Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. The poem I'd like to talk about today

is book length so it is too long to talk about in detail on this but I'm going to select

some of what I think are representative and also of course brilliant bits and consequently

time dictates that this week I'll sacrifice some of the very close reading I like to apply

to poems in order to give a more general sense of this whole book. It's called The Illegal

Age. It was published in 2018 and it's written by a poet called Ellen Hinsey. So if you

flick through it it is an unlikely poetry book. It's like a sort of political brief in

dossier, reports, files, evidence, lots of numbers, headings, soft headings. It doesn't look

a very happy home for poetry and that I suppose is exactly where poetry needs to be, a sort

of a virus in the machine. So you get the cold business like official line of a government

of a regime in this book but it's infiltrated by compassion. It's a bit like, do you remember

that image of anti-Vietnam war protesters and one of them puts a flower down the barrel

of a soldier's gun and it's that it's something beautiful amidst a lot of militaristic and hardcore

political horror. So Ellen Hinsey is an American who lives in Europe and is a proper serious

political prose writer as well as being a poet. She was actually at the criminal tribunal

for former Yugoslavia and heard lots of witness accounts of all sorts of atrocities and terrible

things that happened during the Balkans conflict. And she said, and this is an interesting

quote I think, as a poet I was afraid of aestheticizing the experience. So afraid of completely

turning it into art of using someone else's tragedy. You can't get away from the fact that

poetry comes with its own sort of music. It is a pleasurable entertainment and I think she didn't

want to dance on the graves of any of these real people with their real stories. So it's a poetry

that in lots of ways stays quite close to prose almost as a sign of respect. So it's got it's

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