This is the second podcast of this fourth season, and also the second to feature the poetry of Steve Ely.  

In this episode of the podcast, Steve reads from three long poems which look at the struggles of particular species to survive in the Anthropocene -  the present geological era which is defined by the significant and lasting impact of human activities on Earth’s ecosystems and the physical structure of the planet. Steve reads first from Lives of British Shrews (published by Broken Sleep in 2023), a long poem which as the title indicates records, in vigorous and powerfully expressive verse, the challenges which these tiny but fascinating little creatures face in simply surviving for a single day. 

Steve then reads two sections fromThe European Eel (Longbarrow Press, 2021) which portrays with great imaginative and scientific clarity the extraordinary life cycle of this exceptional fish - from its birth in the Sargasso sea as a leaf-shaped leptosopholus, then drifting as a glass eel the 4,000 miles to Europe on the Gulf Stream, where transformed into first an elver and then a mature eel, it live in fresh water streams until, after a life of up to 20 years, the adult eel then swims the 4,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea where it was born, there to mate and then die. And so the cycle begins again.

Steve concludes the reading with a three poem sequence from Orasaigh (published by Broken Sleep in 2024 with photographs by by Michael Faint). Described by Steve as an example of ‘apocalyptic landscape’ writing about the history and threats facing a ting Hebridean island. 

Steve is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.

Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.  

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

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