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Last broadcast on Tue, 19 Oct 2010, 11:30 on BBC Radio 4.
Synopsis
What brought one of the most compelling modern European poets to a perfectly ordinary street in North London? Who did he visit there? And what made him write a poem about the experience? The writer, Toby Litt, investigates this most improbable of brief encounters between Paul Celan, the master elegist of 20th century Jewish experience and Britain at the end of the Sixties.
Mapesbury Road
The stillness flashed
at you from a black
woman's heel.
By her side
the
magnolia-houred halfclock
before a red that
also seeks meaning elsewhere -
or also nowehere.
The whole
court of time round
a lodged bullet, adjacent, cranial.
Sharply faulted, curial gulps of
confluent air.
Now don't you adjourn.
Broadcast
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Tue 19 Oct 201011:30
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