Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet from the Australian Outback, regarded as one of the greatest living exponents of English poetic strength, known for poems on nature and Aboriginal life.
On the island
Eight records
Rutgers University Choir, Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy
I love it because it's got such a wonderful opening. It sounds like all the churches, you know, opening up into glory.
Ravi Shankar can do no wrong. I first encountered him when I was a young derelict in Sydney and I drifted into a house with a mate of mine and a few people and my sleeping place was an overcoat in the hall of the house with a breeze blowing in. I remember lying there and listening to this wonderful endless hypnotic music and it did me a tremendous amount of good.
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622: II. Adagio
David Campbell, City of London Sinfonia, Richard Hickox
Oh, it's such a beautiful thing. It is just so stunningly beautiful. It also makes me cry. You know, you need to cry.
Spartacus: Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia
Vienna Philharmonic, Aram Khachaturian
This is known to everybody, of course, as the Janedan line music.
It's an example of lining of the old Gaelic way, of Scots Gaelic way of singing psalms in church. And when I first heard it, it absolutely fascinated me. I thought it came out of Central Asia, because I hadn't heard of it before.
La Valse à mille tempsFavourite
Ah one of my great uh old loves from my twenties and early thirties, Jacques Brell. He died all too all too young, I think, Belgian genius.
My wife and I used to love this in the 60s and I picked it in order to go back and visit the 60s.
The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Philharmonia Orchestra, John Eliot Gardiner
After being professor of depressive studies, I think I uh I need a bit to put a bit of jollity into this programme.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:57How do you react to judgments that put you in the super league with Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott?
No, I don't really believe it. Ag again, I stand beside it. It's uh it's it's part of the publicity and uh um it's uh part of the fame.
Presenter asks
5:30When did you first realize that poetry was your thing?
Yeah, it would have been about december sixth or seventh, nineteen fifty six, beside the Kolloogealook River in New South Wales, sitting in an old mill which has now fallen down and disappeared. Looking out on the on the river, you know, with mayflies come rising off it.
Presenter asks
10:42How did your mother die?
My mother had had a number of miscarriages. I was a bit late arriving and they induced me in the old simple way that they had and I've always had the horrible fear that maybe they damaged my mother's reproductive abilities and after that she had three miscarriages of which the third killed her. She began to hemorrhage and she couldn't be got to the hospital fast enough and the doctor wouldn't send the ambulance. ... So at the time my father managed to get my mother to hospital she'd lost a tremendous amount of blood.
The keepsakes
The book
Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary
Robert Henry Mathews
a big sort of ledger or something to write poems in
The luxury
I only think it'll stand up to the harsh climate on the desert island. I've always wanted a four poster. I might as well have a marble one.
Presenter asks
20:20When did you convert to Catholicism?
1957 when I went to university. I hadn't particularly noticed it before, but I got talking about it and studying it, and I thought I belonged to that. ... Oh, it just felt it felt like home. The religion I was born into was Free Presbyterian, and a stern form of Calvinism in which there wasn't much forgiveness. ... But when I heard of Catholicism, it it involved things like forgiveness, and it involved particularly the wonderful that wonderful defiance of rationalism, transubstantiation, in which bread and wine can be made into Jesus.
Presenter asks
27:34How mad did you go [during your breakdown]?
Oh, I went real mad. Uh I came down with uh a big uh breakdown. I met one of my old school colleagues, a girl who uh had some particularly fine names for me and she told me one of them and I started to come apart immediately. ... within a day or two I was driving around in the car with tears streaming down my face. I was crying out.
“The main living you get out of poetry is in readings. We've been known occasionally to survive on prizes for a year.”
“I had the sharp point of a pen and I dug the depression out of myself with it.”
“I come from the biggest and best desert island in the world.”