Frank is very moved by what the poet, Mona Van Duyn, can do with an eraser. The poem referenced is ‘The Creation’ by Mona Van Duyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank and the poet, Craig Raine, explore a disused botanical garden. The poems referenced are ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, ‘Listen With Mother’ and ‘The Old Botanical Gardens’ by Craig Raine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank and the poet, Wislawa Szymborska, discover how many people actually like poetry. The poems referenced are ‘Plato, or Why’ and ‘Some Like Poetry’ by Wislawa Szymborska. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank spends a day in Belfast, wallowing in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. The poem referenced are ‘Personal Helicon’ from ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and ‘Limbo’ by Seamus Heaney. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

A poem by Ruth Padel results in Frank staring, for 15 minutes, at an embroidery of an elephant. The poem referenced is ‘Mary’s Elephant, Elizabeth’s Spinet’ from ‘The Soho Leopard’ by Ruth Padel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank is more than slightly besotted with ‘Lunch Poems’ by Frank O'Hara. The poems referenced are ‘Personal Poem’ and ‘The Day Lady Died’ by Frank O’Hara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank gets very excited about the Rebecca Hawkes collection, ‘Meat Lovers’. The poems referenced are ‘After The Blizzard I Followed My Mother’ and ‘Pony Club Summer Camp’ by Rebecca Hawkes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank spends the night in Dylan Thomas' bedroom. The poems referenced are ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ and ‘A Refusal To Morn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London’ by Dylan Thomas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank loves a hard-drinking, hard-smoking Polytechnic lecturer like Martin Bell, especially when he is offering poetic praise to Groucho Marx. The poems referenced are ‘Ode to Groucho’ by Martin Bell and ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…

Jo Shapcott sends Frank, an enthusiastic tree-hugger, into a sap-soaked frenzy. The collection referenced is ‘Of Mutability’. The poems referenced are ‘I Go Inside The Tree’, ‘My Oak’ and ‘Cypress’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank stands in awe as Sasha Dugdale sends a frighteningly honest Valentine’s message. The collection referenced is ‘Joy’ by Sasha Dugdale. The poems referenced are ‘Joy’ and ‘Valentine’s’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank is alarmed by AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

The Irish poet, Jessica Traynor, explores one of Frank’s favourite subjects – ageing performers who don’t know when to quit. The collection referenced is ‘Pit Lullabies’ by Jessica Traynor. The cycle of poems referenced is ‘An Island Sings’. The poems referenced are ‘The Parent’s Song’, ‘Song of the Insomniac’ and ‘Nureyev in Dublin’. Learn more ab…

American poet, Billy Collins, makes Frank question the whole Poetry Podcast experience. The poems referenced are ‘Introduction to Poetry’ and ‘American Sonnet’ by Billy Collins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank trembles at the fragmented beauty of Sappho, the superstar poet of Ancient Greece. The fragment translations are by Aaron Poochigian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank explores The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Nuff said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Series 9 of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast begins on 10th January. See you there! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Is it a man? Is it a moth? Frank has a strange night out with Elizabeth Bishop. The poem referenced is 'The Man-Moth'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank indulges his obsession with the Anglo Saxons as he reads Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Did he or didn't he? Frank investigates Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'. The other poem referenced is 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' by Robert Browning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Nature gets horny and reflective. Frank is excited about the poetry of Jean Sprackland. The collection referenced is 'Green Noise'. The poem referenced is 'April' and the sequence referenced is 'The Lost Villages'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank examines statues and statutes with Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poems referenced are 'England in 1918' and 'Ozymandias'. The essay referenced is 'A Defense of Poetry'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank howls at the moon with Sylvia Plath. The poems referenced are 'The Moon and the Yew Tree' and 'Ariel. TW: mentions of suicide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank celebrates the razor-sharp poetic mind of Don Paterson. The poem referenced is 'Rain'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows Frank that it's hard to be a mother and a poet and a revolutionary. The poem referenced is 'Mother and Poet'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Series 8 of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast coming very soon... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Frank discovers two very different war poets, Alan Ross and Alan Seeger. The poems referenced are ‘Mess Deck’ by Alan Ross and ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’ by Alan Seeger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Frank explains why the poet, Charlotte Mew, should, in his opinion, be a household name. The poems referenced are ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ and ‘Sea Love’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Frank screams the praises of Sinéad Morrissey’s Beatlemania poems. The book referenced is ‘On Balance’. The poems referenced are ‘The Millihelen’ and ‘Perfume’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week: Thomas Hardy’s poetry, featuring love, death and men that look like holly bushes. The poems referenced are ‘Exeunt Omnes’, ‘A Light Snow-Fall After Frost’ and ‘A Countenance’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Frank enters the funny but unsettling world of Selima Hill. The collection referenced is ‘Men Who Feed Pigeons’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, John Keats talks to pottery. The poem referenced is ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, we look at a John Masefield poem from 1911, in which a naked drunk runs through a town at midnight, threatening firefighters with their own hose-nozzles. The poems referenced are ‘Sea-Fever’, ‘The Everlasting Mercy’, ‘Dauber’ and ‘Partridges’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…

This week: why do so many of us stagger through life leaving a trail of chaos and confusion? American poet, Kay Ryan, reveals it’s because we are carrying an invisible ladder. The poems referenced are ‘We’re Building the Ship As We Sail It’, ‘Carrying A Ladder’ and ‘Blandeur’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…

This week, American poet, Richard Wilbur, explains why stones aren’t very ambitious. The poems referenced are ‘A Dubious Night’ and ‘Two Voices in A Meadow’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, American Poet Laureate, Ada Limón heads for the safe haven of the parental raincoat. The poems referenced are ‘The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual’, ‘The Raincoat’ and ‘Before’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Ted Hughes shows us that writing a poem is like a stinking fox walking across a snow-covered field. The poem referenced are ‘The Thought Fox’ and ‘The Jaguar’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, our Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, writes a brilliant poem about what some might think is an unlikely subject. The poem referenced is ‘The Patriarchs – An Elegy’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, Carol Ann Duffy considers the profound, prayer-like quality of the Shipping Forecast. The poems referenced are ‘Death of a Teacher’ and ‘Prayer’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

This week, John Betjeman gets a tennis-based humiliation from the girl of his dreams. The poem referenced is ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Series 6 of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast begins on 8th February. See you there! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

At last, our first jousting poet - Frank meets Sir Thomas Wyatt, head-on. The poems referenced are They Flee From Me and Farewell Love and All Thy Laws For Ever by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank went on holiday with Emily Dickinson and came back in love with her poetry. The poems referenced are ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, ‘One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted’ and ‘A Wind That Rose’ by Emily Dickinson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…

Vampires and mermaids - Frank falls under the spell of Clare Pollard’s fabulous poetry. The collection referenced is Changeling by Clare Pollard and the individual poems referenced are Zennor and Whitby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank meets Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and finds out why Camelot is a bit of a lottery. The poems referenced are The Charge Of The Light Brigade and The Lady Of Shalott both by Tennyson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Drunken nights and floppy discs - Frank gets excited about the poetry of Leontia Flynn. The collection referenced is Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn and the individual poems referenced are Anecdote and The Floppy Disk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank explains why the first poetry book he ever bought, The Mersey Sound, changed his life forever. The poems referenced are Without You and The New ‘Our Times’ by Adrian Henri, Where Are You Now, Batman, Party Piece and After Breakfast by Brian Patten, and On Picnics, Café Portraits and Let Me Die A Youngman’s Death by Roger McGough. Learn more a…

Series 5 of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast coming very soon... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank shares a cold, sad Sunday morning with Robert Hayden. The poems referenced are Those Winter Sundays and The Whipping by Robert Hayden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon

Frank explores the poetic treasure-trove that is Michael Symmons Roberts’ collection, Drysalter. The poems referenced are Face to Face, Through a Glass Darkly and Discoverers by Michael Symmons Roberts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesPor Avalon