22 January 2005
Saturday 22 January 2005 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan is joined by the poet Julia Darling, who has written a new story about sickness and waiting. Tom Paulin reveals the secrets of Seamus Heaney, and award winning 'eartoonist' Peter Blegvad returns.
Programme details
The Verb January 22nd 2005 at 21.45
On the programme this week IAN McMILLAN talks to JULIA DARLING, a poet and novelist, who reads a specially commissioned essay 'How to Wait', about waiting, knitting and waiting rooms. Julia's novels, 'Crocodile Soup' and 'The Taxi Driver's Daughter' found great favour with readers and critics - her work has a sparkling force, and 'How to Wait' reveals a defiant, amused and mercurial sensibility, pitting creativity against illness and bureaucracy.
Four hundred years after the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' "DON QUIXOTE", SALVADOR ESTEBANEZ, director of the Cervantes Institute in London explains why this first of all novels maintains such a powerful grip on the psyche of Spain. He contrasts the patience and subservience of the British soul, in its tight-lipped self-containment, with the volcanic and ebullient spirits of the sons and daughters of Don Quixote. Ever since the industrial revolution, Salvador implies, the British have been queuing in estranged silence - while Don Quixote and Sancho Panza's people are closer to the earth, and each other.
TONY HARRISON is one of our foremost poets and dramatists, and he joins The Verb to champion the cause of a brilliant scholar and linguist, a man who was a legend to some in his own life time as Torquemada, the fiendish puzzle master of the Observer's cryptic crossword, and to others as E. POWYS MATHERS, poet and translator of genius, much admired by contemporaries like W.B Yeats, and now hymned by Tony Harrison. Mathers' (1892 - 1939) work is brave and elegant, tender and erotic, unforced, unblinking, and often, in Tony's estimation, sublime. Tony reads poetry by E Powys Mathers, and explains his appeal.
And our resident scholar and poet TOM PAULIN continues his series on the secret life of poems with a radical close reading of one of the most beautiful and most loved in our language, John Keats' ode 'To Autumn.' Drawing on Keats' biography, letters he wrote to friends and family, and his known sympathies for the common people of his time, who were reeling from the Peterloo Massacre, when mounted soldiers repeatedly charged a peaceful demonstration, Tom traces a sinister undertone in the poem, a coded portrait of an oppressed and suffering country.
