麻豆社

Daljit Nagra chooses The Flaggy Shore by Gwyneth Lewis.

Taken from Ruth Padel's landmark series exploring the pleasures of writing and reading poems.

This edition comes from Swansea, where Ruth leads a workshop with the Junkbox poetry group - at The Dylan Thomas Centre.

To warm up their poetry muscles, the group try out some writing exercises. 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

First broadcast on 麻豆社 Radio 4 in 2012.