Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast

Beneath the Pump Room in Bath, water rises at forty-six degrees, more than a million litres a day. It fell as rain on the Mendips around ten thousand years ago, travelled three kilometres down into the earth's heat, and is only now finding its way back into the light. It has never once altered its behaviour on anyone's account. And for two thousand years, people have stood at its edge and asked it for things anyway. The Romans threw in coins, jewellery, and lead curse tablets — thin inscribed sheets addressed to the goddess Sulis. Around a hundred and thirty have been recovered, and they are almost unbearably ordinary: a cloak stolen from the bath-house, six coins from a purse, the names of everyone who might have taken them. The goddess did not intervene. The cloaks were never returned. But we can still read every word. This week's guest poem comes not from the canon but from a living young poet, Leila Lillian Dudmish, who has kindly allowed Alden to share her work. "Treasured You" is an elegy for her grandfather, Ronald Dudmish, built entirely from small physical particulars — a light blue shirt, a chuckle, a white t-shirt losing its scent. Her Instagram is leilalilliandudmish.work Alden then reads his own poem, "Bath," from Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, and asks why the specific detail, not the general statement, is what makes an elegy last. Email a guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent by hand. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.

9th September 2026. It is a special day tomorrow, so this week's episode — which would normally reach you on Wednesday morning at six — will instead arrive on Thursday morning at the same hour. One day later than usual, and then we return to our regular rhythm the following week. This podcast keeps a steady time on purpose, and I know many of you listen on a particular morning, on a particular walk or journey to work. I would rather not disturb that, and I am sorry to move it. But I would far rather give you the episode properly on Thursday than a hurried version of it on Wednesday. It is worth the extra day. On Thursday we are going to Bath — to the hot spring beneath the Pump Room, and the water that fell as rain on the Mendips ten thousand years ago and is only now finding its way back into the light. The guest poem this week comes not from the canon, but from a living young poet who has very kindly allowed me to share her work with you. It is an episode about what we set down against forgetting. If you follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening now, Thursday's episode will find its own way to you without your having to remember the change. Competition: email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent to you by hand. Until Thursday — may you find poetry waiting for you in the everyday.

Tomorrow, the book comes out. Before that: we go back to where it all began. John Clare's Emmonsail's Heath in Winter—written by a farm labourer watching a heron flap off, a crow swing on a rotten branch, twenty long-tailed tits hang on a twig and start again. Nothing in it performs for him. Nothing waits. His first appearance on the show, and worth the wait. Then Somerset Awaits, the opening poem of the collection—a title that's wrong on purpose. Eighteen lines later, the poem itself says: "Geology holds no intention; it does not wait." A twelve-metre tide, a river that runs above its own fields, water pumped uphill against its own weight, twice a day, for two centuries, just so Somerset can stay dry. This week's discussion—Launch Week: an honest account of what this book actually is, what it cost to write it straight, and three small, no-obligation ways you can help it find readers. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy, sent to you by hand. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What does it take for a drowned thing to stay readable, instead of just staying intact? We begin with the Titanic. Thomas Hardy's The Convergence of the Twain, written nine days after the sinking for a charity matinee at Covent Garden—a poem so cold about human loss that it never once mentions a body. Jewels lie "lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind," and the fish who find them can't read a single thing the wreck was ever meant to say. Then we descend into a Somerset swamp: Glastonbury Lake Village, an artificial island built from a thousand tons of imported clay, sinking on a decadal cycle for two centuries until the mere finally claimed it. But the marsh didn't just preserve the timber. In 1892, Arthur Bulleid read ten superimposed clay floors and knew exactly what had happened there. The sea forgets what it swallows. The marsh remembers everything. This week's discussion—The Marsh Method: the difference between a poem's details that stay beautiful but go opaque, and the ones that still work as information centuries later. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's launch-week episode.

What do you do with the most mythologised hill in England, when your own poem refuses to mention the myth at all? We begin with the legend at full volume: Tennyson's Avalon, from The Passing of Arthur—an island where "falls not hail, or rain, or any snow," promised to a dying king who admits, in the same breath, that he isn't sure it's real. Then we climb the real hill. Glastonbury Tor: a residual outlier left standing while everything softer eroded away, seven terraces of disputed origin, a roofless tower held up by iron tie bars, and an abbot hanged, drawn and quartered at the summit in 1539. Nothing here has ever been exempt from weather, wear, or violence—and the poem never once says the word Avalon. This week's discussion—Refusing the Legend: what it costs, and what it buys you, to choose the documented truth over the more beautiful story everyone already wants to believe. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What do you do with the ten thousand years underneath your feet, while half a million pairs of shoes wear the path above it smooth? We begin in 1858 with Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill—a poem built as pure dialogue, one voice growing more anxious with every question, the other never once changing its temperature. Rossetti's first appearance on the show, and overdue. Then we descend into Cheddar—a village pinned between a limestone scarp and the water table, where a quarry takes the cliff back by the tonne, half a million tourists a year polish the gorge trails to a slip, and a few metres below all of it, Cheddar Man has rested in the same fixed cold as maturing wheels of cheese for ten thousand years. Nothing above ground touches it. This week's practical work—The Unchanging Room: how to tell the difference between the parts of a poem that should wear down through revision, and the one image at the centre that should never move. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What do a Victorian priest praising a spotted cow and a wind-scoured Somerset hilltop have in common? Everything doesn't have to match to hold together. We begin in Wales, 1877, with Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty—ten and a half lines praising the dappled, the "counter, original, spare, strange"—a poem that finds God not in perfection but in mixture, unpublished until 29 years after Hopkins's death. Then we climb to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point in Somerset: a Bronze Age cemetery, a Norse word, three ruined signal fires, and a concrete survey pillar, all sharing a few dozen paces of gritstone—nothing on it from the same century, all of it slowly sliding downhill together, pushed by water freezing in the rock. This week's big news: Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is finished, and arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. We talk honestly about what the book is, how it differs from the earlier volumes, and three small, no-obligation ways you can help it find readers. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What happens when a storm stops being a threat and becomes a release? This week, we climb. We begin on a Yorkshire moor in 1836, with eighteen-year-old Emily Brontë—a poet who walked the moors alone for hours, in weather that sent everyone else indoors, and came back each time not diminished but restored. Her poem High Waving Heather doesn't watch the storm from safety. It finds freedom inside it. For the first time in a while, our guest poem comes from a woman, and it more than earns its place. Then we climb into Cumbria, onto the real Kirkstone Pass—a one-in-four gradient locals call The Struggle, cut through four hundred million years of volcanic stone, where no tree can root and the crest arrives without warning: the gradient simply stops, and the whole sky opens. This week's practical work—The Gradient Draft: why the hardest, most unrewarding stretch of a poem isn't a sign you're on the wrong road, and how to keep moving through it without losing the thread. Also this week: a first look at the next book in this series, Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, out in paperback on Amazon from 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What turns a ledger into a home? This week, we explore the space between a posting and a place—between empire's measurement and the small, unmeasured things that root us to somewhere for good. We begin with Rudyard Kipling's Roman Centurion's Song—a centurion recalled to Rome after forty years in Britain, discovering that he can no longer leave. His love for this cold, wet, provincial frontier has nothing to do with duty or glory. It lives in hawthorn in the sun, bracken in the wet, the particular grey of a British March sky. It lives, Kipling shows us, in the specific things no ledger ever records. Then we walk through Brampton—a small border town just south of Hadrian's Wall, built literally from centuries of measurement: Roman tonnage carved into stone, Victorian hydraulics, industrial coal tracks, modern timetables governed by signal and rail. Four centuries of careful accounting. But what would it take for such a place to become somebody's granite border keep? The answer lies in what we call the unofficial map—the things you could never look up, because nobody ever wrote them down. The exact kink in a garden wall that marks a culverted stream. The bench that has quietly become yours. The frost that lifts last on a particular wall. These small, unrecorded acts of attention are how a place stops being a destination and becomes a home. This week's practical work: Go back to somewhere you already know well. Notice it slowly. Write down the details you'd be slightly embarrassed to admit you know. These are the seeds of belonging. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

On the Solway coast sits a town that was never discovered, only designed. Silloth's dock gates open for exactly two hours around every high tide — no more, no less — and its whole working life has been built around that narrow window for over a century.. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what real mastery actually looks like, when the thing you are mastering was never yours to command. The guest poem is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880), a short, disciplined poem built from an unvarying five-line stanza and a refrain that never once departs from itself. A traveller crosses the sand at twilight; small waves erase his footprints; morning comes, and he does not return. Through it all, indifferent to grief or morning alike: the tide rises, the tide falls. Alden then reads his own poem, "Silloth," a precise portrait of a Victorian planned port still timing its working life to the sea it has never controlled, only learned. The episode closes with a discussion for every writer: the poetics of constraint. Why form is not a cage, and how the sonnet, the metre, and the submission deadline all work the same way as a dock gate that only opens for two hours. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Mastery is not control. It is knowing exactly when to open the gate.

On a fell above Buttermere, a mountain is quietly coming apart. This is Haystacks — Alfred Wainwright's favourite fell in all of Lakeland, the one he asked to be scattered upon when he died. In 1991, near the tarn called Innominate, he was. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks a question that follows every walker eventually: is anything ever truly lost, or does it only change its form? The guest poem is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Cloud" (1820), spoken by the cloud itself — a being that dissolves into rain and reforms out of the blue, endlessly, and refuses to call any of it dying. I change, but I cannot die. Alden then reads his own poem, "Haystacks," an unflinching portrait of volcanic rock fractured by ten thousand winters, a rusted tramway gone to ghost, and a walker standing at the rim, staring into the cloud's white core. The episode closes with a discussion on writing the landscape you want to become part of — what changes when a poet writes a place not as a visitor, but as somewhere they intend to belong to completely, even after death. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. Nothing here is lost. It is only changing state.

Some towns are built to do one thing. Cleator Moor was built to dig iron. Beneath this small West Cumbrian town runs hematite — the rich red ore that, in the nineteenth century, turned a quiet rural settlement into a boom town almost overnight, so busy and so Irish it was known for a time as "Little Ireland." Then the ore ran out. The mines were capped. The work was shipped to the coast and never came back. What's left is a town in the long quiet afterwards — and as Alden Carrow discovered, walking its emptied square, the silence here is not peace. It is exhaustion. In this episode, we ask one of the hardest questions a poet can face: what is left of a place when the work that built it is gone — and the world has simply finished with it? The guest poem is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Work Without Hope" (1825), a short, devastating sonnet from the end of his life. While all of nature labours through the spring — the bees stirring, the birds on the wing — the poet alone stands idle, unable to work and unable to hope. Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, he writes, and hope without an object cannot live. It is the inner experience of lost purpose, set down in fourteen unforgettable lines. Alden then reads his own poem, "Cleator Moor," an unflinching portrait of an iron town hollowed out and waiting — its bronze statues weathering in the damp, the field creeping back into the gaps where the houses stood, the whole place a hard shell waiting for the turf to close overhead. The episode closes with a discussion for every writer and reader: how to write about loss without consoling it falsely — and why bearing witness to a place the world has abandoned is itself an act of respect, and perhaps of love. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. When the work is gone, what is left is not peace. It is waiting.

Beneath the streets of Camborne, the engines once roared. This was the capital of the Cornish mining world — the town of Richard Trevithick and the Camborne School of Mines, whose engineers sank shafts on every continent on earth. A place that genuinely changed the world. And a place that paid for it, in lungs full of dust and lives cut short in the dark. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks one of the hardest questions a poet can face: how do we honour the work a place did, without forgetting what that work cost the people who did it? The guest poem is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" (1843) — one of the most powerful protest poems of the Victorian age. Written after Barrett Browning read the parliamentary reports on child labour in Britain's mines and mills, it was poetry as intervention: an act aimed directly at the conscience of a nation that was letting children of five and six die underground. The child's sob in the silence, she wrote, curses deeper than the strong man in his wrath. Alden then reads his own poem, "Camborne," a defiant portrait of a Cornish mining town that refuses to be reduced to its decline. The beam engine still stands. The brass band still plays on the green. A town of brass and coal-black hands — where the same hands that played the cornet on Sunday were black with the work that would shorten the life attached to them. Joy and cost, held in a single breath. The episode closes with a discussion every writer and reader will recognise: how to write about labour and hardship without romanticising it into heritage, or reducing it to nothing but misery. Why the pride and the price are not two subjects, but one. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. To honour the work, we must also remember what it cost.