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Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Series exploring dialect poetry in different parts of the UK.

Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets: Cumbria

Cumbria

BBC Radio 4 - Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets, Cumbria

Novelist Katie Hale explores the legacy of early dialect poetry in her native Cumbria.

Poet and novelist Katie Hale explores the legacy of early dialect poets in her native county of Cumbria, to discover if dialect poetry is a way of expressing local identity.

A return of the series on dialect poetry in different parts of the UK. Poet and novelist Katie Hale explores the legacy of early dialect poets in her native county of Cumbria, to discover if dialect poetry is a way of expressing local identity.

Cumbria has a long history of dialect poetry, beginning with poets like Josiah Relph, Susanna Blamire and Robert Anderson, and continuing right up to the present day. Katie finds out more about some of these historic poets and their contemporary counterparts. She also speaks to Cedric Robinson - the Queen’s Guide to the Sands of Morecambe Bay - and to farmer and writer James Rebanks, trying to understand the connection between dialect, identity and the land itself. How does the place we live in shape who we are and how we choose to express ourselves?

In episodes two and three, the series takes a look at dialect poetry in the Isle of Man and Yorkshire.

A Made in Manchester production for BBC Radio 4

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Tongue and Talk: The Dialect Poets

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