On the Solway coast sits a town that was never discovered, only designed. Silloth's dock gates open for exactly two hours around every high tide — no more, no less — and its whole working life has been built around that narrow window for over a century..

In this episode, Alden Carrow asks what real mastery actually looks like, when the thing you are mastering was never yours to command.

The guest poem is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880), a short, disciplined poem built from an unvarying five-line stanza and a refrain that never once departs from itself. A traveller crosses the sand at twilight; small waves erase his footprints; morning comes, and he does not return. Through it all, indifferent to grief or morning alike: the tide rises, the tide falls.

Alden then reads his own poem, "Silloth," a precise portrait of a Victorian planned port still timing its working life to the sea it has never controlled, only learned.

The episode closes with a discussion for every writer: the poetics of constraint. Why form is not a cage, and how the sonnet, the metre, and the submission deadline all work the same way as a dock gate that only opens for two hours.

Competition

Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand.

New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.

Mastery is not control. It is knowing exactly when to open the gate.

On a fell above Buttermere, a mountain is quietly coming apart. This is Haystacks — Alfred Wainwright's favourite fell in all of Lakeland, the one he asked to be scattered upon when he died. In 1991, near the tarn called Innominate, he was.

In this episode, Alden Carrow asks a question that follows every walker eventually: is anything ever truly lost, or does it only change its form?

The guest poem is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Cloud" (1820), spoken by the cloud itself — a being that dissolves into rain and reforms out of the blue, endlessly, and refuses to call any of it dying. I change, but I cannot die.

Alden then reads his own poem, "Haystacks," an unflinching portrait of volcanic rock fractured by ten thousand winters, a rusted tramway gone to ghost, and a walker standing at the rim, staring into the cloud's white core.

The episode closes with a discussion on writing the landscape you want to become part of — what changes when a poet writes a place not as a visitor, but as somewhere they intend to belong to completely, even after death.

Competition

Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry, sent to you by hand.

New episodes every Wednesday at 6am. Slow down. Listen closely.

Nothing here is lost. It is only changing state.

Some towns are built to do one thing. Cleator Moor was built to dig iron. Beneath this small West Cumbrian town runs hematite — the rich red ore that, in the nineteenth century, turned a quiet rural settlement into a boom town almost overnight, so busy and so Irish it was known for a time as "Little Ireland." Then the ore ran out. The mines were capped. The work was shipped to the coast and never came back. What's left is a town in the long quiet afterwards — and as Alden Carrow discovered, walking its emptied square, the silence here is not peace. It is exhaustion.

In this episode, we ask one of the hardest questions a poet can face: what is left of a place when the work that built it is gone — and the world has simply finished with it?

The guest poem is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Work Without Hope" (1825), a short, devastating sonnet from the end of his life. While all of nature labours through the spring — the bees stirring, the birds on the wing — the poet alone stands idle, unable to work and unable to hope. Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, he writes, and hope without an object cannot live. It is the inner experience of lost purpose, set down in fourteen unforgettable lines.

Alden then reads his own poem, "Cleator Moor," an unflinching portrait of an iron town hollowed out and waiting — its bronze statues weathering in the damp, the field creeping back into the gaps where the houses stood, the whole place a hard shell waiting for the turf to close overhead.

The episode closes with a discussion for every writer and reader: how to write about loss without consoling it falsely — and why bearing witness to a place the world has abandoned is itself an act of respect, and perhaps of love.

Competition

Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a personally signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells 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.

When the work is gone, what is left is not peace. It is waiting.

Beneath the streets of Camborne, the engines once roared. This was the capital of the Cornish mining world — the town of Richard Trevithick and the Camborne School of Mines, whose engineers sank shafts on every continent on earth. A place that genuinely changed the world. And a place that paid for it, in lungs full of dust and lives cut short in the dark.

In this episode, Alden Carrow asks one of the hardest questions a poet can face: how do we honour the work a place did, without forgetting what that work cost the people who did it?

The guest poem is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" (1843) — one of the most powerful protest poems of the Victorian age. Written after Barrett Browning read the parliamentary reports on child labour in Britain's mines and mills, it was poetry as intervention: an act aimed directly at the conscience of a nation that was letting children of five and six die underground. The child's sob in the silence, she wrote, curses deeper than the strong man in his wrath.

Alden then reads his own poem, "Camborne," a defiant portrait of a Cornish mining town that refuses to be reduced to its decline. The beam engine still stands. The brass band still plays on the green. A town of brass and coal-black hands — where the same hands that played the cornet on Sunday were black with the work that would shorten the life attached to them. Joy and cost, held in a single breath.

The episode closes with a discussion every writer and reader will recognise: how to write about labour and hardship without romanticising it into heritage, or reducing it to nothing but misery. Why the pride and the price are not two subjects, but one.

Competition

Email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] 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.

To honour the work, we must also remember what it cost.

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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected]

In this must‑listen episode of Alden Carrow’s Poetry Podcast, Alden descends beneath the bright surface of things — from Tennyson’s abyssal Kraken to the steep, enclosing walls of Buttermere. Guided by the theme “the surface is a lie that holds the light,” Alden explores what lies beneath the calm, polished appearances we trust: the millennial darkness of the deep sea, the silted cold of a Lakeland lake, and the hidden pressures beneath a poet’s working life.

The episode opens with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Kraken,” a listener‑requested guest poem that plunges into the ancient, dreamless depths where truth sleeps far below the reach of sunlight. Alden then shares his own poem “Buttermere,” written during a storm‑struck autumn walk in a valley where beauty, geology, and a quiet history of imposture all press against the surface at once.

In the second half, Alden turns to the unseen labour of submitting to literary journals — the long silences, the sediment of rejection, and the patient, necessary work that happens out of sight. For emerging poets, this is a rare, honest guide to surviving the depths without losing heart.

And as always, listeners are invited to take part in the ongoing competition: email a poem you’d love to hear featured in a future episode to [email protected], and you’ll be entered into the draw to win a signed copy of Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry.

Settle in. Slow down. There is light on the surface — but the truth is waiting beneath it.