Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past

Carol Ann Duffy

Sep 2008 · Pan Macmillan

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Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired – Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti – the result is a collection of voices that speak to one another across the centuries.

Teasing, subverting, arguing, echoing and – ultimately – illuminating, Answering Back is a vibrant, fascinating and timeless anthology, compiled by one of the nation’s favourite poets.

‘Intriguing . . . Entertaining and stimulating’ Good Book Guide

‘A starry game of call and answer across poetic generations’ FT Magazine

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Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool, where she studied Philosophy. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Whitbread, T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include The World's Wife, Love Poems, Rapture and The Bees which won the Costa Poetry Award.