Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. I was on tour, it was about 12 months ago,

and I'm in the car travelling all around Britain and Ireland with my tour manager and my

support act. And every Sunday afternoon I would insist that we had to listen to poetry

please on Radio 4, which is a programme hosted by the great British poet Roger McGoth,

in which people, one of the, there are different kinds of episodes. This particular week there was a

poet called Malika Bukka and she was talking about some of her favourite poems and poets and she

chose a poem called Bird by a poet called Liz Berry, who I had never heard of before and the

recording that they played was Liz Berry reading her own poem. And I got to say her accent was not a

million miles from my own and it really, I mean it really moved me this poem. It was from a collection

Malika Bukka pointed out called Black Country, which is the area where I come from. It's an

area of the Westminster of England called the Black Country because it was central to the industrial

revolution and was covered in suit for a very, very long time, less so now. But the name sticks.

I think one of the things we look for in poetry is ourselves and I could feel myself in this.

So when I got back to my hotel room after the show that night I went on YouTube and I found

footage of Liz Berry reading another of her poems called Birmingham Roller, which was a poem about

a pigeon which you may not feel as an obvious source of emotion. I can honestly say with that

exaggeration that I I wept. I don't mean I got a bit juicier, I wept. The tears made it to my collar

and there are many reasons for this but I just I think it's a brilliant moving poem. The particular

pigeon that she was talking about was called a Birmingham Roller, hence the the poem being called

Birmingham Roller. It was a poem from from the the Black Country collection from 2014. I remember these

pigeons as a backdrop to my childhood. We called them tomblers. I didn't know they were called Birmingham

but when I was a lonely kid in my back garden in the West Midlands back in the late 60s, early 70s,

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