Kaveh Akbar — How Prayer Works

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama shares “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, a favorite childhood poem of his, and offers an audio postscript to Season 10 of Poetry Unbound. Later in 2026, he will bring us more Poetry Unbound to look forward to — find out what and when here. In the meantime ...  Show more

Have you ever watched, in awe, as a skilled gymnast or skater lifts off and completes a dizzying number of revolutions in less than a second before landing safely back down? That’s how you may feel upon reading the great Leonard Cohen’s urgent, dreamlike poem “I, 8” from Book of ...  Show more

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his first collection to now, reflect changes in himself as a person? Akbar talks about th ...  Show more

To celebrate its 500th edition, Beyond Belief has recorded a special programme at the Contains Strong Language poetry festival in Coventry. From the stage of the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry to discuss the theme of ‘Poetry as the Language of Religion’, Ernie Rea is joined by a di ...  Show more

This is episode 1 in our series on Biblical Poetry!

In part 1 (0-4:43), the guys discuss the fact that about one third of the modern biblical text is poetry. But what exactly is poetry? Tim explains that every culture has its own definition of poetry. Tim prefers this d ...

You may be surprised to learn that one of the best-selling poets in America today is a man who lived and died 800 years ago. The Persian-born Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammed Rumi, to give him his full name, was a Sufi master who wrote ecstatic poems about joy and love and separation ...  Show more