Radar: What I’m Reading, Watching, Listening to this Week

Find out what I'm engaging with this week

Listening

I’ve just listened to this podcast where Bloodaxe poet Jane Griffiths is interviewed about her 2022 collection ‘Little Silver.’ It’s a great podcast to listen to covering the poet’s background, approach to writing and the book in question. I particularly enjoyed her reading of the poem Little Silver. This is definitely a book I’ll be looking out for.  She’ll be reading at Worcester College, Oxford this Friday evening as part of The Oxford Review of Books ‘Poetry Night’. 

I’m currently listening to The War of the Worlds on BBC Sounds, and have been for a couple of months, the problem is I keep falling asleep to it at night and have to keep going back to where I started the night before. I’m really enjoying it but currently stuck on Book 1 Chapter 13!

Watching

I really enjoyed Shogun on Disney+ recently. We mainly got Disney+ so our children could watch Spidey and His Amazing Friends and stuff like that, so I’ve made a bit of an effort to watch some of the other programmes on there recently. Shogun is produced very well indeed and I did enjoy it. I found the ending a little abrupt (is there any modern drama with a good, satisfying, well crafted ending? They’re so hard to come by) and also the acting of the main character Jack Blackthorn became increasingly one-dimensional as the ten episodes worn on, however it was great to watch something set in Japan (as opposed to modern European cities) and dip into their ancient customs and culture (even if some of it was incredibly brutal!). 

Reading

I’m going to be running two book clubs over the course of this month: one on Diane Seuss’s ‘Modern Poetry’ and one on Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’. So I’m currently dipping into those. Carl Phillips’ ‘Scattered Snows, to the North’ is another book I’ve been reading on and off for the past six months or so. I always keep a few books on my desk and invariably end up picking them up and magpie-ing through them when I should be doing other work. You can sign up to those here.

Events

There are two poetry readings happening this Friday night, one at the Reading Poetry Café featuring Harry Mann (published by Nine Arches), and one in Oxford at Worcester College run by The Oxford Review of Books featuring six poets including (Sue Leigh, Peter McDonald, Jane Griffiths and Rowland Bagnall). If you’re in the vicinity of either do go and support them.