Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast, occasionally people say to me, I don't

want into a bit of poetry, but I don't like this modern stuff. I don't like the contemporary.

And I say to them, you should try reading some Shinnade Morrissey and then shot up a

biography. And I think Shinnade Morrissey is a fantastic contemporary poet. If you notice, I

don't know quite at home with the word contemporary. I get in the middle and then I get a little bit

lost. Nevertheless, I think she's brilliant. In case you have an urge of Shinnade Morrissey,

all you need to know for the moment is that she is a multi-award, winning, Northern Irish poet,

and everything else you need to know, you'll get just from listening to these poems. Okay, I'm

focusing on a collection of Shinnade, if I may call her that, we've never met, called on balance,

and there's so much stuff. There's so much great stuff in here. I think this is a great place to

start if you're trying to convert someone to contemporary repoetry. There's stuff in it about

Napoleon's horse. There's my favourite topic, as many of our regular listeners will know,

the Aviaterix theme, the female pilot. And I want to focus on a poem about the Beatles. There are

many major historical happenings in on balance, and they're looked at in a fabulously different

clever, beautiful way. One thing I go on about on these podcasts is how I love discovering new words,

new ideas, new information from Napoleon's. People think that you need to be reading non-fiction

books, mainly by Lucy Wersley, to learn anything. But I've learnt so much, I mean, factual stuff from

poetry, as well as mountains of emotional stuff. Anyway, the first poem in the book is called the

Millie Helen, and I didn't know what that meant, and then I started reading it, and it's about the

launch of a ship, and I thought, oh, maybe it's the sort of SS Millie Helen that I've never heard of,

and then it became more and more apparent when it went into the lock and what people were wearing

that we were probably talking about, the Titanic, and I thought, well, where does the Millie Helen

...