Programming note: Steyn's Song of the Week can be heard weekly on Serenade Radio, every Sunday at 5.30pm British Summer Time/12.30pm North American Eastern. If you missed today's show, it replays at 5.30am Monday UK time - that's 9.30pm Pacific Sunday evening on the West Coast of North America, or Monday lunchtime in Australia. You can listen from anywhere in the world by clicking the button at top right here.
~In the summer months, our weekend video poetry retreats into audio only to spare your eyes from the sun's glare on your computer screens. So welcome to the first of this season's summer anthologies, in which Mark has put together a quartet of favourite poems, and matched them to some appropriate musical interludes.
The centrepiece of this show is a blood-soaked postscript to Steyn's visit to Northern Ireland earlier this week. Mark commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Claudy bombing in July 1972 with a very direct and powerful poem. There are also contrasting takes on the same female name, and Mary Shelley in the depths of her widowhood. Plus musical accompaniment drawn from the last three-quarters of a millennium.
We hope these forty minutes of words and music provide a respite from the glum state of the world this Sunday. To listen, simply click above.
If you'd like to catch up with earlier poems in the series, you can find them on our Sunday Poems home page. As with Tales for Our Time and our music specials and The Mark Steyn Show, we've archived Mark's poetry picks in an easy-to-access Netflix-style tile format that we hope makes it the work of moments to prowl around and alight on something that piques your interest of a weekend, whether Blake or Browning.
Steyn's Sunday Poems is a special presentation of The Mark Steyn Club. Mark launched the Steyn Club over five years ago, and we're immensely heartened by all the longtime SteynOnline regulars - from Fargo to Fiji, Madrid to Malaysia, West Virginia to Witless Bay - who've signed up to be a part of it. Membership in The Mark Steyn Club also comes with non-poetic benefits, including:
~Our latest audio adventure in Tales for Our Time, and its five dozen thrilling predecessors;
~Other audio series on pertinent topics, such as our nightly installments of Climate Change: The Facts, and last year's weekly serialization of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade;
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with Mark, such as Friday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, and other video content;
~Advance booking for Mark's live appearances around the world, assuming such things are ever again permitted;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the chance to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here. And for our special Gift Membership see here. Oh, and by the way, Mark's live appearances often include a live performance of a Sunday Poem.
One other benefit to Club Membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like this feature or consider Mark's poem readings a bust, then feel free to comment away below. Please do stay on topic on all our comment threads, because that's the way to keep them focused and readable. With that caution, have at it (in verse, if you wish).
