Product Description

'Poetry, the poets here teach us, is language as life; not only a baton-like passing-on of tradition but a way of making the human immortal. With all their joys, jokes, passions, protests, loves and losses, the poems here prove that it is not only silence that poetry answers back'

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, Vicki Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by poets such as 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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12760 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
`A collection bristling with ideas, at once witty, wry and sensuous...The juxtapositions consistently tease out fresh meanings'
--Observer

`An appealing idea for an anthology' --Herald

From the Publisher
Carol Ann Duffy is Poet Laureate.

About the Author

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, and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. Her most recent collection, Rapture, was published by Picador in 2005.

Customer Reviews

Kipling, Donne, Larkin (and others) in a new poetic light
If you read only one selection of poetry this year, make it this one. The idea - living poets choosing and responding to poems from the past - is simple enough. But it works really well, and the result is a fascinating diversity of responses. There's straightforward homage (Gillian Clarke's `Nettles', taking its inspiration from Edward Thomas' `Tall Nettles'). Sardonic riposte (Carol Rumens' warm and optimistic countering of Philip Larkin's misanthropic `This Be The Verse'). And moving elegy (Owen Sheers' `Elegy: To her Husband Going to Bed', in which John Donne's wife gives voice to her child-bearing fears, and past grief, in counterpoint to his confidence, as expressed in Donne's `Elegie: to his Mistress Going to Bed'). Throughout, the new sets off the old, shedding light on it from sometimes startling angles. Occasionally, the contrast with the new is unflattering: U.A. Fanthorpe's `A Word, Camerade' (a plea for agnosticism about the nature of animals' communion with God) exposes the narrow-minded, self-satisfied presumption of Walt Whitman's `The Beasts'. Editor Carol Ann Duffy's own contribution, `Kipling', is a brilliant exposé of the banality behind the bombast in Kipling's ghastly poem `If'. Pretty well all the `answers' in this collection work - and in such a variety of ways, at so many levels, that this little volume will absorb and delight even on the umpteenth reading.

better-read and dead
There are so many excellent reasons to adore this book; the spoof of Philip Larkin's most famous verse is worth the cover price by itself. then there's a riposte to Allan Ginsberg's "howl", a reply to Cavafy's "Ithaca" (in the style of Leonard Cohen, yet!)and, oh bliss oh joy, a Molesworth version of "A Shropshire Lad". It also works as a somewhat different anthology of poetry on its own merits, but the "answers" give the originals a whole different dimension. I'm buying this for people who like poetry, and more importantly, for some who don't!!

refreshing and surprising
This collection of poems old and new is fascinating. Todays poets choose an established poem and then write in response. It is full of surprises and gives a fresh approach to reading poetry.