With the IPCC warning that our addiction to fossil fuels is driving "unprecedented" changes in the world's oceans which threaten mass extinction, the watery theme of this week's National Poetry Day could not have been more timely.
This week's podcast dives into the deep end with a poet, an oceanographer and an ecologist who is making a splash in the world of children's fiction.
Simon Armitage reads from his new collection, Stanza Stones, the culmination of a two-year project that has seen his water poems carved into stones along a 50-mile stretch of his native Yorkshire.
The marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts has just been shortlisted for the Royal Society's Winton prize with his latest book, Ocean of Life. He tells the Observer's Robin McKie why preserving the planet's seas should be at the top of the global political agenda.
The ecologist Tom Moorhouse, meanwhile, has taken a more elliptical approach to championing the water creatures among which he spends his working life. His children's novel, The River Singers, does for water voles what Richard Adams's Watership Down did for rabbits. He explains to Richard Lea how the arrival of the American mink in the UK has turned the life of the water vole from pastoral idyll to dystopian thriller and how he decided to adopt a vole's eye view.
Finally, we listen in to the Forward poetry prize, where the actress Natascha McElhone reads a poem from the winning collection by Michael Symmons Roberts.
Reading list
Stanza Stones by Simon Armitage (Enitharmon)
A limited edition of In Memory of Water by Simon Armitage, illustrated by Hilary Paynter, is available here
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts (Allen Lane)
The River Singers by Tom Moorhouse (Oxford University Press)
Drysalter by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape)
