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 traveling 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 program hosted by the great British poet Roger McGough in which people, there are different kinds of episodes.

This particular week there was a poet called Malika Booker and she was talking about some of her

favorite 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 at least Barry 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 was from a collection, Malika Booker pointed out, called

Black Country, which is the area where I come from it's an area of the West Midlands of

England called the black country because it was central to the Industrial

Revolution and was covered in soot 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 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

dewy-eyed. I wept. The tears made it to my collar.

And 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 poem being called Birmingham roller. It was a poem from 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 Rollers. But when I was a lonely kid in my back garden in the West

Midlands back in the late 60s, early 70 70s kicking a football about on my own

playing cowboys on my own sitting on my swing always in the sky these birds were there putting on this spectacular sideshow which we'll discuss in a mini

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