The Poetry Detective

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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?

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The Poetry Detective: In Memoriam

In Memoriam

BBC Radio 4 - The Poetry Detective, In Memoriam

Poems to remember the departed and console the living. With Vanessa Kisuule.

Vanessa Kisuule presents The Poetry Detective, a radio show about the poems that go with us through life. Ep 3/3 Poems to remember the departed and console the living.

Vanessa Kisuule returns with a new series of The Poetry Detective, a radio show about the poems that go with us through life.

Vanessa 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?

In this episode, poems to remember the departed and console the living. 

Vanessa investigates the surprising history of one of our best known poems of consolation for the bereaved, 'Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep'. At various times it has been attributed to 'Anonymous' or believed to be a Native American burial prayer. And then for many years, people thought it had been written by a Baltimore housewife in the 1930s - Mary Elizabeth Frye. The story went that she had been inspired by a friend's sorrow at not being able to attend her mother's funeral in Germany, due to the rise of the Nazis. But did Frye really write the poem? Literary sleuth Scott Norsworthy has new evidence that points to an alternative author. 

We hear from musician and podcaster Robin Allender about a poem he has come to treasure - 'Going Without Saying' by the Irish poet and academic Bernard O'Donoghue. How did the poem come to be written? We speak the poet about how he went about crafting it, and who it was written for. 

And Vanessa speaks to American poet Saeed Jones about his remarkable poem 'A Stranger', written about his late mother. 

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

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