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In the wired and connected twenty-first century, is there any place for silence? In this sonic exploration of the meditative and therapeutic power of silence you’ll hear poets and thinkers as diverse as Søren Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, Judith Wright, Miroslav Holub, Henry David Thoreau and ee cummings. Dedicated to the memory of Margaret Cameron

The magic and mystery of air travel, in a program that reflects on the experience of soaring above the earth just like the birds, with a range of thinkers and poets.

Omar Musa is a Malaysian-Australian rapper and poet from Queanbeyan. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam, and has been a featured TEDx speaker.

A feature on one of the originators of the confessional poetry movement, whose work resonates as strongly today as it did during her lifetime.

Blues, the quintessential American musical form, was born in the work songs, field hollers and spirituals of the African Americans of the South. It travelled from the Mississippi delta through to Chicago, and to the east coast, forming the back bone of American music. This program brings together poems from a recent anthology by a range of writers responding to the music, and the music itself.

Jamaica, like many Caribbean countries, has a rich poetic output, due in no small part to the oral traditions the slaves brought with them from Africa ...

An intimate conversation and poetry reading recorded with Cate at her home in rural Victoria. Cate Kennedy is a popular writer of fiction, memoir and short stories in addition to poetry. Her highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath won the People’s Choice Award in the 2010 NSW Premier’s Literary Awardsm and her third poetry collection The Taste of River Water: New and Selected Poems won the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. Some of Cate’s poems are short stories in themselves, beautifully encapsulating miniature narratives, the observation of small detail enlivening the poems. Cate’s style is warm and accessible, and her humanity consistently shines through.

This anthology of recent poems showcases a new generation of female poets from Africa and her diaspora. The writers - some well-known, others just beginning literary careers - come from seventeen different African countries.

In 2013 a new collection of Australian love poems was published. Edited by noted poet Mark Tredinnick, it ventures far from the clichés and saccharine sentiment of greeting cards. Instead it's gutsy, earthy, frank, and at times lustful, exploring all aspects of love ...

It was the English Romantics, and in particular William and Dorothy Wordsworth along with their friends Coleridge, de Quincey and Hazlitt, who popularised the idea of walking in the western literary imagination, taking it from a mode of transport to a way of being in the world ...

'The idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise—the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control ... '

An anthology of poetry by Australian women on all the forms of work women do.

Recreational fishing is a popular pastime, and writing about it seems to be too: there is a considerable body of prose and poetry that explores it both literally and as metaphor.

The nightingale has been a recurring literary motif throughout time in Europe and the Middle East. This 'small and inconspicuous' bird has long been held up as the paragon of birdsong, and its vocal outpourings both celebrated in verse and likened to the words issued by poets themselves. This program features poetry and prose that muses upon the sound of the nightingale's song and its implied meaning. The excerpt here is Meredith Penman reading John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale.

Born in Sydney in 1948, Michael Dransfield was first published in the mid sixties in the underground press that sprang up during that time of great political and social unrest. Like many of his contemporaries he questioned the values and mores of mainstream society, and chose to live somewhat outside them. He spent most of his adult years either living the life of a bohemian in suburbs like Balmain and Paddington, or roaming around the countryside. As a result, his poetry gave a voice to people marginalised by society. Yet his work was not limited to social or political commentary; a true romantic at heart, much of his prolific output is of a lyrical beauty. He died in 1973, at the age of just twenty-four; his poetry remains as vivid and highly regarded today as it was then.