Showing results by narrator "Carol Ann Duffy" in All Categories

Sincerity is Duffy’s final collection of poems as Poet Laureate and the much-anticipated successor to the Costa Award-winning The Bees. Time and its passage are at the heart of this reflective work, which gazes out from the autumn of life. There are moving elegies here for what has departed; whether that be children who have flown the nest, a way of life, literary luminaries, past loves, lost parents or our own youth.

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends and - most movingly - the poet's own mother. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee.

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is an audiobook-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive.

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire.

On a frosty winter evening, the Baron watches the snow fall. He is bored and worried. It will soon be Christmas, and everything is too quiet. What can he do to bring excitement to the Manor? His wife, the Baroness, has an idea: he can appoint a King of Christmas, a peasant to take his place. And so begin twelve days of chaos, anarchy and merriment....

Selected Poems is a collection of poetry chosen by Carol Ann Duffy from her first four acclaimed novels: Standing Female Nude, Selling Manhattan, The Other Country, and Mean Time (winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award).