The Poetry Detective

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BBC Radio 4 FM

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

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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: Talisman Poems

Talisman Poems

BBC Radio 4 - The Poetry Detective, Talisman Poems

Can a poem be carried like a talisman, to ward off anxiety or protect from harm?

Vanessa Kisuule returns with a new series of The Poetry Detective, a show about the poems that go with us through life. Ep 1/3 Poems that people carry with them in physical form.

Writer Vanessa Kisuule returns with a new series of The Poetry Detective, a radio show about how poetry sits in people's everyday lives. Each week, Vanessa speaks to people about a poem that is deeply meaningful to them. She finds out why the poem matters, and then unfolds the backstory of the poem itself - who wrote it, what was the context it came out of and how does it work on us?

In the first episode of the new series we talk to people who carry poems with them in physical form. Including Karen Walker, who wears a ring inscribed with a line of poetry that came into her life exactly when she needed it most - "three days after she died, Diane di Prima saved my life". And Kevin Koontz, who tells us about the faded newspaper clipping of a poem that his adoptive mother carried in her wallet for 50 years. Can our Poetry Detective find out anything about the author? 

Produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth & Alice McKee for BBC Audio

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