This week Niall chooses five movements from Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies.
At 12.30 an episode from a new series of short radio features ‘Remembering Seamus Heaney’. RTÉ lyric fm marks Seamus Heaney’s tenth anniversary by asking ten people to each choose and introduce a favourite Heaney poem followed by a recording of the poet himself reading the poem. The poems chosen include some of his best known and most loved, like Mid-Term Break and Digging, as well as less well known poems, and range in theme from family and childhood, music and landscape, history, human rights, and the Troubles.
All the poems in the series are included in 100 Poems of Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber and the recordings are taken from the Collected Poems CD box set produced by RTÉ in association with The Lannan Foundation. Our thanks to the publishers and to the Estate of Seamus Heaney for permission to broadcast these poems.
A Rockfinch production for RTÉ lyric fm co-funded by RTÉ IRP and Coimisiún na Meán.
Monday: Episode 1: Poet Michael Longley recalls his first meeting with Seamus Heaney and chooses the poem The Harvest Bow (from the collection Field Work, published by Faber & Faber).
Tuesday: Episode 2:The choice of journalist and presenter Olivia O’Leary is one of the poems in the Clearances sequence, Clearances #4 (from The Haw Lantern, Faber & Faber), written in memory of the poet’s mother.
Wednesday: Episode 3: Actor Andrew Bennett looks back on some of his own memories of growing up on a farm and is struck by parallels to his own experience in the poems Lightenings #6 and #7 (from Seeing Things, Faber & Faber).
Thursday: Episode 4: Luke Dolan, student and winner of the Seamus Heaney Award in the 2022 Poetry Aloud competition, chooses the opening poem of Seamus Heaney’s first collection: Digging (from Death of a Naturalist, Faber & Faber).
Friday: Episode 5: Nicholas Allen, who is Director of the Willson Center at the University of Georgia in the United States, introduces a poem that brings us back to the dark days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland: Two Lorries (from The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber).
RTÉ lyric fm, Monday 4th September – Friday 8th September, 10am-1pm
