The Poetry Detective

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Vanessa Kisuule explores the stories behind the poems we carry with us through life.

What's the line of poetry that will live in your head forever? Vanessa Kisuule tells the stories of poems that speak to us so strongly that we return to them again and again.

This is a show about the poems we carry with us. The poems that speak to us so strongly that we return to them in times of confusion, fear, loneliness or joy. Some of us might choose to scribble a couple of lines on a Post It and stick it to the mirror. Some of us mutter them under our breath like a mantra. Some of us ink them permanently into our skin. Some of us find that lines come back to us, unbidden, across the decades - and transport us to another time and place. 

Our Poetry Detective is the writer Vanessa Kisuule. She meets people with a poem that is precious to them, and unfolds the history of the poem. Why does it mean so much to them? Who wrote it and how? What's the story behind how it came to be written? How does it work on us?

BBC Radio 4 LW

The Poetry Detective: Not in Love Poems

Not in Love Poems

BBC Radio 4 - The Poetry Detective, Not in Love Poems

Stories of the poems that go with us through life. With Vanessa Kisuule.

A radio show about the poems that go with us through life. With Vanessa Kisuule.

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

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Poetry Detective

Not in Love Poems

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4