Two Tongues
Regular price
€17.50
Winner of the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021
Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion - spatial, verbal and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.
Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion - spatial, verbal and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.
Claudine Toutoungi is a poet and playwright. She was born in Warwickshire, studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford and has worked as an actor, a BBC radio drama producer, English teacher, and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for Newnham and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Carcanet published her debut poetry collection Smoothie in 2017. This was followed by Two Tongues (2020), which won the Ledbury Prize for Second Collection. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish and her live poetry contributions to festivals include Tongue Fu, Poetry East and appearances on BBC Radio 4. Her plays for theatre include Bit Part and Slipping (Stephen Joseph Theatre) and her many audio dramas for BBC Radio 4 include Deliverers, The Inheritors and The Voice in my Ear. She lives in Cambridge.