This is the fifth episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Francis Harvey was born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in 1925 and died in 2014 at the age of 89.
Though born in Northern Ireland, he lived most of his life in County Donegal in the Republic, and was a member of Aosdána, the Irish association that honours artists who have produced distinguished work of genuine originality.
His poem “Heron” won the 1989 Guardian and World Wildlife Fund poetry competition.
You can buy Francis Harvey’s Collected Poems, published by Dedalus Press, here.
This is the fourth episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in Depew, New York, and died in 2010. She served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985, was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats in 2000.
Clifton’s style was a minimalist one — without standard capitalization or punctuation — but if that was a rebellion of sorts (she was in her 30s by the time of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s — it also gave her poems a rawness and power.
“breaklight” comes from her 1974 collection An Ordinary Woman, a collection that explored identity, both as woman and poet.
Find out more about Lucille Clifton’s life and work here.
Shane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.
I’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below or on Spotify.
If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.
If you use Spotify and you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.
MANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Lucille Clifton. (Photo courtesy of famouspoetsandpoems / Wikipedia)Announcing Strong WordsYour thoughtsRatings and ReviewsMusic Credit
This is the third episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Ada Limón was born in California in 1976 and was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2022 until 2025.
She is one of the most notable and noteworthy voices in contemporary American poetry. Some of the themes of her work include love, loss, the body, and the natural world. Limon has published eight collections, including 2018’s The Carrying, which included today’s poem and won the American National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Her latest collection is Startlement, published in 2025, and she also published two recent poetry books for younger readers, In Praise of Mystery (Norton Young Readers) and And, Too, The Fox (Lerner Publishing).
She lives in Kentucky.
Find out more about Ada Limón's life and work here.
You can buy the collection “The Carrying” from Amazon.co.uk here.
Announcing Strong Words
Shane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.
Find out more about Strong Words
Ratings and reviews
I’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below.
If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.
If you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.
Music credit
MANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This is the second episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Seamus Heaney, who died in 2013, was one of Ireland's most celebrated and most loved poets, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
He grew up on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and the landscape of his childhood—its bogs, fields, and rural rhythms—saturated his work throughout his life.
"Death of a Naturalist" is the title poem from his first collection, published in 1966 when Heaney was just 27 years old.
Find out more about Seamus Heaney's life and work here.
You can buy the collection "Death of a Naturalist" from Amazon.co.uk here.
Announcing Strong Words
Shane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.
Find out more about Strong Words
Ratings and reviews
I’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below.
If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.
If you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.
Music credit
MANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This is the first episode of the Nature, Wilderness and Wildness series of the podcast.
Wendell Berry is an American poet, farmer, and environmental activist who has spent most of his life on a small farm in Kentucky.
Born in 1934, Berry has been writing for over six decades, exploring themes of agrarian life, community, and our relationship with the land. He's both a working farmer and a thinker about what it means to live well on this earth.
The New York Times has called him the "prophet of rural America."
"The Peace of Wild Things" was first published in Berry’s 1968 collection “Openings”, and has become one of his most beloved poems. a quiet antidote to anxiety, and a reminder of where we might turn when the weight of the world becomes too much to bear.
Find out more about Wendell Berry’s work via The Berry Center here.
Announcing Strong Words
Shane’s new professional service is Strong Words, which helps businesses, organizations and leaders all around the world find the right words to communicate their mission, their vision, and their impact.
Find out more about Strong Words
Ratings and reviews
I’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below.
If you like the show, we would be so grateful for your rating or review. For one thing, it’s a great way to tell the various platforms that it’s worth showing the podcast to new people.
If you’re not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the “Follow” button on the “Poems for the Speed of Life” show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.
Music credit
MANTRon by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Announcing a new series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin.
This series of the podcast is overdue, and it's great to be back.
This series is all about the world around us. Nature. Wilderness. Wildness. The other living things that share our space and our place on this earth.
Included in this series of Poems for the Speed of Life will be poems from Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Wendell Berry and many more.
A few things to note:
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin.
This is Episode 10 of the Christmas series and today's piece is "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas.
You can read the piece here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 9 of the Christmas series and today's piece is the lyric of the song "Silent Night (Christmas 1915)" by Cormac MacConnell.
You can read the piece here
Watch and listen to the great Irish tenor Jerry Lynch singing the song here.
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 8 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "A Jewish Mom's Christmas Poem" by Amy Sue Nathan.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 7 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "My hero the whirligig" by Bob Hicok.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 6 of the Christmas series and today's piece of writing is "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus", by Francis P. Church.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 5 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "A Christmas Childhood" by Patrick Kavanagh.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 4 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "Christmas" by John Betjeman.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 3 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "The Christmas Letter" by John N. Morris.
You can read the poem here
You can get notified about new episodes, receive more detailed episode descriptions, and if you are so moved, support the podcast financially, by joining on Substack here.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Support the show on Substack, and receive notifications when new episodes go live and other benefits, here.
***
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 2 of the Christmas series and today's poem is "Advent" by Mary Jo Salter.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner and advocate of poetry and the written word to be our mentor and guide through the world and through our lives.
This is Episode 1 of the Christmas series: "Christmas Trees" by Robert Frost.
***
Listen back to the introductory episode of the Christmas series on Spotify here.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
***
Music on this episode is by Lofium from Pixabay.
Introducing a new series of Poems for the Speed of Life, with your host, Shane Breslin.
This podcast is about the transformative power of poetry, literature and the written word in general, to help us, to teach us, to guide us on the road through the life we’d like to lead.
The theme for the new series is Christmas.
You can look forward to poems from all over the world, plus a song lyric or two, as well as a few passages of prose that I believe perfectly fits what this series is all about.
The new series begins with Episode 1 on Saturday, November 23rd.
Please follow on Spotify or subscribe, for free, on your favourite podcast app.
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", in your podcast player or click here to listen on Spotify.
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Twitter here, Instagram here and Facebook here.
Subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
***
To leave the show a review:
***
Welcome to another episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
To finish this series on fathers and fatherhood, I decided to offer a sort of couplet. Two poems, written maybe a century apart, one by a man who was read by millions when he lived and is now long since dead, the other by a young woman who immigrated to Canada from India with her parents as a young child in the 1990s.
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England in the 1880s, moved to Detroit, Michigan in the US when he was 10 and later wrote thousands of poems, collected in 20 books, hosted a popular radio show in the 1940s, starred on TV in the 1950s and wrote a popular light column that was syndicated to 300 newspapers around America. His poem here is one of his most serious, I think. His poems were often humorous, poking fun at his subjects, bringing a levity to many a reader’s dark day. This one, Only a Dad, has some of that lightness — a lightness of touch, for sure — but like the best light writers (think of poets such as Pam Ayres or Clive James, who appear in Episodes 43 and 110 of this podcast) the subject matter here will also connect deeply and resonate strongly, I think, with readers everywhere.
Rupi Kaur was born in Punjab, India and is now, as she embarks upon her 30s, reaching an ever-growing global audience through heartfelt, searingly powerful and often tiny poems, many of them accompanied by pencil drawings or animated videos that inject her words with even more meaning. Kaur is, in many ways, the first Instagram poet, and I don’t mean that disparagingly at all. Instagram, and other new technologies for communicating globally, are platforms that can be used for good or exploited for ill. The work of Rupi Kaur and many others there spread goodness, wisdom, truth and beauty through the world and across time and space at the speed of light and with at least some of the power of a thousand real-life poetry readings.
These two poems cover fathers in very different ways, but each of them is, in its way, priceless. With Guest’s poem, we see and praise the ordinary father, doing ordinary things, for the ordinary beloved people in his life. In Kaur’s poem, we get a glimpse of what happens when a father’s love morphs into something damaging. In both of these poems — as I hope in all of the poems throughout this series on fathers and fatherhood — there is something here for all readers and all listeners. For fathers, who might hope to conduct and fulfil that role to the very best effect for your family and all who need them, and for wives and partners of men, and for sons and daughters of fathers too.
So thank you again for being here throughout this series. And I leave you with these two poems, presented together, each offering something different and vital for fathers, for men who would like to be one one day, and for everyone else who yearns for the father in their life to be as strong, as good, as wise and protective and mentoring as he can possibly be.
You can read Rupi Kaur’s poem here
And Edgar Albert Guest’s poem here
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
*** If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here. You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars.
Welcome to another series of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is the fourth episode of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem marks a new departure for this podcast and this project.
It is one of my own poems, "The Time" by Shane Breslin.
Typically in this podcast I read the poem twice straight through and then give some thoughts, some of my thoughts on what it might be communicating to us, but for this episode, maybe for obvious reasons, I’m going to just leave the poem here for you — I hope you enjoy it.
You can read along here. ***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here. You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts. To leave the show a review: On Spotify. Open the Spotify app (iOS or Android), find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Apple. Open your Apple Podcasts app, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. On Podchaser. Open the Podchaser website, find the show and tap to rate five-stars. *** Music Credit: MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to this episode of Poems for the Speed of Life with Shane Breslin, writer, business owner, poetry advocate and poet.
This is Episode 10 of this series of the show on the theme of "Fatherhood”.
Today's poem is "Follower" by Seamus Heaney.
You can read today’s poem here
***
For a detailed outline of the mission and purpose behind this podcast, please check out Episode 100, "Why Poems for the Speed of Life?", and Episode 200, "A New Era for Poems for the Speed of Life", in your podcast player.
***
If you’re on social media, you can follow on Instagram here and Facebook here.
You can subscribe to or follow the show for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
To leave the show a review:
***
Music Credit:
MANTRA by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/Creative Commons CC BY 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/