Poems for Births, Deaths and Marriages

DUAL Poetry Podcast

Welcome to the Dual Poetry Podcast’s department of births deaths and marriages.

Reflecting our remit, the department of births deaths and marriages will be playing you three poems reflecting these three themes:

The Caesarean of Three Continents by Corsino Fortes from Cape Verde

Death of a princess by Gaarriye from Somalia &

the married woman by Adelaide Ivánova from Brazil

The start of the new year suggested a podcast about fresh beginnings, renewal and rebirth. But this, of course, is impossible as all poems are about death, or if not death, perhaps poems are simply about poetry, about form.

The idea that all poems are about death comes from Tom Boll, a Spanish Translator and lecturer who was once my boss at the PTC. He found that picking a poem to read at a wedding was near impossible because even love poems contain within them the seed of love’s withering.

It’s easy to think there is meaning on one side and form on the other but its never so neat and a poem tends to meld these two stands lightly together like the curing phosphate backbones of a DNA double helix. As the translation process itself often demonstrates, you ask a question about form and you will get an answer about meaning.