Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast

A city remembers nothing of itself. A tower stands broken on purpose. And a poet, four hundred years dead, argues that only verse survives — while his own house burned in Ireland.

In Episode 45, we travel inland to Helmsley, a market town on the edge of the North York Moors, where a castle holds a question every ruin asks: *What good is it that I was?*

Our guest poem is Edmund Spenser's "The Ruines of Time," six verses spoken by Verlame — Roman Verulamium — as she grieves not just her walls, but her erasure from memory. Then we stand beneath Helmsley Castle's half-ruined tower and ask who actually broke it. Not time. People. A garrison. A general. A banker's family who kept the wreck because it looked beautiful in the landscape.

Here's what Spenser got wrong: he blamed time for every ruin. This week, we meet the hands behind the damage — and the hands that decided to keep these broken things standing.

Pour something warm. Stay awhile. There is poetry to be found in the everyday, and a story written in stone.

**New to the podcast? Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen — free, and it arrives every Wednesday morning.**

On a Yorkshire headland above the North Sea, one ruined abbey produced two unlikely legacies: the first named poet in the English language, and the legend that became Dracula.

This week, poet Alden Carrow pairs Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 poem "The City in the Sea" — a drowned city where nothing moves and Death alone presides — with his own poem "Whitby Abbey," from North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry (British Counties In Verse series). Along the way: Cædmon, the cowherd who woke up a poet; the Synod of Whitby; St Hilda's snake legend; and Bram Stoker's 1890 summer holiday that gave the world Dracula.

In the discussion, "The Open Ruin," Alden asks a question that matters to anyone who writes about place — when should a subject stay open to more than one story, and when does it need just one, final reading?

Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast pairs classic and contemporary landscape poetry with the wild places that inspired it. New episodes every Wednesday.

Suggest a future guest poem and enter the draw for a signed copy of North Yorkshire In Verse — email [email protected].

In a corner of a farmyard, a rusty harrow, a worn-out plough, and a stone roller have vanished under nettles for years. Most poets would mourn that. Edward Thomas doesn't. In eight quiet lines, written during the war that would kill him within months, he simply confesses a preference: "This corner of the farmyard I like most." No metaphor, no lesson, no grief. Just liking, stated plainly.

Thomas came to poetry late, at thirty-six, after Robert Frost urged him to set his own prose out in lines. He wrote nearly 140 poems in two years before enlisting, and was killed at Arras in April 1917..

Alden then takes us to Simonsbath, deep on Exmoor, where in 1818 a wealthy ironmaster named John Knight tried to turn an entire wild moor into farmland — a twenty-nine-mile wall, roads, farmsteads, a failed mine. Two centuries on, the moor is quietly undoing all of it, unhurried and without malice.

The discussion asks why so much craft advice insists a poem must earn its subject through history, cost, or meaning — and what it would mean to write, instead, about something you simply like, for no reason you can name.

This is the final Somerset episode before the podcast moves to North Yorkshire next week.

Email a guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent by hand. Also available on Amazon.

New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.

Beneath the Pump Room in Bath, water rises at forty-six degrees, more than a million litres a day. It fell as rain on the Mendips around ten thousand years ago, travelled three kilometres down into the earth's heat, and is only now finding its way back into the light. It has never once altered its behaviour on anyone's account.

And for two thousand years, people have stood at its edge and asked it for things anyway.

The Romans threw in coins, jewellery, and lead curse tablets — thin inscribed sheets addressed to the goddess Sulis. Around a hundred and thirty have been recovered, and they are almost unbearably ordinary: a cloak stolen from the bath-house, six coins from a purse, the names of everyone who might have taken them. The goddess did not intervene. The cloaks were never returned. But we can still read every word.

This week's guest poem comes not from the canon but from a living young poet, Leila Lillian Dudmish, who has kindly allowed Alden to share her work. "Treasured You" is an elegy for her grandfather, Ronald Dudmish, built entirely from small physical particulars — a light blue shirt, a chuckle, a white t-shirt losing its scent. Her Instagram is leilalilliandudmish.work

Alden then reads his own poem, "Bath," from Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, and asks why the specific detail, not the general statement, is what makes an elegy last.

Email a guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent by hand.

New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.

9th September 2026.

It is a special day tomorrow, so this week's episode — which would normally reach you on Wednesday morning at six — will instead arrive on Thursday morning at the same hour. One day later than usual, and then we return to our regular rhythm the following week.

This podcast keeps a steady time on purpose, and I know many of you listen on a particular morning, on a particular walk or journey to work. I would rather not disturb that, and I am sorry to move it. But I would far rather give you the episode properly on Thursday than a hurried version of it on Wednesday.

It is worth the extra day. On Thursday we are going to Bath — to the hot spring beneath the Pump Room, and the water that fell as rain on the Mendips ten thousand years ago and is only now finding its way back into the light. The guest poem this week comes not from the canon, but from a living young poet who has very kindly allowed me to share her work with you. It is an episode about what we set down against forgetting.

If you follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening now, Thursday's episode will find its own way to you without your having to remember the change.

Competition: email your guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent to you by hand.

Until Thursday — may you find poetry waiting for you in the everyday.

Tomorrow, the book comes out.

Before that: we go back to where it all began. John Clare's Emmonsail's Heath in Winter—written by a farm labourer watching a heron flap off, a crow swing on a rotten branch, twenty long-tailed tits hang on a twig and start again. Nothing in it performs for him. Nothing waits. His first appearance on the show, and worth the wait.

Then Somerset Awaits, the opening poem of the collection—a title that's wrong on purpose. Eighteen lines later, the poem itself says: "Geology holds no intention; it does not wait." A twelve-metre tide, a river that runs above its own fields, water pumped uphill against its own weight, twice a day, for two centuries, just so Somerset can stay dry.

This week's discussion—Launch Week: an honest account of what this book actually is, what it cost to write it straight, and three small, no-obligation ways you can help it find readers.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date.

Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy, sent to you by hand.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What does it take for a drowned thing to stay readable, instead of just staying intact?

We begin with the Titanic. Thomas Hardy's The Convergence of the Twain, written nine days after the sinking for a charity matinee at Covent Garden—a poem so cold about human loss that it never once mentions a body. Jewels lie "lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind," and the fish who find them can't read a single thing the wreck was ever meant to say.

Then we descend into a Somerset swamp: Glastonbury Lake Village, an artificial island built from a thousand tons of imported clay, sinking on a decadal cycle for two centuries until the mere finally claimed it. But the marsh didn't just preserve the timber. In 1892, Arthur Bulleid read ten superimposed clay floors and knew exactly what had happened there. The sea forgets what it swallows. The marsh remembers everything.

This week's discussion—The Marsh Method: the difference between a poem's details that stay beautiful but go opaque, and the ones that still work as information centuries later.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders.

Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's launch-week episode.

What do you do with the most mythologised hill in England, when your own poem refuses to mention the myth at all?

We begin with the legend at full volume: Tennyson's Avalon, from The Passing of Arthur—an island where "falls not hail, or rain, or any snow," promised to a dying king who admits, in the same breath, that he isn't sure it's real.

Then we climb the real hill. Glastonbury Tor: a residual outlier left standing while everything softer eroded away, seven terraces of disputed origin, a roofless tower held up by iron tie bars, and an abbot hanged, drawn and quartered at the summit in 1539. Nothing here has ever been exempt from weather, wear, or violence—and the poem never once says the word Avalon.

This week's discussion—Refusing the Legend: what it costs, and what it buys you, to choose the documented truth over the more beautiful story everyone already wants to believe.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember.

Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What do you do with the ten thousand years underneath your feet, while half a million pairs of shoes wear the path above it smooth?

We begin in 1858 with Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill—a poem built as pure dialogue, one voice growing more anxious with every question, the other never once changing its temperature. Rossetti's first appearance on the show, and overdue.

Then we descend into Cheddar—a village pinned between a limestone scarp and the water table, where a quarry takes the cliff back by the tonne, half a million tourists a year polish the gorge trails to a slip, and a few metres below all of it, Cheddar Man has rested in the same fixed cold as maturing wheels of cheese for ten thousand years. Nothing above ground touches it.

This week's practical work—The Unchanging Room: how to tell the difference between the parts of a poem that should wear down through revision, and the one image at the centre that should never move.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember.

Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.

What do a Victorian priest praising a spotted cow and a wind-scoured Somerset hilltop have in common? Everything doesn't have to match to hold together.

We begin in Wales, 1877, with Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty—ten and a half lines praising the dappled, the "counter, original, spare, strange"—a poem that finds God not in perfection but in mixture, unpublished until 29 years after Hopkins's death.

Then we climb to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point in Somerset: a Bronze Age cemetery, a Norse word, three ruined signal fires, and a concrete survey pillar, all sharing a few dozen paces of gritstone—nothing on it from the same century, all of it slowly sliding downhill together, pushed by water freezing in the rock.

This week's big news: Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is finished, and arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. We talk honestly about what the book is, how it differs from the earlier volumes, and three small, no-obligation ways you can help it find readers.

Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.