Books by Carol Ann Duffy
Selected Poems: Carol Ann Duffy: First Edition
The author's own selection of the best poems from her four published selections Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993). Carol Ann Duffy is one of Britain's most outstanding young poets.
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Moon Zoo
A lunar landscape is the setting for a very special zoo where elephants' "trunks are telescopes probing space, pointing up at the Earth's blue face" and baboons "jump twenty feet into outer space and flash their bottoms at the human race!"
The moon tiger scratches at shooting stars, polar bears float down from their mountain for starfish and salad, and the zookeeper, of course, is an alien, complete with eight bright green hands. Lyrical, humorous verses illuminate an entrancing world that is both familiar and strange, while soft-toned, wonderfully strange illustrations capture the eerie beauty of the moon zoo.
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Underwater Farmyard
Mermaids both milk the cows and read the calves a bedtime story while water-pigs hunt for pearls in this beautiful, poetic tale illustrated with quiet magic
Under the blue-green fields of the Deep
Bleat the bubbly baas of webbed-feet sheep
Starfish twinkle in the ocean sky
Electric eels are comets zooming high.
The moon is the silver of a dolphin's skin
In the watery heaven
Where angelfish swim.
Dive under the sea to the underwater farmyard where dolphins dance among the sheep and cows, while a musical octopus plays. Ethereal and atmospheric illustrations perfectly capture the slow, lulling flow of the cows and other farmyard animals in this fantastically strange bedtime story.
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The Princess's Blankets
"A princess lived, once, who was always cold. Even when the bright sun was at its hottest, she never felt warm."
A young princess who can never feel warm. A worried king and queen. A stranger in black with hard gray eyes. A musician with a kind and good heart. Carol Ann Duffy’s powerful new fairy tale explores the depths of human fears, frailty, and love, complemented by a series of beautiful, atmospheric paintings by acclaimed artist Catherine Hyde. Compelling, lyrical, magical — this is the tale of The Princess's Blankets.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Celebrated artist tells story of a mysterious gift that travels around the world, spreading a message of love that inspires its recipients.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Jimmy Joe can hardly believe it. Fish Woman has invited him to go fishing. And not just regular fishing, but salmon fishing. Some say that Fish Woman might be a witch, but salmon fishing...well, that's an invitation you just can't turn down. So he puts on his hat, his sweater and his yellow slicker, and Jimmy Joe and Fish Woman head out to sea for an adventure more magical than he ever could have imagined.
Vibrant watercolors in glowing hues of blue, green, and red bring alive the beauty of the sea, the magnificence of the mighty whales that live within it, and the warmth of the characters, making this a special story about friendship and the true meaning of giving.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Throughout their journey to America and their first summers on the prairie, music eases the way for an immigrant family, but when loneliness, worry, and hard winters cause her mother to stop singing, a young girl finds a way to bring music back into their lives.Throughout their journey to America, music eases the way for an immigrant family, but when loneliness, worry, and hard winters cause her mother to stop singing, a young girl finds a way to bring music back into their lives.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
The Gift is a magical, fable-like Christmas story from Cecelia Ahern, the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of P.S. I Love You and Thanks for the Memories. The story of Lou Suffern, a successful executive frustrated by the fact that he spends more time in the office than with his doting wife and two young children, The Gift is “a tantalizing tale wrapped in a tale....[the] perfect treat for the holidays.” (Sara Gruen)
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Chosen by author Elizabeth Gilbert as one of her ten favorite books, Daniel Ladinsky’s extraordinary renderings of 250 unforgettable lyrical poems by Hafiz, one of the greatest Sufi poets of all time
More than any other Persian poet—even Rumi—Hafiz expanded the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Because his poems were often ecstatic love songs from God to his beloved world, many have called Hafiz the “Invisible Tongue.” Indeed, Daniel Ladinsky has said that his work with Hafiz is an attempt to do the impossible: to render Light into words—to make the Luminous Resonance of God tangible to our finite senses.
I am
a hole in a flute
that the Christ's breath moves
through—
listen to this
music!
With this stunning collection of Hafiz’s most intimate poems, Ladinsky has succeeded brilliantly in presenting the essence of one of Islam’s greatest poetic and religious voices. Each line of The Gift imparts the wonderful qualities of this master Sufi poet and spiritual teacher: encouragement, an audacious love that touches lives, profound knowledge, generosity, and a sweet, playful genius unparalleled in world literature.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Considered by many to be the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. • An interweaving of the effects of life and memory, tradition and heritage, upon art, the book tells of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished poet seeking fame in the phantasmic world of Berlin in the 1920s.
"A fascinating lesson in the truly staggering number of possible ways of writing and seeing." -Kirkus Reviews
The Gift is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry of literature follows the pursuits of an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write.
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of the initial period of his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others.
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
Book by Young, Kathy Chase
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The Gift
by Hafiz, Carol Ann Duffy, Vladimir Nabokov, Cecelia Ahern, Kristine Franklin, Marcia S. Freeman, Sandra Magsamen, Kathy Chase Young
After meeting a magical old woman in a clearing in the woods and trading her daisy chain for the granting of a wish, a little girl grows into a young woman and the clearing begins to fill with the loveliest flowers, the most fragrant herbs, and the most perfect stones.
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The Tear Thief
In the evening, between supper and bedtime, an invisible fairy slips into homes to steal tears of shame, fear, pain, and sadness, then climbs to the moon where she transforms the sackful of droplets into something wonderful.
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The World's Wife Poems
Be terrified.
It's you I love,
perfect man,
Greek God, my own;
but I know you'll go,
betray me, stray
from home.
So better by far for
me if you were stone.
--from "Medusa"
Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous -- and infamous -- male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.
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Rapture: Poems
Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, "essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages" (The Guardian)
The effortless virtuosity, drama, and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her much admired among contemporary poets. Rapture is a book-length love poem and a moving act of personal testimony. But what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is Duffy's refusal to simplify the contradictions of love and read its transformations-infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancor, separation, and grief-as either redemptive or destructive. This is a map of real love in all its churning complexity, simultaneously direct and subtle, showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives. With poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that can and does speak for us all.
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The Bees: Poems
A winner of the Costa Book Award, "beautiful and moving poetry for the real world" (The Guardian)
The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as British poet laureate, and the much anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize–winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, and poems of political anger. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends and―most movingly―for the poet's mother. As Duffy's voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song.
Woven into and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy's subject, sometimes it strays into the poem or hovers at its edge―and the reader soon begins to anticipate its appearance. In the end, Duffy's point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees is Duffy's clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as "secular prayer," as the means by which we remind ourselves of what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.
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Everyman (Faber Drama)
Everyman is successful, popular, and riding high when Death comes calling. Forced to abandon the life he has built, he embarks on a last, frantic search to recruit a friend, anyone, to speak in his defense. But Death is close behind, and time is running out.
One of the great primal, spiritual myths, Everyman asks whether it is only in death that we can understand our lives. A cornerstone of English drama since the 15th century, this new adaptation by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was presented at the National Theatre, London, in April 2015.
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Love
One of the English language’s best-loved living poets arrays before us here, in chronological order, her favorites among her poems on the theme of love, drawing on work written over four decades, and she adds to her selection one new poem. It makes for a sequence that is sensual, stimulating, irresistible.
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Mean Time
Carol Ann Duffy dramatises 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. By turns funny, sad, cruel, and uplifting, these stories explore how the turn of the millennium impacts on the life of the individual. These poetms are firmly rooted in human nature. For all the technological elements that invade our lives, many of the characters here still resort to the traditional urges and instincts central to the best crime fiction: greed, foolishness, weekness.
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Earth Prayers Encounters in Poetry with the Natural World
‘Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time’ - Guardian
The wonders of nature have inspired poets for centuries, stretching far back beyond the Romantics. Beautifully curated by Carol Ann Duffy, the poems in Earth Prayers span widely across time, but in their moments of joy, empathy or difference, even the earliest poems reveal a concern for the welfare of our planet. Duffy brings these early eco-poems into conversation with contemporary voices writing into the environmental crisis, and through this dialogue sounds a clarion call to cherish and defend the planet while we can.
From John Clare to Lucille Clifton to Kathleen Jamie, the poets collected in Earth Prayers speak at times as stewards and ambassadors of the earth, at others in anger at those who would exploit nature, or to question their own part in its decline. And the earth speaks back: in Stephanie Pruitt’s ‘Mississippi Gardens’ the soil bears witness to the worst of human history, while in ‘Poem’ Jorie Graham relays the earth’s plea: ‘remember me’.
To encounter nature, these poems tell us, is to be humbled, to have our own smallness magnified by the presence of the sublime. Earth Prayers is a testament to the immense beauty of the natural world, and a challenging reminder of our place in ‘the living skein / of which the world is woven’.
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