Catching Life by the Throat : How to Read Poetry and Why

This audiobook is an anthology of poems by WH Auden, TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Sylvia Plath and W B Yeats, introduced by Josephine Hart and read by a cast of famous actors: Ralph Fiennes, Edward Fox, Ian McDiarmid, Helen McCrory, Sir Roger Moore, Harold Pinter, Elizabeth McGovern, Harriet Walter, Sir Bob Geldof, Sinead Cusack, Grey Gowrie, Rupert Graves and Juliet Stevenson. 'The idea is simple,' says Josephine Hart as she introduces the poets and takes us through their life and writings, 'an understanding of the life and philosophy of the poet illuminates the poetry and therefore makes the experience of reading or listening to each poem more intense.' Whether you believe, like Robert Frost, that poetry is a way of catching life by the throat or, like Eliot, it is one person talking to another, nobody does it better than the poets whose work and life will feature in this publication.