Back in the 1940s George Orwell famously remarked: “Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers.” And how does poetry on the air sound in 2014? Well, Liz Lochhead, one of the distinguished quartet brought together by Peggy Reynolds in Four Women Poets Today (20 September) offered some bracing remarks about the Muse’s capacity to “turn tail and open her mouth”. The striped trousers, you inferred, had probably gone as well.Lochhead, now the Scots “Makar”, or national poet, had originally been interviewed by Reynolds alongside her English and Welsh equivalents, Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, and the Irish poet Eavan Boland, back in 1993. The initial sit-down had been convened with the idea of examining how the four dealt with suc