The Media School

Poetry landmark for BU professor

16 October 2009

Published collection of poetry spans 30 years of work by legendary broadcaster.

Broadcaster and BU academic Professor Sean Street has published his seventh poetry collection, bringing together work spanning almost three decades.

Time Between Tides is a collection of new and existing pieces written by Professor Street from the 1980s up until the present day. The edition marks his first published work since Radio and Other Poems which explored daily news, folklore and his interest in la sense of place. Street draws on several interests during the course of Time Between Tides, notably travel, landscape, literary history and film.

The title is taken from a line in one of the poems, ‘Cliff Fall’. But as Sean Street suggests, it has another meaning: “It's also a metaphor: the time between tides could be said to be the space between the collections gathered together in this volume. It's also a suggestion of mortality, also inevitably a theme as one gets older!”

Speaking about Time Between Tides, Street said: “Although its difficult to select any one poem as a favourite, ‘Shipping Forecast, Donegal’, from the Selected Poems section of the book, has been anthologised numerous times since it was first broadcast as part of ‘Radio: Ten Poems About Sound’ by BBC Radio 4 on National Poetry Day 1998, so that seems to have stood the test of time so far.”

As an independent radio producer and presenter, Professor Street regularly contributes to features on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and some overseas stations. As well as literature and poetry, he has published widely on radio history matters and has been influential in the development of new portable broadcast platforms for digital radio within the UK. He is also Director of the Centre for Broadcasting Research within BU’s acclaimed Media School.

He believes that people who enjoy his radio programmes “might find something to like” in Time Between Tides.

He explains: “A number of the poems grow out of radio, and the programme-making process. Also I hope anyone who's found something in my poems in previous books may be interested in this collection of previous material together with work I would like to be represented by today.

“A “selected” is quite a big event for a poet, rather like a retrospective for an artist. It's a time for pause, for reflection, and also a point from which to move on. So for me it's a bit of a landmark.”

Time Between Tides: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2009 is published by Rockingham Pres.