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Larkin Revisited

Talking in Bed

Duration: 14 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 LWLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 FM

Available for over a year

Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin's work in his centenary year.

Episode 3:
Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin's poem Talking in Bed.

In Talking in Bed Larkin depicts a couple who are struggling to communicate - to find words 'at once true and kind,/ Or not untrue and not unkind.' Does this poem still speak to us meaningfully about the difficulty of intimate relationships?

Producer: Faith Lawrence
Mixed by: Sue Stonestreet Show less

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