All literature, but poetry in particular for some of us, becomes more important during the pandemic. Last month, we invited a group of poets and critics to read favourite poems of theirs, from any country or century. We know how much you enjoyed it; the response has been fantastic. So we've invited fifteen more poets and poetry lovers to read a poem that resonates for them and that might speak to others as we hunker down and live more privately. All the readers, poets, and titles of poems are listed below. 

Kate Middleton reads ‘Lake Superior’ by Lorine Niedecker

Jaya Savige reads ‘Happiness is the Art of Being Broken’ by Bruce Dawe

Anthony Lawrence reads ‘The Simple Truth’ by Philip Levine

Claire G. Coleman reads ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats 

Warwick Hadfield reads ‘Bouncer’ by Anthony Lawrence + ‘A Gypsy Tune’ by Gwen Harwood

Sarah Day reads ‘Encounter’ by Czesław Miłosz

Chris Wallace-Crabbe reads ‘South Country’ by Kenneth Slessor

Kerryn Goldsworthy reads ‘Quarantine’ by Eavan Boland             

Philip Mead reads 'One Train May Hide Another' by Kenneth Koch

Kevin Brophy reads ‘Aware’ by Denise Levertov

Andrea Goldsmith reads ‘A Man in His Life’ by Yehuda Amichai (translation by Chana Bloch)

Michael Farrell reads ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ by Henry Lawson            

Geoffrey Lehmann reads ‘At Half Past Three, A Single Bird’ by Emily Dickinson

Maria Takolander reads ‘Brooms’ by Charles Simic

Ali Alizadeh reads ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ by HD (Hilda Doolittle)

Thom Sullivan reads ‘The City Limits’ by A.R. Ammons     

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

Subscribe via iTunes, Google, or Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Music credit: 'Moonrise' and 'Negentropy' by Chad Crouch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.