University poets share new ‘lyrical ballads’ inspired by Wordsworth’s 250th birthday

Helen Mort was one of four poets selected for BBC Radio 4's 'The New Lyrical Ballads'

Three University poets have written new work inspired by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s seminal Lyrical Ballads.

To mark the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, BBC Radio 4 commissioned The New Lyrical Ballads, asking four contemporary poets to respond to the 1798 collection that revolutionised British poetry and is widely heralded as the birth of English romanticism.

Dr Helen Mort, Senior Lecturer within Manchester Writing School, and PhD student Kim Moore and graduate Zaffar Kunial all featured in the programme.

Lyrical Ballads includes works that reflect upon nature, encounters in the Lake District and country life, written, then controversially, in the everyday language of those Wordsworth encountered in his daily life. Each poet selected for The New Lyrical Ballads has a strong link to Cumbria and the Lake District and their work offers a glimpse into life in the county now.

Mort, an award-winning poet and novelist, read Shepherds, based on Lake District shepherdesses, and the changing landscape of Cumbria which Wordsworth was familiar with. Much of Mort’s work concerns landscape and place.

She said: “It was such an honour to take part in The New Lyrical Ballads commission and to think about how the work of Wordsworth still resonates in an age of climate emergency and changed working patterns. I wanted to write about women who work with sheep and researching them was fascinating and inspiring.”

An extract from Shepherds by Dr Helen Mort:

What if Little Bo Peep

was a farmer’s daughter from Cumbria

crunching the bows and dainty crook

beneath her Timberland work boots,

living in the breathing flanks of hills,

in the breath of the herd.

What if she never slept at all

and always knew where her sheep were

each of them connected

in the lung of the valley.

What if she walked off the map,

becks and culverts, skulls and moss,

bones and lichen, the rhythm

of her days the rhythm of grazing.

She had two elegant tattoos,

strong biceps, a way with sailor’s knots,

she had the eyes of an arctic fox

but the sheep were not afraid of her:

Bo-Peep, playing hide and seek

with the sunlight,

body elided and re-written,

hiding in plain sight.

Moore read The Stranger, a poem inspired by Wordsworth’s Lines left upon A Seat in a Yew-tree… and a story she heard about someone living in the words in Barrow-in-Furness, and The Man Who Ran with the Hounds, in response to Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman. Moore is a PhD student within Manchester Writing School, and a graduate of the MA Creative Writing programme, whose first full length collection The Art of Falling won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Ings was performed by Kunial, a 2019 PhD graduate and the former Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence, responding to Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places. The new poem was written about a place he drove past when he lived in Grasmere. Kunial’s 2018 collection Us was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

Catherine Wilcox, Academic Director of Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, said: "When Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads burst on the scene in 1798, it changed the course of British poetry. This Radio 4 programme showcases contemporary poets responding with new lyrical ballads for our time; poets who stand in that tradition of writing about nature in ways that are accessible to a wide audience.

“It's hugely exciting for the Manchester Writing School that our staff and students are featured as leading poets--senior lecturer Dr Helen Mort, and two of our current and former PhD students, Zaffar Kunial and Kim Moore. It's wonderful to have this depth of talent on our programme to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth."