Two Tongues

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.

Claudine Toutoungi grew up in Warwickshire and studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford. After a Master’s at Goldsmiths, she trained as an actor at LAMDA and worked as a BBC Radio Drama producer and English teacher. As a dramatist, her plays Bit Part and Slipping have been produced by The Stephen Joseph Theatre. Her first poetry collection Smoothie was published by Carcanet in 2017. She lives in Cambridge.