'Carol Ann Duffy is considered a top poet. But she deserves better. She deserves to outsell most of the novelists on your shelf ' Observer

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet.

Sincerity is Duffy's final collection of poems as Poet Laureate, and the much-anticipated successor to the Costa Award-winning The Bees. Time and its passage are at the heart of this reflective work, which gazes out from the autumn of life. There are moving elegies here for what has departed; whether that be children who have flown the nest, a way of life, literary luminaries, past loves, lost parents or our own youth. As Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence and adulthood, she finds moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life.

This collection finds a poet at the height of her powers using her full poetic range, casting her eye both inwards, in poems of a deeply personal nature, and yet also outwards, taking stock of a world in turmoil. In some of her most radical work yet, we see Duffy satirise and unpick the deception and dishonesty at the heart of our current political situation. A rallying cry builds steadily through the book culminating in a moving closing ode to the virtue of sincerity.

A fitting culmination to her time as a Poet Laureate, this collection, at once intimate and public, is a work of great power from one of our most cherished and humane poets.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy returns with Sincerity, her last full collection as Poet Laureate, a magisterial achievement from the greatest living poet of our times.

About the Author
Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. In 2011 The Bees won the Costa Poetry Award, and in 2012 she won the PEN Pinter Prize. She was appointed DBE in 2015.


Book Information
ISBN 9781509893423
Author Carol Ann Duffy, DBE
Format Hardback
Page Count 96
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 282g
Dimensions(mm) 224mm * 143mm * 21mm