Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past
by Carol Ann Duffy (Editor)
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"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 50 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 - show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Read: June 2020
Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2020
This beautiful book of poetry centres the idea that living poets of today can ‘answer back’ to poets from the past and this concept is wonderfully executed. I have been introduced to some contemporary poets that I want to read more from; U.A. Fanthorpe’s passionate retort to Walt Whitman’s The Beasts, Carol Rumens’ own version of Larkin’s This Be The Verse and Clare Shaw’s heart-breaking The No Baby Poem puts them firmly on my radar.
There were also long gone poets that I have never heard of before whose words moved me, especially William Carlos Williams’ 1938 haiku-like poem The Red Wheelbarrow and Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaka (1911).
I highly recommend this collection to show more all lovers of poetry. show less
Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2020
This beautiful book of poetry centres the idea that living poets of today can ‘answer back’ to poets from the past and this concept is wonderfully executed. I have been introduced to some contemporary poets that I want to read more from; U.A. Fanthorpe’s passionate retort to Walt Whitman’s The Beasts, Carol Rumens’ own version of Larkin’s This Be The Verse and Clare Shaw’s heart-breaking The No Baby Poem puts them firmly on my radar.
There were also long gone poets that I have never heard of before whose words moved me, especially William Carlos Williams’ 1938 haiku-like poem The Red Wheelbarrow and Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s Ithaka (1911).
I highly recommend this collection to show more all lovers of poetry. show less
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Author Information
Carol Ann Duffy has published four highly praised collections of poetry. Her last, "Mean Time", won the "Forward" Poetry Prize & the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She lives in Manchester, England. (Publisher Fact Sheets) Carol Ann Duffy was born on December 23, 1955 in Gasgow. She is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is also Professor of Contemporary show more Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and always wanted to be a writer, producing poems from the age of 11. When Duffy was 15, June Scriven sent her poems to Outposts, a publisher of pamphlets, where it was read by the bookseller Bernard Stone, who published some of them. She applied to the University of Liverpool and began a philosophy degree there in 1974. She had two plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, wrote a pamphlet, Fifth Last Song, and received an honours degree in philosophy in 1977. She worked as poetry critic for The Guardian from 1988 -1989, and was editor of the poetry magazine, Ambit. In 1996, she was appointed as a lecturer in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and later became creative director of its Writing School. She has since gone on to write several works of poetry and children's books. Her title's The World's Wife, Rapture, and The Bees made the New Zealand Best Seller List. (Publisher Provided) show less
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Classifications
- Genres
- Poetry, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 821.008 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures British Poetry English poetry {by more than one author} Modified standard subdivisions Collections of literary texts not limited by time period or kind of form
- LCC
- PR1174 .A83 — Language and Literature English English Literature Collections of English literature
- BISAC
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- Members
- 119
- Popularity
- 273,162
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.46)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 3
