Seán Street is Professor of Radio and Director of the Centre for Broadcasting History Research in the Media School, Bournemouth University. He has also worked as a radio practitioner for 38 years, and recent work has included The Trial of Ezra Pound. He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Radio and Other Poems (Rockingham Press, 1999). He is currently working on a new collection which will appear in Autumn 2009. His prose includes The Wreck of the Deutschland (Souvenir Press, 1992) and The Dymock Poets (Seren, 1993, reprinted 1998). Seán is currently researching for a new book on the relationship between poetry and sound. His plays have been widely performed; Honest John won the Central Television Award for new drama. His most recent work for the stage is Beyond Paradise – the Wildlife of a Gentleman, a one-man play about Charles Darwin.

Quelle: poetry p f

Shipping Forecast
Donegal

They have shared still late October,
but salt stones and a broken tree,
the peeled paint on the lifeboat house
chime with places where the glass falls,
prime sources encountering night’s bald predications.

Everywhere winter edges in,
And now the time is ten to six…

Lightness and weight, air’s potentials
pressed into words, implication;
here —on all coasts —listening grows passionately tense.

Fair Isle, Faeroes, South East Iceland,
North Utsire, South Utsire,
Fisher, German Bight, Tyne, Dogger…
This pattern of names on the sea —
weather’s unlistening geography —paves water.

Beyond the music, the singing
of sounds —this minimal chanting,
this ritual pared to the bone
becomes the cold poetry of information.

The litany edges closer —
Lundy, Fastnet and Irish Sea…
Routine enough, all just routine.
Always his eyes guessing beyond
the headland, she perhaps sleeping, no words spoken.

He stretches forward to grasp it,
claims his radio place —and now
the weather reports from coastal stations
and then: Malin Head —such routine
that she barely glances up, but hears now falling.

in collection Radio and Other Poems, 1999,
Rockingham Press