The Poetry Detective - Not in Love Poems

Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and selects The Poetry Detective - Not in Love poems for the loveless, thwarted and unrequited. With Vanessa Kisuule. And Daljit reads from his Poetry Extra Book of the Month: Somewhere There is a Sky For Us.

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. 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?

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 transformative for her.

Produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2022.