Overwintering
Vanessa Kisuule unearths the poems that offer us insight into the issues that ail us most. This week, it's getting through winter. Can poetry help?
Vanessa Kisuule unearths the poems that offer us insight into the issues that ail us most. This week, it's getting through winter.
"Overwintering" is a term usually reserved for plants or animals adapting in order to make it through winter. But we humans are living beings too and perhaps we are also in need of some mulching around the roots, some bringing indoors, some hibernation.
And when life throws us a metaphorical winter, can we allow ourselves to just sit and watch through the window 'til the storm has passed? Perhaps poetry can help. Can it make us calmer, wiser, and more accepting of life's unplanned pauses?
With Katherine May, author of Wintering and the poets Lavinia Greenlaw, Megan Fernandes and Isabelle Baafi.
Produced in Bristol by Ellie Richold
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Poems in this Episode
Ode to Winter
by Gillian Clarke
from ICE (Carcanet Press )
Winter
by Megan Fernandes
from I Do Everything I'm Told (Tin House Books)
Notes on Modality
by Isabelle Baafi
from Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber)
Sisu
by Lavinia Greenlaw
from Minsk (Faber & Faber)
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
Originally from Poems of the Past and the Present
Advent
by Patrick Kavanagh
'Advent’ by Patrick Kavanagh is quoted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
A Flame
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh from the collection Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Broadcast
- Tue 23 Dec 202516:00BBC Radio 4
