Maureen Duffy's new collection centres on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to a vividly remembered childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Toulouse Lautrec, Ralph Vaughan Williams - bringing them lucidly and memorably to life. With their hallmark of compassion and fair play, Duffy's poems reflect her lifelong support for progressive social and political movements; they also display a beautiful lyricism and technical skill that grows out of her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, the city past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life-stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.

About the Author
Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 in Worthing, Sussex. As well as being a poet, playwright and novelist, she has also published biographies of Aphra Behn and Henry Purcell, and The Erotic World of Faery a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature. After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King's College London. She went on to be a teacher from 1956 to 1961, and edited three editions of a poetry magazine called The Sixties. She then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television. In 1960 her play, Pearson, won the City of London Young Playwrights Award. She made her debut as a novelist with That's How It Was, published to wide acclaim in 1962. Her first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous Gateways Club in London. Among her later novels, Gor Saga was televised in 1988 in a three-part mini-series called First Born, starring Charles Dance, the London trilogy of Wounds, Capital and Londoners are now available in ebook form, and her latest publications are the poetry collection Family Values (Enitharmon Press, 2008) and a novel The Orpheus Trail (Arcadia, 2009). She is also the author of 16 plays for stage, television and radio, the most recent being Sappho Singing in 2010. A new novel. In Times Like These, will also be published by Arcadia. Duffy has published 31 books, including six volumes of poetry. Her Collected Poems, 1949-84 appeared in 1985. Her work has often used Freudian ideas and Greek myth as a framework. She took an active part during the debates around homosexual law reform, which culminated in the Act of 1967. In 1977 she published The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a broadside against the trial of the Gay News newspaper for 'blasphemous libel'. She has also been active in a variety of groups representing the interest of writers, and is currently the President of the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society, and a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She is deeply interested in issues around enforcing traditional forms of intellectual property law, and is President of the British Copyright Council, and a Fellow of King's College London. She was made a D.Litt. by Loughborough University in 2011 for services to literature and equality law.

Reviews
TLS: "A striking new volume of poems - Maureen Duffy has inspired many other writers and proved that the English novel need not be realistic and domestic, but can be fantastical, experimental and political. Perhaps it is her poetry, though, that most fully captures her range as she presses on like a medieval troubadour across barriers of genre, gender, space and time."



Book Information
ISBN 9781907587283
Author Maureen Duffy
Format Paperback
Page Count 63
Imprint Enitharmon Press
Publisher Enitharmon Press