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Poetry series exploring exciting voices from around the world.

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Mother Tongue: Double Takes

Double Takes

BBC Radio 4 - Mother Tongue, Double Takes

The globetrotting poetry series presented by poet Imtiaz Dharker.

Poet Imtiaz Dharker explores exciting voices from around the world. Fire extinguishers and marathon runners provide inspiration in this edition of the globetrotting poetry series.

Globetrotting poetry series, presented by poet Imtiaz Dharker.

In this episode, Imtiaz hears poets from Poland, Cuba and Taiwan - in their original language and in translation. Starting with the phrase Double Takes, she reflects on how these three poets have the knack of making their readers look, and look again, at the world around them - shifting perspectives with their idiosyncratic takes on details and experiences.

Imtiaz speaks to Adam Zagajewski, widely considered to be the leading Polish poet of his generation. He writes with great humanity and wry humour, with the ability to elevate the most ordinary things, such as airports and sandals, to epic levels. He takes a walk around his home city, Krakow, and talks about his approach to writing poetry. With poems from his collection, Asymmetry, translated by Clare Cavanagh.

We also hear poems from Legna Rodriguez Iglesias, an up-and-coming Cuban voice, now living in Miami. Her intense and sometimes unnerving work often has an absurdist focus on close-up details. Imtiaz speaks to the poet Abigail Parry who, with Serafina Vick, has translated a new selection of Rodriguez’s poems in a collection called A Little Body are Many Parts.

Finally, there’s Amang Hung, a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker who writes with playful and inventive flair about nature, the digital world and her life in Taipei. She reads poems from her collection Raised by Wolves. The English translations are by Steve Bradbury.

Reader: Vera Chok.
Producer: Caroline Hughes
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4

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