Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast

A Place Does Not Die When Its Work Ends. It Dies When It Forgets How to Begin Again. — Goldsmith's Deserted Village, the Cornish Town of Callington, and What We Lose When the Work Leaves

In 1770, Oliver Goldsmith stood in the ruins of a village and wrote its elegy. The mill was silent. The brook was choked with weeds. The people were gone — driven off their own land so a wealthy man could enlarge his private park. Ill fares the land, Goldsmith warned, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. He was describing one English village. He could have been describing half of Britain. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks the question every struggling town in these islands eventually faces: what happens to a place when the work that built it is gone? The guest poem is Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" (1770) — one of the great laments in English poetry, written as the Enclosure Acts emptied the countryside and erased a whole way of life. A poem about what we lose when a community is robbed of its purpose, and never allowed to begin again. Alden then reads his own poem, "Callington," a portrait of a Cornish market town that faced the same ending — and refused it. Beneath Kit Hill, where the copper and tin mines once roared, the orchards now grow. The chapel spire and the miner's past still echo in the granite, but the town did not become a ruin. It became something new. A town that holds the old and new, in morning mist and evening hue. The episode closes with a discussion for anyone who has ever loved a place that has changed: how a poet reads a landscape that carries a working past beneath a pastoral present. Why every rolling hill is a record of labour. Why a living town is more like a garden than a museum. And why beginning again is not the same as forgetting. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to aldencarrow78@gmail.com to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. A place does not die when its work ends. It dies when it forgets how to begin again.

Some Places Are Not Weathered. They Are Practised. — Byron's Apostrophe to the Ocean, the Cornish Coast at Bude, and What Small Towns Know That Cities Forgot

In the autumn of 1817, exiled from England and on the run from a continent's worth of scandal, Lord Byron sat at a desk above the Adriatic and addressed the sea. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll! He had watched his reputation collapse, his marriage break, and a society close its doors against him. And in the ocean he found, with something close to relief, a force that had noticed none of it — a force that could not be broken in turn. In this episode, Alden Carrow explores an idea that has sharpened over years of walking the Cornish coast: some places are not weathered. They are practised. The guest poem is Lord Byron's "Apostrophe to the Ocean," the closing movement of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) — by common consent the greatest sea-poetry the Romantic movement produced. Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage: all gone, while the ocean stands unchanged. Man marks the earth with ruin, Byron writes, his control stops with the shore. A wild, almost mocking meditation on the futility of human pretension against something genuinely vast and genuinely indifferent. Alden then reads his own poem, "Bude," a portrait of a north-Cornish town that has made an art of leaning into the gale. Where the breakers crash on Summerleaze and the sea pool is carved in stone and tide, a small community has practised something the rest of England has forgotten: how to stand at the edge, and find joy there. A town that leans into the gale, and finds its strength in every tale. The episode closes with a discussion of the poetry of community — what small coastal towns actually do that great cities have forgotten. The rhythm of shared survival. The visibility of the individual. Why there is no poetry in convenience, and why resilience is not about being untouchable but about being touchable, vulnerable to the elements and to each other, and finding strength in that shared state. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to aldencarrow78@gmail.com to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. Some places are not weathered. They are practised.

Solitude Is Not a Punishment. It Is an Instrument. — W. B. Yeats's Stolen Child, the Cornish Island of Bryher, and the Quiet Art of Being Alone

On a rocky water-edge in County Sligo, a young William Butler Yeats hears voices on the wind. They are not human voices. They are the faeries of Irish folklore, and they are calling a human child away — out of his mother's house, into the wild lakes and woods and waters, beyond the reach of a world that has grown too noisy with its grief. Come away, O human child, they sing, four times across the poem, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what it means to choose solitude — not as a wound, not as a punishment, but as an instrument we can learn to play. The guest poem is "The Stolen Child" by W. B. Yeats (1886), written when the poet was only twenty-one — a piece that announces his whole career to come. It draws on the genuine fear of changelings in Irish folk tradition, then turns the story inside out by letting the faeries speak the poem themselves. The result is one of the most musical and morally ambiguous summonses-to-elsewhere in English verse. Is the calling-away a horror or a mercy? Yeats refuses, beautifully, to tell us. Alden then reads his own poem, "Bryher," a portrait of a small Cornish island where the waves strike hard on Hell Bay's shore and a single cottage holds its ground against the western swell. Where Yeats's child is called away, Bryher is the destination — the wild place that has chosen itself, where the wind writes verses on the sand and solitude becomes a choice. The episode closes with a practical discussion every writer and reader will recognise: the writing retreat. Why poets from Wordsworth at Grasmere to Dylan Thomas at Laugharne have always sought islands. How to construct a productive solitude, whether a week away or an hour each morning. And what solitude, properly practised, can give back to the work. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to aldencarrow78@gmail.com to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. Solitude is not a punishment. It is an instrument.

Some Places Do Not Raise Their Voices: Thomas Gray's Country Churchyard, Bodmin Moor, and the Quiet Art of Listening to History

In a country churchyard at the close of the eighteenth century, a poet stops at a moss-covered headstone and reads a name no one has spoken aloud in a hundred years. The curfew tolls. The village dead sleep on beneath unread inscriptions. And Thomas Gray, looking down at the rude forefathers of the hamlet, makes one of the quietest, gravest claims in English poetry: that beneath these obscure stones may lie a mute inglorious Milton, a village Hampden, a Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. Greatness, he insists, is not the same as recognition. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what it means to listen to places that have never asked to be heard. The guest poem is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray (1751), one of the great works of English poetry — a meditation on obscurity, dignity, and the buried lives that history declines to name. A poem that taught two centuries of readers how to stand quietly in a small place and pay attention to what is no longer speaking. Alden then reads his own poem, "Bodmin," a portrait of a Cornish moorland town where the chapel bell and the prison gate still stand within sight of one another, and the past has not finished happening. The 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion marched out of these granite streets. Saints and smugglers walked them. The railway has gone quiet but the air has not. The granite walls hold tales unsaid. The episode closes with a practical discussion for any poet, novelist, or local historian: how to research the history of a place before writing about it. Parish records, county archives, local history societies, the literature of unglamorous documentation. Because the moor will not tell you its stories unless you have earned the right to ask. Competition Email your guest poem suggestion to aldencarrow78@gmail.com to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely. There is poetry to be found. Some places do not raise their voices. They simply keep speaking.

The Whole Truth in Quiet Places: From Browning’s Orchard to Bedale’s Gentle Bloom

In this episode, we step into the quiet power of locality — from Browning’s aching orchard to the gentle, truth‑telling streets of Bedale — and discover why the surface of a place can sometimes be the whole truth. We explore how a single parish can hold an entire universe, how the smallest details become the deepest poetry, and why noticing is an act of love. You’ll hear Robert Browning’s *Home Thoughts from Abroad*, a listener‑requested poem that captures the longing for home with astonishing precision, followed by my own poem *Bedale*, a celebration of a market town whose peace is not a mask but a meaning. And this week, the stakes are higher: **your poem suggestion could win you a signed copy of *Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry*.** Every listener who emails a guest‑poem recommendation is entered into the draw — and the next featured poem will come from one of you. If you’ve ever wanted to shape an episode, this is your moment. The competition is open, the prize is personal, and the poetry we share next might be yours. Send me your suggestions by email to aldencarrow78@gmail.com