Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Yes, we're here again. In my hand,

I hold a poetry collection as I tend to do most days and this one is a 2011 collection

of poems called Changeling by Claire Pollard and it is full of strangeness and folklore and

be steal happenings and general spookiness and as a consequence I love it but more importantly,

Claire Pollard and this is an odd thing to say about a poet but she has a fabulous turn

of phrase and a way with words. I know you're saying those are the basics of being a poet but

you don't always get them at this level before your eyes as I see them now. So I'm going to read a

poem called I believe the pronunciation is Xenna, Z-D-N-N-O-R and if you live in Cornwall you may have

been there. I think you are allowed to go there if you don't live in Cornwall but you know

what I mean and this is a poem essentially about the mermaid phenomenon. Now I have long been

strangely obsessed with mermaids. I can't really explain it. I guess if I was going to be completely

confessional there is a part of me that thinks that they might exist. There I've said it. I went to

an art exhibition by a Scandinavian artist called Harold Solberg and there was a painting in that

called The Mermaid which was I think from the late 19th century and it was brilliant but not like

your usual bosty curly headed mermaid. She looked pretty tough and a bit cheeky smiled and

the way he painted her and he painted this picture in several versions. The moon is behind her head

giving her a sort of halo. So there's all sorts of odd sexuality, sacredness, odd things or mixed up.

There you go. So I'm going to read you the first bit of Xenna by Claire Pollard and I just from knowing

you this long I know you'll love you and I should say that it's almost journalistic in its form

in that you get a couple of cases of mermaid sightings and then a focus on a particular one that

happened at Xenna. They crossed the partition. First the mermaid at Nonton who slithered from

netted green nightmare silence where catfish skidded whiskered over her chest, her shocked eyes.

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