My spoken-word poetry podcast, A Voice Like This, returns for a second season on Monday, 28 September, with more great poetry, familiar voices, unexpected discoveries and a few special episodes along the way.
There is something about poetry that changes when it is spoken aloud.
A line that can sit quietly on the page suddenly acquires rhythm, breath and personality. Sometimes a poem we think we know reveals something completely different when we stop reading it and simply listen.
That was the idea behind A Voice Like This when I began the podcast, and on Monday, 28 September, it returns for Season Two.
Poetry given room to breathe
A Voice Like This is a short weekly poetry podcast built around a very simple idea: a few quiet minutes, a great poem and a voice to carry it.
This isn’t intended as an academic examination of poetry. I don’t want to dissect a poem until all the life has gone out of it. Instead, each episode brings together poetry around a particular thought, season or theme, with just enough context to help us listen a little more closely.
Most importantly, the poems themselves are allowed to do the talking.
Season Two brings together voices from the past and present, with poems about change, teaching, identity, solitude, the natural world, ageing, fear and all the other things human beings have been attempting to put into words for centuries.
What to expect from Season Two
The season begins with The Turning Year, an autumnal pairing of John Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Keats’s To Autumn finds the season at its richest and most abundant, while Hopkins’s Spring and Fall: to a young child looks at falling leaves through very different eyes, finding in them a child’s first encounter with loss and change.
Episode Two, Lessons, marks World Teachers’ Day with Kahlil Gibran’s On Teaching and William Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned. Both, in very different ways, ask whether understanding is really something another person can simply give us.
In A Quiet Mind, John Clare’s extraordinary I Am! meets Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata in an episode reflecting on uncertainty, isolation, self-acceptance and finding moments of peace amid the noise of life.
And Masks and Mirrors brings together Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Thomas Hardy to explore the faces we present to other people, the things we keep hidden and the sometimes uncomfortable difference between outward appearance and the life beneath it.
There will be special episodes too, including a distinctly darker visit to the poetry shelves for Halloween.
I may have enjoyed recording that one rather more than I should.
Why a spoken-word poetry podcast?
I’m a professional voice actor, so words spoken aloud are a fairly large part of my life. But poetry gives the voice a different job.
It doesn’t need selling. It doesn’t need embellishing. Often, the most interesting thing a reader can do is simply trust the language, find its thought and allow the listener to meet the poem for themselves.
That’s what I want A Voice Like This to be.
Not a lecture about poetry and not a performance designed to show off the performer. Just somewhere to stop for a few minutes and listen to some remarkable words.
Perhaps, in a world that isn’t exactly short of noise, there is room for that.
Listen to A Voice Like This Season Two
Season Two of A Voice Like This begins Monday, 28 September 2026, with a new episode each week.
If you already listen to podcasts, search for A Voice Like This on your usual podcast app and follow the show now. New episodes will then be waiting for you as they’re released.
And if poetry is something you haven’t visited for a while, you’re especially welcome.
You don’t need to know anything about poetry.
Just bring your ears.
I’ll provide the voice.