Front Row

Dove Cottage Grasmere is the heart of Romantic poetry and is hosting part of this year's Contains Strong Language festival. We'll be asking what the Romantics have to tell us now, with the poet Kate Clanchy who has adapted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel with a newly commissioned score by composer Katie Chatburn. Novelist, poet and playwright Zosia Wand was born in London but didn't speak English till she went to school and spent all her holidays in Poland. Now she's written a radio play Bones - set on the sandbanks of Morecambe Bay - exploring how it feels to be a migrant and the emotional impact on the generations that follow.In 2005 the award winning poet and novelist Jacob Polley’s home town of Carlisle flooded catastrophically after heavy rain. Three people died and thousands were left homeless in an event that was supposed to be a one in a hundred year event. Now Jacob Polley’s returned to that time for a new play Emergency. It’s a love story set against a merciless storm voiced thr