This week I’m delighted to welcome Zoe Brooks, who has agreed to drop in to introduce her new poem for voices, Fool’s Paradise.

That’s how Fool’s Paradise starts. We are on the road with three travellers and like them we question where it starts and when.

The words and rhythms reference the Bible, but at the crossroads there is a very modern shrine made of photographs. It could be anywhere that people come in grief. It was inspired by the shrine I saw in Wenceslas Square to Jan Palach, the student who set himself on fire in protest against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. There must now be shrines like it all over Ukraine and indeed many other places in the world.

Shortly after this opening the travellers meet the Fool, who leads them on the road to a city where there is another shrine. This shrine is…