‘A gift, a love gift / Utterly unasked for / By a sky’

This week, Sally has been reading Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poppies in October’ (1963). Join her for this brief mediation on living generously and the restorative powers of reading poetry.

The text of the poem can be found here.

This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen.

Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

‘There’s always hope where there’s poetry…’

This week, Sally is preparing for her narrowboat, Cerian, to journey upriver for maintenance. Join her in her engine room for a discussion of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil, meditations on kindness, and reflections on how poetry helps us to create our own rhythms in a noisy world.

More information on The Painted Veil (1925) can be found here.

The poems read from in this episode are ‘Auguries of Innocence’ by William Blake, ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’ by Emily Dickinson, and ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot.

The original piano music is ‘Doubt’ and ‘Sunday’ by Paul Sebastian. The original guitar music is by Dylan Gwalia.

This episode was edited and produced by Lucie Richter-Mahr.

Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

‘Silence, quietness, that’s a way of living…’

This week, we join Sally in the attic room of her family home, where she has been reading Rose Tremain's first novel Sadler’s Birthday (1976). Follow her on a journey through the spaces in life where we find quietness, and the ways we make ourselves fit into them, in writing or otherwise.

The piano music in the closing section is ‘Tuesday’, by Paul Sebastian.

This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen.

Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.