"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 - 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.

Author Biography

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, TS Eliot and Forward Prizes, and the EM Forster Prize in America. Her most recent collection, Rapture, was published by Picador in 2005.