Reeta Chakrabarti, Fred D'Aguiar, Ella Frears, Edward Wilson-Lee

Flames and poetry - what poetry tell us about the Los Angeles fires, the pleasure the poet John Keats took in reading - a poem-letter to an imaginary estate agent, and magical language. To explore all this McMillan is joined by poetry writers and poetry lovers.

Ian's guests: BBC newsreader and journalist Reeta Chakrabarti is a trustee of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. She shares her passion for John Keats' poem 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' - with its 'realms of gold' and a planet that 'swims'.

Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet who lives and teaches in Los Angeles - he shares a powerful new commission which bears witness to the Los Angeles fires, and asks how we might depict and talk about fire in an age of rising temperatures.

What does it mean to be a tenant, or an artist in residence in someone else's house - at a time when it is harder to buy houses than in the past? The poet Ella Frears has written a book-length poem exploring rented and borrowed spaces - addressed to an imaginary estate agent - full of tender and frank observations about modern life.

Edward Wilson-Lee's new book 'The Grammar of Angels - A Search for the Magical Powers of Language' explores the attraction (and the rejection) of language that has a powerful effect, or casts a spell on us - including the speech of angels and inscriptions on amulets. The book invites us to consider when sound is more powerful than sense, and why that might have concerned our ancestors.