Samuel Tongue

And this has been a special podcast for the Scottish Poetry Library.

If you go to our website, you'll find our Nothing But The Poem podcasts and a series of other interesting insights and interesting podcasts that we've had done over the years.

So yeah, visit our website.

And even better, come and visit us at Five Crichtons Close, where you can borrow books.

You can borrow all of Valerie's back catalogue.

I'm not sure we've got a...

Is a new one in yet?

But I'm hoping we will have very shortly so you can borrow, yeah, the entirety of Valerie's oeuvre.

So yes, please come along to the Scottish Poetry Library as soon as you're able.

Thank you for listening.

Hello and welcome to Nothing But The Poem.

and that's for the Friends of the SPL.

We just them through twice and talk about them and see what impact they make on us.

For good or for ill, we can be quite critical when needs be, but that's all part of the conversation as to how a poem works and what it does.

is just the way in which they touched a lot of poets around the world and the impact of their death generated so many responses and so much love, to be honest, that I wanted to try and read some of their poems as part of that remembrance.

And it's also a good excuse for me, full disclosure, it's always a good excuse for me to read a poet and some poems that I haven't read before and read them with other people because that communal reading can lead to so much interpretation and so much commentary and a really kind of different perspective on things.

So in the session, we managed to read three poems together.

I'll give you some insight into two of those poems today.

First poem is a longish one.

I'm going to read it in its entirety.