Poetry Please - 11/07/2010

Roger McGough with your requests, including poems by Kipling, Shelley and Yevtushenko. Many of the poems in today's programme are about choices. Some are about moral decisions. For instance, Lorna Goodison reads her poem 'For Rosa Parks', about the black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. There are poems about being coerced - like the child in Kipling's 'A Smuggler's Song'. Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford' is about the voiceless; those that aren't even heard, let alone have choices to make. W.H Auden urges us all to 'Leap Before You Look', Shelley rages about the state of England in 1819, and Porphyria's Lover makes a terrible decision in a poem by Browning. The readers are Kenneth Cranham and Jonjo O'Neill. Producer: Sarah Langan.