Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. Today I'd like to talk about a poet

and Irish poet called Nick Laird and how did I discover Nick Laird? I hear you say,

well I was listening to another poetry podcast, the New Yorker poetry podcast some time ago

and Nick Laird was on there reading amongst other things his own poem Feel Free and I completely

fell for it in a massive way and so I went and bought all his poetry books and there we go the book

I'm holding in my hand currently is a Nick Laird collection called On Purpose and it's full of

brilliant stuff one of the things I love about Nick Laird is not just the sort of joy of his

poetry but it's also a fabulous learning exercise I mean I'm not just of always new and unusual

words which is one of the great joys of poetry anyway but it's a sort of an advent calendar

and everything you find that's confusing if you open that little door you'll find a world

of knowledge and interesting stuff behind it and just in this collection alone for example there's

a poem about Evagrius the fourth century thinker who I had never heard of and it turns out again

very interestingly that he identified eight deadly sins Evagrius rather than normal seven and

the extra one was sadness sadness is one of the deadly sins I think is a really interesting topic and

it makes an interesting poem there's another poem about sadness in this collection which points out

that tears of sadness contain more manganese than tears caused by stuff like cutting an army and

or smoke yes that is the store of stuff that you get in a Nick Laird poem so I'm going to go to it

the poem that I've chosen from this collection is called the Underwood number four and it's a it's a

longish poem I'm low to leave any of it out because it's so rich and it all is like a house of

cards important to each other's section so I've you know I've beaten myself up about the length

of these podcasts I said from the beginning that they would be half an hour and they're often

more than that but you know what I'm going to stop beating myself up about that and just talk

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