Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast.

This week I want to look at a collection of poems called Pitt Lollabies and that collection was

published in 2022 and it is a collection of poems written by Jessica trainer who is a Dublin-born poet who I like a great deal and so I want to share my excitement about her work with you guys.

I'm going to begin by saying that a friend of mine recommended a poem to me, actually a poet to me,

and then waited my reply and after a couple of days I called back and said

sorry but I found him a bit too understandable and he was slightly irate at this but what I meant was that it was easy to get to most of the meaning in the poems and then I didn't find the really important hard bit at the core. Some poems have the hard bit on the

outside like some sort of carrot pace. The way it works with Jessica Trainer in my experience of her work

is that it feels quite straightforward when you read it and then you get deeper and deeper and

it gets more and more exciting. I read an interview

with Jessica Trainer. She is a woman who has written for opera, written for the

theatre, she teaches creative writing, she is a journalist, she does

reviews of poems, she does a lot. And interestingly, she said that working in the theatre had an influence

on her poetry because the theatrical writer has to and I quote explore big complex themes

using language that sounds natural.

And that's what she tries to do with her poetry,

to avoid being self-consciously poetic,

as she puts it and to use her literal voice and it is a tremendous

skill of the dramatic writer that they get across really big themes but if the characters

talk in high-for-luted and complex ways the whole thing can collapse so So it's a real skill, language that sounds like people talking,

but enormous concepts being discussed. And I think that is how Jessica's I'm going to call her Jessica I've never met her

But I'm going to call her Jessica that is how her poetry works for me

So this collection pit labies, there is a cycle of poems called

...