Liz Lochhead joins Olivia to talk about her time as National Poet of Scotland, and Manuela Moser and Stephen Connolly tell us about the Lifeboat poetry readings in Belfast.
Liz Lochhead was National Poet of Scotland, or Scottish Makar, from 2011 to 2016. While it was exhausting, she relished bringing her enthusiasm for poetry to schools, community groups and readers all over Scotland. She believes that writing poetry is all about capturing a voice and brings us distinctive voices in the poems she reads on the programme: an actor in a theatre dressing-room, a Dirty Diva bemoaning the fact that so many of her friends are ‘friends of Dorothy’, and Rabbie Burns’ mouse talks back.
Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser run the Lifeboat poetry readings in Belfast. Undaunted by the giants of poetry who have preceded them, they see poetry in Northern Ireland as a living thing. Both read some of their own work that appeared in the anthology The future always makes me so thirsty: new poets from the north of Ireland.