that spans the ages, with verse by the 8th century Chinese poet Du Fu, William Makepeace Thackeray, ee cummings and Polly Clark, to name just a few.

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Poetry Please - 15/02/2009

Roger McGough introduces a selection of poems by the late Adrian Mitchell, chosen and read by some of his friends and fellow poets.

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Poetry Please - 15/04/2007

Roger McGough introduces poems about writing poetry, including works by Emily Bronte, Sophie Hannah and RS Thomas. Readers are Adjoa Andoh, Cian Murchu and Trevor Peacock.

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Poetry Please - 15/06/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including a short interview with poet Mimi Khalvati. Readers are Mark Meadows, Rebecca Smart and William Hope.

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Poetry Please - 16/05/2010

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems learnt by heart while at school. Including classic works by AA Milne, Thomas Hardy and 'Anon'.

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Poetry Please - 17/02/2008

Roger McGough presents a selection of poems by writers perhaps better known as novelists, such as DH Lawrence, Muriel Spark, Robert Graves and Dermot Bolger.

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Poetry Please - 17/05/2009

Roger McGough introduces poems by AE Housman and Walt Whitman, including from A Shropshire Lad and O Captain, My Captain. The readers are Kenneth Cranham and Peter Marinker.

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Poetry Please - 17/10/2010

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems that mark life's major transitions, from the cradle to the grave. Tessa Nicholson and Alun Raglan read works by Blake and others.

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Poetry Please - 18/01/2009

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests. Actress Lindsay Duncan reads Keats's erotic and magical poem The Eve of St Agnes.

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Poetry Please - 18/02/2007

Marking the centenary of arguably the most important poet of the 20th century in the English language after TS Eliot, Roger McGough introduces requests for works by WH Auden.

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Poetry Please - 18/05/2008

Roger McGough revisits some of the readings recorded for Poetry Please by the actor Paul Scofield, who died in March. Juliet Stevenson joined him in 1998 to read a wide selection.

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Poetry Please - 18/07/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including works by Michael Longley and Lavinia Greenlaw. The readers are Kenneth Cranham, Annette Badland and Jonjo O'Neill.

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Poetry Please - 18/10/2009

Roger McGough is joined by special guest readers at Bristol Old Vic for a second programme celebrating the 30th birthday of Poetry Please.

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Poetry Please - 18/11/2007

Roger McGough celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake with a selection of his most popular verse, read by Samuel West, Janet Suzman and David Collins.

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Poetry Please - 19/07/2009

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems about space by Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney and others.

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Poetry Please - 19/09/2010

Roger McGough presents an autumn edition focussing on Louis MacNeice and including parts of his Autumn Journal. Paul Mundell is the reader.

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Poetry Please - 19/10/2008

Roger McGough is joined on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival by Pippa Haywood and Bill Hope to read funny poems about poetry readings, mathematics, oranges and cats.

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Poetry Please - 20/01/2008

Roger McGough presents an eclectic selection of poetry including Kipling's The Way through the Woods and Muriel Spark's That Lonely Shoe on the Road.

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Poetry Please - 20/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems that mark life's turning points. Featured writers include Thom Gunn, Kahlil Gibran and Helen Dunmore.

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Poetry Please - 20/06/2010

Roger McGough introduces some of the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, plus a selection from some other 17th-century masters: John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan.

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Poetry Please - 20/07/2008

Roger McGough presents a special programme from the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Featured poets include Wendy Cope, Michael Longley, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian Hamilton and James Tate.

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Poetry Please - 20/09/2009

Roger McGough presents listeners' requests for works with an environmental theme, including Alan Brownjohn's We Are Going to See the Rabbit, and two of Jo Shapcott's Mad Cow poems.

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Poetry Please - 21/02/2010

Roger McGough is joined by poet Tony Harrison for a new reading of Newcastle is Peru, and introduces poems by Frances Horowitz and Heather Reid.

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Poetry Please - 21/03/2010

Roger McGough introduces a selection of mainly American poetry, read by Jennifer Jellicorse and Kerry Shale.

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Poetry Please - 21/06/2009

Marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author and the 150th anniversary of its publication, Gabriel Woolf reads Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

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Poetry Please - 21/09/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' poetry requests. He marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Robert W Service, nicknamed the Canadian Kipling.

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Poetry Please - 22/02/2009

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests for poems by Derek Walcott, Linda Pastan and Russian poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Inna Kabysh.

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Poetry Please - 22/04/2007

With Roger McGough. Brian Pettifer, Richard McCabe and Eleanor Tremain read poems by Edward Thomas, John Clare and Christina Rossetti. Kathleen Jamie reads her own work.

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Poetry Please - 22/06/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, with guest Fleur Adcock. The readers are Rebecca Smart and Mark Meadows.

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Poetry Please - 23/01/2011

Roger McGough returns with a new series of poetry requests, including work by Bertolt Brecht, Rudyard Kipling and Kate Scott. The readers are Jon Strickland and Phyllida Nash.

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Poetry Please - 23/05/2010

Roger McGough introduces TS Eliot's Four Quartets, with extracts performed by the poet himself, Ted Hughes, Paul Scofield and Lia Williams.

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Poetry Please - 24/05/2009

Roger McGough introduces a reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, read by Finbar Lynch.

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Poetry Please - 24/10/2010

Roger McGough introduces poems about Scotland to mark the death of poet Edwin Morgan. Includes Scotland small? by Hugh MacDiarmid. The readers are Stella Gonet and Jimmy Yuill.

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Poetry Please - 25/01/2009

Presented by Roger McGough. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, John Mackay reads some of his greatest poems, as requested by listeners.

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Poetry Please - 25/05/2008

Roger McGough introduces the poetry magazine. Featured works include Carol Ann Duffy's Elvis's Twin Sister, which imagines a sibling for Elvis Presley as a nun.

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Poetry Please - 25/07/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including verse by Simon Armitage, Denise Levertov and John Keats. The readers are Kenneth Cranham, Annette Badland and Jonjo O'Neill.

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Poetry Please - 25/10/2009

Roger McGough introduces poems about snow and solitude. There are splashes of colour too, with Goulash by Myrna Schneider and Poppies by Carole Satymurti.

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Poetry Please - 26/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems that mark life's turning points. Featured writers include Thom Gunn, Kahlil Gibran and Helen Dunmore.

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Poetry Please - 26/07/2009

Listeners' requests for poems lead Roger McGough to swim with seals in icy waters, recall the wives of Thomas Hardy and contemplate life and death while talking about a tea tray.

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Poetry Please - 26/09/2010

Roger McGough introduces a selection of American poems. Peter Marinker is the reader. Poets include Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, John Crowe Ransome and Delmore Schwartz.

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Poetry Please - 26/10/2008

Roger McGough introduces a variety of poems that celebrate the natural world, including work by Shakespeare, Ted Hughes, DH Lawrence and Elizabeth Jennings.

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Poetry Please - 27/01/2008

Roger McGough presents a selection of listeners' favourite poetry, from Yevtushenko to Yeats, read by actors including Stephen Rea, Judi Dench, Paul Scofield and Ronald Pickup.

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Poetry Please - 27/05/2007

Roger McGough introduces requests for works with a Welsh connection. Featured poets include Wordsworth, Gillian Clarke, Dylan Thomas and W H Davies.

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Poetry Please - 27/09/2009

Roger McGough introduces requests for Lewis Carroll's surreal poem, The Hunting of the Snark, told not in verses but in eight distinctive 'fits'.

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Poetry Please - 28/01/2007

Roger McGough presents a selection of poems.

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Poetry Please - 28/02/2010

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems including An Overworked Elocutionist by Carolyn Wells, in which a confused boy struggles to master a maelstrom of famous first lines.

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Poetry Please - 28/09/2008

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests for the works of Christina Rossetti. Tessa Nicholson reads such classics as the haunting narrative poem Goblin Market.

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Poetry Please - 29/04/2007

With Roger McGough. Brian Pettifer, Richard McCabe and Eleanor Tremain read poems by Edwin Morgan, Philip Larkin and Emily Bronte, while poet Andrew McNeillie reads his own work.

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Poetry Please - 29/06/2008

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems with a distinctly Gothic and funereal flavour, including Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Readers are Patrick Romer and Noni Lewis.

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Poetry Please - 30/05/2010

Roger McGough visits Cambridge University Library to see the wealth of poetry manuscripts held there. He is joined by actors Juliet Stevenson and David Bamber.

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Poetry Please - 31/01/2010

Roger McGough introduces listeners' requests, including poems by Stevie Smith, Les Murray, Tony Harrison, Sylvia Plath and Robert Graves.

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Poetry Please - 31/05/2009

Roger McGough introduces requests for poems by Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. Read by Peter Marinker and Philip Franks.

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Poetry Please - Bodleian Library

Roger McGough truffles through the extraordinarily rich poetry collection held by the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

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Poetry Please - Episode 1

Roger McGough presents a selection of poems. Featured works include John Gay's Trivia, Tony Connor's On the Cliff and John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.

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Poetry Please - Episode 2

Roger McGough hosts the programme from the Latitude music and arts festival in Suffolk. Performers include Mark Steel, Simon Armitage, Rickie Lee Jones and Rachel Pantechnicon.

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Poetry Please - Episode 3

Roger McGough hosts a second programme from the Latitude music and arts festival in Suffolk. Performers include Mark Steel, Simon Armitage, Rickie Lee Jones and Rachel Pantechnicon.

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Poetry Please - Episode 4

Roger McGough presents a selection of listeners' requests. Stephen Rea and Fiona Shaw read poems by Irish authors, from WB Yeats to Seamus Heaney.

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Poetry Please - Episode 5

Roger McGough presents a selection of listeners' favourite poetry, read by Peter Marinker, Tom Lawrence, Phyllida Nash and Susan Jameson.

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Poetry Please - Episode 6

Roger McGough presents a selection of listeners' favourite poetry, read by Susan Jameson, Tom Lawrence, Peter Marinker, Jenny Coverack and Phyllida Nash.

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Poetry Please - Episode 7

Roger McGough presents poems which use as imagery the sea, trees and autumn fruits. Readers are Phyllida Nash, Jenny Coverack, Tom Lawrence and Peter Marinker.

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Poetry Please - Episode 8

Roger McGough presents poems on themes reflecting the end of the summer. He also looks at a collection of artwork drawn especially for him by a class of primary school pupils.

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