A love of poetry doesn’t necessarily get you the girl. At least that’s the experience of Michael Buerk, the 64-year-old BBC journalist and newsreader, who will be starring in this year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival on Sunday, July 11.

Not that it should be a concern for him as Michael is quizzed about his choice Desert Island Poems at the festival, the biggest of its kind in the country and one deemed “the best” by former Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion.

“I became keen on poetry in my teens in Solihull,” he says. “I read a lot and fell in love with words and the showier poets, like Dylan Thomas. I worked my way through the Penguin Modern Poets series, and flirted with Ferlinghetti and ee cummings.

“As an extremely unsuccessful bystander in the 60s sexual revolution, I thought a well-signalled love of poetry might make me seem attractively sensitive. It didn’t.

“I also thought those early poetic arguments for knicker dropping – Ode to to his Mistress and so on, would work infallibly. They didn’t.”

Indeed, though he has reported from 50 countries round the world, winning acclaim and prizes for his reports on the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and is the authoritative voice of The Moral Maze, he doesn’t consider himself a serious person.

“Like most journalists, I spent my working life skating across the surface of events trying, not always very successfully, to sound as if I knew what I was talking about,” he insists despite his history-witnessing experience over 20 years.

“I did spend a long time in some very serious situations in what increasingly felt was an ambiguous role, flitting from one large scale human disaster to another like some club-class misery tourist.

“I have a developed sense of the ridiculous, which leads to some frivolity and occasional insensitivity. Mind you, the way the media is going these days, I am beginning to feel like a cross between Kant and Keynes.”

So Francine Stock, another BBC veteran who will be interviewing Michael on July 11, should be able to evoke some fun from him, the more so as he is a published poet.

“Admittedly, my poems were only published in the Solihull School magazine called Thought, which I edited,” he reveals. “And in two editions of the Bromsgrove Weekly Messenger where I was a trainee reporter and the Editor was on holiday. To this day, I pick up every new anthology hoping to see them, but, strangely, they have yet to appear.”

Yet Michael, now retired and living in Surrey, is unsure whether poetry can raise spirits in the face of despair, such as the famine he so brilliantly covered, or be a driving force for public good.

“I think good poetry can crystallise a moment, an emotion or an idea,” he points out. “It can clarify one's thoughts, can help us see things in a totally different way.”

Nevertheless, you do have to be careful with the use of words when it comes to sex, as happened in the controversial wake of his claim in a Radio Times interview five years ago that the “shift in the balance of power between the sexes” had gone too far – and that men were now little more than “sperm donors.”

Does he regret that?

“What I was actually saying was not that women were increasingly on top, still less complaining about it, but that men were – in many different senses and many different ways – losing it,” he explains.

“Perceived female virtues – empathy, emotional literacy are everywhere in the ascendant, not necessarily as a bad thing, and traditional male virtues – stoicism, courage, reticence not only at a discount but seen as dysfunctional.

“Do I believe that? With qualifications, yes. Do I regret saying it? I’ll tell you when the wounds heal.”

Ledbury Poetry Festival runs from July 2 – 12. See www.poetry-festival.com for details.

By Gerald Isaaman