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Episode details

Radio 3,13 Jan 2023,44 mins

Breath

The Verb

Available for over a year

This week on the Verb we're taking in the air, and letting it out again as we explore how breath shapes and moulds the poetic line and stanza, how it can breathe life into a story and how breathing itself can be a kind of narrative. Ian McMillan is joined by the poet Stephen Watts whose poems pulse and flow with the rhythm of breath, novelist Emma Carroll whose book The Tale of Truthwater Lake breathes life into the future and revives the past, James Nestor a journalist and free diver who teaches us how to survive with and without breathing and poet Daisy Lafarge whose collection Life Without Air was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize.

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