Our regular podcast host Samuel Tongue, after meeting with the Friends of the SPL group, rolls up his sleeves for one of his favourite poets, Selima Hill, examining two poems from her 1997 collection, Violet (Bloodaxe).

Please Can I Have a Man

Why I Left You

What they said about Selima Hill's poetry:

"Every page reveals her unique ability to invert the world and shake it, until it reveals its truth" - Kathleen Jamie & Maurice Riordan (PBS Bulletin)

"She is truly gifted. She invests mundane things with visionary, delirious brilliance." - Graham Swift (Sunday Times)

"Hill is a unique voice in British poetry, handling central subjects with wit, metaphorical beauty, and deep clarity. Her two most characeristic features, the off-the-wall images, and no-holds-barred straight talk, work flawlessly together." " - Ruth Padel & Sean O'Brien (PBS Bulletin)

Poetry films mentioned:

Do not go gentle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZjrkfWIlM

La Plage by Alastair Cook

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/filmpoem-4-la-plage/

Acknowledgements

https://www.arvideriksson.com/acknowledgements

Additional Resources

Poetry Film Workshop web page (wide variety of many poetry film related resources) https://artsci.co.uk/poetryfilmworkshop/

Charles Olsen’s 2023 essay on ‘How to film a poem’ https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/06/13/how-to-film-a-poem/

Helen Dewberry’s book ‘How to make a Poetry Film (a handbook for poets)’

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/helendewbery/how-to-make-a-poetry-film/

Regular podcast host Samuel Tongue, after a meetup with the Friends of the SPL group, rolls up his sleeves and gets thinking about two poems by Nick Makoha from his much acclaimed and award-listed 2025 masterpiece, The New Carthaginians (Penguin).

What they said about The New Carthaginians:

"A dizzying experience... like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat" - Philip Terry (Guardian)

"A moving collection of entangled histories. Makoha’s poems break, cut, scratch and sample with heightened language to remake and renew the boundaries of myth. Do not sleep on The New Carthaginians - Raymond Antrobus

"In this book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go." - Jason Allen-Paisant

"Profound, sheer originality... a tantalising jigsaw puzzle of a book" - Tristram Fane-Saunders (Telegraph)