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Catching Life by the Throat

How to Read Poetry and Why

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Catching Life by the Throat

By: Josephine Hart
Narrated by: Ralph Fiennes, Roger Moore, Juliet Stevenson
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About this listen

 Here is an audiobook of the hugely successful Josephine Hart Poetry Hours at the British Library. Actors such as Roger Moore and Juliet Stevenson read poetry from Auden to Eliot and from Larkin to Plath.Compilation and Introductory Material ©2006 Joesphine Hart; (P)2006 Hachette Audio and British Library Collections & Anthologies European Literary History & Criticism Poetry World Literature

Critic reviews

"For several years, the writer Josephine Hart has been persuading stars to perform at her poetic soirees in London's British Library. You could have predicted that tough, terse Harold Pinter would make a good fist of Philip Larkin's poems, but suave Roger Moore doing Rudyard Kipling? Yet the deathbed imprecations of the bluff father to his disappointing son in his poem The Mary Gloster are simply spellbinding in Moore's reading. The sound quality is patchy with audience coughs and titters, but it is nevertheless poetry's greatest hits read by the A-list: Ralph Fiennes does WH Auden, Edward Fox takes on TS Eliot, and Bob Geldof reads WB Yeats." ( The Sunday Times, Audiobook of the Week)
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I was attracted to this compilation by the list of poetry readers and the persuasive introduction included as an audio sample for the prospective purchaser to listen to. Unfortunately while this introduction was recorded in a studio and is very clear, the readings themselves are so poorly recorded and so faint that it makes listening to them extremely difficult, particularly if one is somewhere noisy such as in a car.

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