The Poetry Detective is a radio show about how poetry sits in peoples’ everyday lives. Each week, Vanessa Kisuule meets people with a story about a poem that’s important to them and then she goes digging for more information. Who wrote it and in what context, and how does it do what it does?

From weddings to Valentine’s Day cards, poetry and romance go hand-in-hand. We go to poetry to woo, to wed and to mark our love. We look to poetry not only for a reflection of how we feel but also to shape an ideal of what love could, or should be. But what about love thwarted and unrequited, love promised and never found? People living without romantic love, or finding love but struggling to accept it? Can poetry speak to the loveless as well as the lovers?

"What would it look like if we didn't place romantic love as the organising principle of our lives? Could life be good anyway?" Amy Key is the author of two poetry collections and her first non-fiction book, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life, will be published in Spring 2023. She talks to Vanessa about a treasured anthology of haiku by Japanese women. Can these tiny, potent poems - written between the 17th century and the present day - help us reckon with longing?

"I'm reading this poem, it's a sign". Audrey Lee tells Vanessa about falling for her friend as an undergraduate and yearning to be more than friends with him. She didn't want to mess up their friendship and swallowed her feelings for the duration of their time at college together. One day, she happened on a poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Frank Bidart that felt like a call to action. A poem of unspoken desire finally spoken. And she bit the bullet and sent it to her friend.

And Chlo Samuel talks about finding a lovely boyfriend, but then struggling to allow herself to be loved. After years of living with anorexia and life throwing its worst at her, she felt unworthy of happiness and security. She talks about a poem that came into her life at the exact moment she needed it. "It felt like permission to put the things that had happened to me in a basket, say "I'm not defined by these". I can start again,"

And we hear from Ellen Bass, the Santa Cruz-based author of that poem. She talks about the lines of Tolstoy that inspired the poem and how writing it was as transformative for her as reading it was for Chlo.

Produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio Show less