Birds and their ancestors
The Poet Laureate Simon Armitage meets birds and their relatives to inspire his new poem.
Will Simon Armitage finally finish his animal poem? In this episode he meets a dodo, a dinosaur, and one of the most remarkable poems ever written about a bird - 'The Windhover' by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
It's the 200th anniversary of the naming of the first dinosaur - the Megalosaurus - so Simon visits the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to reach back in time - to see if thinking about the ancestors of birds can help him get closer to what it means to be a human animal, trying to write about other animals in 2024.
Simon also turns to early drafts of Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Windhover' at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford for inspiration.
Contributors:
Professor Paul Smith, former director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Rupert Read, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UEA and author of 'Why Climate Breakdown Matters'
Dr Emma Nicholls, Vertebrate Palaeontologist and Collections Manager, Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Kestrel - observed by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Owls of Yorkshire
Megalosaurus - from Stonesfield
Exhibition marking 200 years of dinosaur discovery featuring the Megalosaurus fossils - can be visited at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History:
https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-oxfordshire-dinosaurs
Produced by Faith Lawrence
Mixed by Simon Highfield
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- Friday 13:45麻豆社 Radio 4