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Tim Key

Tim Key returns with more comic chaos, musically supported by Tom Basden 
 
Award-winning comedian Tim Key is back with three more series of his peculiar poetry programme. Having presented the show from a houseboat, a space simulator and the top of the Shard, he now ventures even further afield in his increasingly ineffective attempts to understand life through the medium of verse. 
 
In these 12 episodes, he finds himself stuck in a cable car high above the Norwegian fjords, making a movie in Rome, stranded in an Austrian cave network with the water rising, and broadcasting live from the labour ward where Megan is having a baby. He also prepares to make his TV debut, gets in trouble with Customs at Stansted Airport, heads out on safari (in Woburn) and hits the road in an Americana special... 
 
Accompanying him on his adventures are regulars Tom Basden and Katy Wix, and guest stars including Miles Jupp, Bridget Christie, Stephen Merchant, Lolly Adefope, Mike Wozniak, Sam Campbell and Morgana Robinson. 
 
‘His sentences never end where you expect them to and the oddly appealing atmosphere he creates is so spellbinding, it's like emerging from a nice fog when he spits you out at the other end.’ Julia Raeside, The Guardian 
 
Cast 
Key – Tim Key 
Lord – Tom Basden 
Megan – Katy Wix 
Jiffy – Mike Wozniak 
Sir Hayden – Miles Jupp 
Pamela – Carlotta Morelli 
Bunny – Karl Johnson 
Bogle – Bridget Christie 
With Stephen Merchant, Lolly Adefope, Sam Campbell, Simon Armstrong, Morgana Robinson 
 
Photo by Jonathan Birch 
 
© 2026 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2026 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Tim Key’s Poetry Programme: The Complete Series 5-7

The BBC Radio 4 Comedy

Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove, who died in June 2003, was a friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and became one of the most celebrated and prolific post-war poets - regarded by many as a true visionary. 
 
The Harper, which gathers together his last poems, is a collection still charged with characteristic energy, eroticism and transforming imagination. Redgrove's language thrills with thunder, rain and electricity, the air heavy with perfumes and balsams, wasps and spiders - and reading these poems is uncannily like re-entering a dream. Peter Redgrove made us look at our world with fresh eyes, and he changed our perception forever.

The Harper

Peter Gizzi

In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed: composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. 
 
The book’s broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls ‘a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.’ Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find – as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book – that ‘everything is fine, better than fine.’ In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament, but also – as it has been for centuries – a work of openness, and a work of love. 
 
‘Gizzi’s best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for… He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen’ The New Yorker

Fierce Elegy

Paul Durcan

WINNER OF THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IRISH BOOK AWARD 2014 
 
Paul Durcan never imagined he would be clasped by a woman again, but life is full of surprises! After all, would it surprise you to learn that at the US Ambassador’s Residence in Dublin his libido almost destroyed the Peace Process? There is a new Pope, too, a ‘man of constant surprise’, although in St Peter’s Square Durcan encounters a monk wholly lacking in the Holy Spirit. 
 
Elsewhere he muses upon the ‘pre-crucifixion scenario’ of being prepared for surgery, the gift of a malacca cane, the joy of retail therapy, the horror that is wheel-clamping, the ‘starry mystique’ of the weather forecaster Jean Byrne, suicide, bird-watching, stammering, art, Mayo, New York City, New Zealand, murder in Syria and the commemoration of 1916. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the voice of the late Seamus Heaney coming down his chimney: ‘Are you all right down there, Poet Durcan?’ The Days of Surprise is proof that the great poet of contemporary Ireland is in fine fettle.

The Days of Surprise

George Crabbe

Rooted in the Suffolk landscape of his youth, the poetry of George Crabbe is some of the most distinctive and original of the early nineteenth century, exploring ordinary, often harsh working lives in realistic, subtle language. This selection contains the best of Crabbe's poetry from throughout his career, including 'Peter Grimes' from The Borough, the powerful 'Sir Eustace Grey', the complete Tales of 1812 and the remarkable late work 'The Family of Love'. Depicting people struggling against the undertow of the past and against their own frailties, these are works of great generosity and human sympathy. 
 
 This Penguin Classics volume is edited with an introduction and notes by Gavin Edwards. 
 
George Crabbe was born in 1754 in Suffolk. The son of a collector of salt-duties, he spent a period of apprenticeship and unsuccessful practice as an apothecary and surgeon before moving to London to make his way as a writer. Struggling with destitution, he was befriended by Edmund Burke, who helped him first to get his work published and then to embark on a career in the church. His religious career culminated in his appointment as Rector of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, where he died in 1832. 
 
Gavin Edwards is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of South Wales. He is the author of George Crabbe's Poetry on Border Land (1990) and Narrative Order 1789-1819: Life and Story in an Age of Revolution (2005).

Selected Poems

Michael Longley

Winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize 
 
 
In The Stairwell, his tenth collection, Michael Longley’s themes and forms reach a new intensity. The second part of the book is a powerful sequence of elegies for his twin brother, Peter, and the dominant mood elsewhere is elegiac. The title poem begins: ‘I have been thinking about the music for my funeral …’ The two parts are also linked by Homer. Longley is well-known for his Homeric versions, and the Iliad is a presiding presence – both in poems about the Great War and in the range of imagery that gives his twin’s death a mythic dimension. Yet funeral music can be life-affirming. Longley has built this collection on intricate doublings, not only when he explores the tensions of twinship. The psychologically suggestive word ‘stairwell’ is itself an ambiguous compound. These poems encompass birth as well as death, childhood and age, nature and art, the animal and human worlds, tenderness and violence, battlefield and ‘homeland’. The Stairwell is a richly textured, immensely moving work. Michael Longley has the rare ability to fuse emotional depth with complicated artistry: to make them, somehow, the same thing.

The Stairwell

Jean de La Fontaine

J. J. Grandville

Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95) freely plundered the works of Aesop, Phaedrus, Bidpai and others to transform the world's great fables into charming poems of astonishing originality, wit and verve. Here he depicts lions, frogs, donkeys, rats, insects, birds and wily foxes in situations that reveal the quirks, follies and frailties he observed in humankind. Sins of pride, greed and vanity come under humorous attack - a cunning fox tricks a crow out of his dinner, an arrogant hare loses a race to a steady tortoise, a merry cicada who sings all summer finds herself hungry in winter, and the goddess Juno scolds a peacock who covets a nightingale's song. But faith in human nature can also be found in poems such as those in which a wolf is saved from choking by a helpful stork, demonstrating an engaging belief in the possibilities of redemption.

Selected Fables

Alexander Pushkin

WINNER OF THE READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020 
 
Alexander Pushkin established what we know as Russian literature. This collection includes his strongly personal lyric verse, which springs spontaneously from his everyday life - his numerous loves, his exile, his hectic life in St Petersburg - while the narrative poems here, from exotic Southern tales to comic parodies and fairy tales of enchanted tsars, display his endless ability to surprise. His landmark work The Bronze Horseman, with its ghostly central figure of Peter the Great, holds the meaning of all Russian history. Antony Wood's translations reveal the variety, inventiveness and perfection of Pushkin's verse.

Selected Poetry

A new edition of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. 
 
The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka poems (the precursor of haiku) express deep emotion through visual images based on a penetrating observation of the natural world. Peter MacMillan's new translation of his prize-winning original conveys even more effectively the beauty and subtlety of this magical collection. 
 
Translated with an introduction and commentary by Peter MacMillan.

One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each

A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse

Majella Kelly

In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies. 
 
In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur. 
 
Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.

The Speculations of Country People

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

This is a collection of classic animal poems. The poems include: Robert Burns's &quot;To a Mouse&quot;; Ted Hughes's &quot;Hawk Roosting&quot;; Christopher Smart's &quot;My Cat Jeoffry&quot;; and e.e. cummings's grasshopper-shaped poem.

Animal Poems

Lewis Carroll

Henry Holiday

'They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway share; They charmed it with smiles and soap' Ever since Lewis Carroll's nonsense epic appeared in 1876 readers have joined his ten-man Snark-hunting crew and pursued the search with great enthusiasm. What are they hunting for? What is the Snark? Numerous theories have been proposed. Carroll himself provides a helpful Preface to the poem and is recorded as having explained to one reader: 'In answer to your question, 'What did you mean the Snark was?' will you tell your friend that I meant that the Snark was a Boojum. I trust that she and you will now feel quite satisfied and happy.' This edition, previously published as The Annotated Snark, reproduces the original illustrations by Henry Holiday, including the 'supressed' Boojum drawing. Martin Gardner provides an introduction, notes and bibliography, and an Appendix contains F. C. S. Schiller's 'Commentary on the Snark' and J. A. Lyndon's 'Fit the Seven-and-a-Halfth'.

The Hunting of the Snark

Hanshan

The best of Hanshan's treasured poems—among the earliest of Zen Buddhist poetry, beloved by the Beat Generation—here newly translated by Peter Harris and organised thematically in a beautiful Pocket Poet hardcover. Long ranking among the most inspiring works of world literature, the poems of Hanshan (whose name means Cold Mountain), were written at least twelve centuries ago on trees, rocks, and walls by a semi-mythical Buddhist monk living in the mountains of south-eastern China.

Hanshan: Cold Mountain Poems

Edward Lear

'Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils', wrote Edward Lear (1812-88), and this collection demonstrates the wonderfully varied ways in which he pursued his philosophy of life. He created an extraordinary world filled with bizarre creatures - from the Dong with a luminous nose to the Pobble who has no toes - who misbehave with joyful abandon. Here can be found such exuberant and timeless verse as 'The Owl and the Pussy-cat', 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat' and numerous comic limericks, along with stories, letters, alphabets and recipes, all accompanied throughout with his fantastical line drawings. Gently pointing out human follies and the absurdities of the conventional Victorian society in which he lived, Lear's nonsense has enchanted children and adults alike for generations.

The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it contains a large cast of characters and offers the reader many literary, philosophical, and autobiographical digressions, often in a highly satirical vein. Eugene Onegin was Pushkin's own favourite work, and this new translation by Stanley Mitchell conveys the literal sense and the poetic music of the original.

Eugene Onegin

A Novel in Verse

Ovid

In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems. 
 
When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection. 
 
Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...

The Serpent's Teeth

Pam Ayres

Ellie Snowdon

A beautiful collection from much-loved poet Pam Ayres, compiling her best verse dedicated to animals, illustrated by Ellie Snowdon. Now a Sunday Times bestseller. 
 
'Oh WHY must you bark at the postman? 
 Why must you batter my ears? 
 I know it seems rum 
 But the postman has come 
 Every morning for SEVENTEEN YEARS.' 
 
 From her very first encounter with a friendly golden Labrador at just three years old, Pam Ayres has been enchanted by animals. Now, for the first time, in this beautiful new illustrated work, she has gathered together her life's work of poems, new and old, dedicated to her love of them. 
 
This definitive collection brings to life the charming characters and voices of all creatures great and small through Pam's poetry over the last five decades. From delightful tales of our British wildlife in 'I'm a Starling Me Darling' and the difficulties of keeping farm animals in 'Fleeced', to her hilarious observations of our pets in 'Ode to a Jack Russell' and poignant reflections on the end of their lives in 'Tippy Tappy Feet', Pam Ayres on Animals is a celebration of animals everywhere.

Pam Ayres on Animals

In The Art of Life Paul Durcan takes us around County Mayo in his "filthy, two-door, bottle-green Opel Astra", stopping off at Westport and Achill Island, where he declares himself to be "globally sad", but "locally glad". Next he travels east to Dublin to hold in his arms his newborn granddaughter and thence to Tuscany, Poland and Japan. Along the way he reflects upon parental pride, the aches and pains of old age, the trim bottoms of snooker players, the wisdom of ex-wives and dogs on Sandymount Strand, while introducing us to a host of colourful characters, including a bishop, a roofer, a milkman, a priest and an unmarried mother. 
 
Is there an art of living or is life a work of art? This magnificent collection - originally published on Paul Durcan's sixtieth birthday - reveals one of Ireland's most successful and popular poets at the height of his powers and continuing to challenge, amuse and delight.

The Art Of Life

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves /  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more.

Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense

Collected Poems

Elves, changelings, leprechauns, pixies, brownies and sprites; England's Queen Mab, France's Melusine, Scandinavian nixies and Scottish selkies: these magical creatures are sometimes mischievous, sometimes dangerous, always enchanting. This collection brings together a diverse array of literary fairies: here are Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Titania, Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci, of course, but also Rimbaud's 'Fairy', Goethe's 'Erl-King', Denise Levertov's 'Elves', Sylvia Plath's 'Lorelei', Christopher Okigbo's 'Watermaid', Neil Gaiman's 'The Fairy Reel' and Patience Agbabi's changeling boy ('The Double').

Fairy Poems

Spike Milligan

From the pen of comic genius Spike Milligan, here are 62 hilarious gems read by Spike himself, including "Ying-Tong-Iddle-I-Po", "This Is a Stick Up", and "Fleas, Knees, and Hidden Elephants". 
©1997 2002 BBC Audiobooks LTD (P)1997 2002 BBC Audiobooks LTD

Spike's Poems

'I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" 
And thumped him on the head.' 
 
Conjuring wily walruses, dancing lobsters, a Jabberwock and a Bandersnatch, Carroll's fantastical verse gave new words to the English language.

O Frabjous Day!

Hesiod (Work and Days) and Virgil’s Georgics set the scene in the early pages with their poetry about farming, while nymphs and shepherds cavort through the Arcadian landscapes of Theocritus, ushering in the pastoral genre. Appropriately the book ends with Alice Oswald, whose much admired nature poetry reflects the influence of classical poets. 
 
From Chaucer onwards English poetry is full of the countryside. Here are plenty of fine examples from major poets, including Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney; Jonson and Milton; Pope, Gray and Blake; Tennyson, Hopkins and Housman; Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Dylan Thomas. Alongside them, editor Paul Quarrie has placed some delightful gems from poets less well-known – Ambrose Philips’s ‘Description of Winter’, Margaret Cavendish’s ‘A Landscape’, James Henry’s ‘The Pleasure of Pigeons’ and poems by Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Mew, John Davidson and Kim Taplin, to name but a few. A lively choice of folk songs and anonymous poems about farming life adds to the mix, as do telling extracts from longer poems penned in the 18th century - the peak period for rural poetry.

Poems of the Countryside

Caleb Femi

What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground? 
 
In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. 
 
Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'

Poor

Nezami Ganjavi

Called 'the Romeo and Juliet of the East' by Lord Byron, Layli and Majnun is a classic tale of forbidden love that gained widespread popularity following its depiction in this twelfth-century narrative poem. Much like the lovers in the Shakespearean classic, Layli and Majnun's star-crossed lovers have become icons of both Persian literature and popular culture thanks to Nizami's accessible narrative poem, which is translated here in rhyming couplets by the acclaimed poet and scholar of Persian literature Dick Davis.

Layli and Majnun

James Quinn

Two sitcom gems from the early 2000s featuring the achingly hip poet Sir Ralph Stanza, written by and starring James QuinnSir Ralph Stanza, a hip London poet, is determined to communicate the people's hopes and fears through his verse. Whether they like it or not&hellip;Sir Ralph Stanza&rsquo;s Letter from Salford follows the exploits of the distinguished-but-hip London poet Sir Ralph Stanza as he settles into his new role as the poet-in-residence for Salford. This is all thanks to a specially-funded scheme displaying great cultural magnanimity towards the good people of the north of England. As he straddles the streets of Orsdall and Weaste, in his panama hat, blazer and silk scarf, Sir Ralph's goal is to blend in with the locals and express their anger through his verse. He seeks his muse in a chip shop, has run-ins with &lsquo;the man&rsquo; and what says &lsquo;artistic climax&rsquo; more than bringing quiche to the Quays&hellip;?In The Jail Diaries of Sir Ralph Stanza our hero poet navigates his new role and incarcerated reality as poet-in-residence at a maximum security prison. Albie Sachs, Nelson Mandela, Jeffrey Archer... The literary penal tradition is an honourable one. It finally reaches its pinnacle with Sir Ralph Stanza, the poet dedicated to bringing culture to the masses, and gently explaining it to them. Sir Ralph shocks the prison authorities by doing a rap double act with inmate Jermaine leading to some far reaching and unexpected consequences&hellip;These comedy series about a poet with a passion feature a special guest appearance from none other than (actual) poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. A perfect listen for anyone looking for the lighter side of life, culture and laughter. Cast and creditsWritten by James QuinnProduced by Graham FrostSir Ralph Stanza&rsquo;s Letters from SalfordStarring James Quinn 
With Alison Darling, Jack Deam, Mark Chatterton, Stephen Hoyle, Jemma Thompson, Tony Melody, Judy Flynn and Bob ChadwickAnd featuring Carol Ann Duffy First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 15 May - 5 Jun 2002 (series 1), 30 Apr 2003 - 4 Jun 2003 (series 2)The Jail Diaries of Sir Ralph StanzaStarring James QuinnWith Chris Jack, James Scales, Lorraine Cheshire, Joan Kempson, Neil Bell, Theo Ant Smith First Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 18 Aug &ndash; 22 Sep 2004&copy;2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

The Exploits of Sir Ralph Stanza

A BBC Radio Comedy Collection

CA Conrad

A visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetry 
 
Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. 
 
 Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.

The Book of Frank

George Szirtes

Published to coincide with the Hungarian Year of Culture (2003-4), this new volume in Harvill's celebrated Leopard series of anthologies comprises a selection of Hungarian prose and poetry from the second half of the twentieth century. Hungarian literature can be characterised as the literature of anxiety. Throughout the 1900s, as Europe's political and social fortunes changed, Hungary's writers reflected on those changes, absorbing and distilling them in work of documentary, poetic or comically grotesque power. This anthology of fiction and poetry begins by setting out some of the major landmarks from the end of the Second World War, then concentrates on the period before, during and after the key date of 1989, when Central Europe was transformed once again. The volume traces that history of change from Marai's wartime diaries, into the Stalinist period with the one-minute novels of Istvan Orkeny, past the paradoxical post-modernist humanism of Peter Esterhazy, and through the haunted waste-tracts of Laszlo Krasznahorkai. On the way, it gathers together the monumental, the mystical, the garrulous and the inward-driven poetries of Janos Pilinszky, Sando Weores, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Gyorgy Petri, Otto Orban and Zsuzsa Rakovszky and many younger writers. This extraordinary journey takes us up to Hungary's return to the European fold, as it moves from the psycho-geographic East towards the longed-for, lost, centre. It celebrates the anxiety, agitation, crying and whispering of the Hungarian literary imagination, posing the question that hangs above the door of the European Community: What is Europe? How do we live in it? And how do we respond to its darkness and its light?

Leopard V: An Island of Sound

Hungarian Poetry and Fiction before and beyond the Iron Curtain

Roger McGough

In this evocative and personal collection of poems Roger McGough comes to terms with painful memories as well as confronting fears that are universal. Here he remembers his father in &lsquo;Squaring Up&rsquo; and &lsquo;Alphabet Soup&rsquo;; observes the eccentricities of contemporary life in &lsquo;The City of London Tour&rsquo;; gives insights into human feeling with the surreal &lsquo;Your Favourite Hat&rsquo; and the moving elegy &lsquo;Defying Gravity&rsquo;; and muses on writing itself with &lsquo;Word Trap&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Darling Buds of Maybe&rsquo;. There are even witty poems dedicated to the chemical elements. Blending the everyday and the magical, his verses sparkle with verbal dexterity, irreverent humour, irony and heartfelt compassion.

Defying Gravity

In forms as various as the melodramas of old Scottish ballads and the hard-boiled poems of twentieth-century noir, here are assembled the most colourful villains and victims ever to be immortalized in verse, from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard to Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Mafia hit-men. Browning, Hardy, Auden, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Simon Armitage and Stevie Smith are only a few of the wide range of poets, old and new, whose comic, chilling and occasionally profound poetic musings on murder are gathered in this uniquely - and irresistibly - heart-racing volume.

Killer Verse

Poems of Murder and Mayhem

Peter Rabbit Tales

Explore with Peter Rabbit

Peter Rabbit Animation

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Peter Rabbit Lift-the-Flap Tales

Peter Rabbit’s Peekaboo

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