Repair

This week on The Verb we're thinking about the language of repair. Ian McMillan and guests discuss poetry's ability to heal, putting literary puzzles back together again, finding what was once lost, and the often impenetrable vocabularies of 'getting stuff fixed'.

Ian is joined by Chris McCabe, poet and National Poetry Librarian. During lockdown the Southbank Centre's National Poetry Library ran the 'lost quotes' service, reuniting remembered fragments of poems with the rest of the text. His latest book is 'Buried Garden', in which he searches for the lost poets of Stoke Newington's Abney Park Cemetery, hoping to revive their forgotten words. Mona Arshi has just published 'Somebody Loves You', a poetic novel about a young girl who chooses silence as a protective mechanism when everything around her feels fragile. The poet William Letford used to be a roofer, and he's written a brand new poem especially for The Verb about returning to his old profession to help out family. And Kate Fox considers repair and the meaning of home.

Presenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Jessica Treen