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Front Row: Poetry and performance from Cumbria's Contains Strong Language festival

25/09/2020

Poetry and performance from Cumbria's Contains Strong Language festival

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Poetry and performance from Cumbria's Contains Strong Language festival

Poets Kate Clanchy, Jacob Polley and Zosia Wand join Katie Popperwell at the festival.

Poets Kate Clanchy, Jacob Polley and Zosia Wand join Katie Popperwell for a Front Row celebrating poetry and performance from Cumbria's Contains Strong Language festival.

Dove Cottage Grasmere is the heart of Romantic poetry and is hosting part of this year's Contains Strong Language festival. We'll be asking what the Romantics have to tell us now, with the poet Kate Clanchy who has adapted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel with a newly commissioned score by composer Katie Chatburn. 

Novelist, poet and playwright Zosia Wand was born in London but didn't speak English till she went to school and spent all her holidays in Poland. Now she's written a radio play Bones - set on the sandbanks of Morecambe Bay - exploring how it feels to be a migrant and the emotional impact on the generations that follow.

In 2005 the award winning poet and novelist Jacob Polley’s home town of Carlisle flooded catastrophically after heavy rain. Three people died and thousands were left homeless in an event that was supposed to be a one in a hundred year event. Now Jacob Polley’s returned to that time for a new play Emergency. It’s a love story set against a merciless storm voiced through ancient Anglo-Saxon riddles about the power of nature. 

And we discuss the impact of poetry in isolation with the young poet Hannah Hodgson who is living with a life limiting disease. She'll read from her lockdown collection and discuss how poetry managed to say what we needed to say this year from zoom poetry slams to tik tok haikus.

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Poetry and performance from Cumbria's Contains Strong Language festival

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