Top ten recordings of poets

Richard Carrington and Andrew Motion set up the Poetry Archive, a continually expanding online audio library of poets reading their own work. One of Motion's ten favorite recordings in the collection:

"Memorial"
Alice Oswald, 2011

Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial brilliantly fillets and reheats Homer’s Iliad in ways that honour the original and also strike disturbing contemporary echoes. Her delivery is almost relentlessly steady, but the effect is not to suppress the shock and thrill of her lines, only to sharpen them; the whole performance has a startlingly live feeling – facing its audience very boldly, yet intimate in its address.

Read about--and listen to--another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue