Poems for the Speed of Life

• S5, E4: "breaklight" by Lucille Clifton

  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. More about Strong WordsI’d love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment below or on Spotify.Leave a commentIf 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

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• S5, E3: "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón

  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 WordsShane’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 Words⁠⁠Ratings and reviewsI’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 creditMANTRon 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/

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• S5, E2: "Death of a Naturalist" by Seamus Heaney

  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 WordsShane’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 Words⁠Ratings and reviewsI’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 creditMANTRon 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/

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• S5, E1: "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

  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 WordsShane’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 WordsRatings and reviewsI’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 creditMANTRon 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/

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• Series 5 Trailer: Nature, Wilderness, Wildness

  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:Shane's new business 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 here.If you're not yet a subscriber on Spotify, please seek out the "Follow" button on the show page in your Spotify app. You can also leave the show a rating by tapping the stars.Poems for the Speed of Life also appears on Substack here. Please go there and sign up if you would like to receive a notification by email when every new episode goes live.I'd love to hear what you think of this episode. You can leave a comment on Spotify or on Substack.In this trailer I mentioned Matthijs Schouten and his appearance on The Almanac of Ireland, a podcast from the much-missed Irish naturalist, author, linguist and documentary-maker Manchán Magan. You can listen to that episode, "Enchanted by Nature", which was first published in November 2020, here.

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