Mean Time

In her prize-winning fourth collection, Mean Time, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes 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.

Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, Duffy is magnificent, grounded, heartfelt, dedicated to the notion that poetry can give us the music of life itself, Carol Ann Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry - any poetry - for years. Her project is both subtle and experimental... a contemporary woman poet whose poetic register reaches all the way from a subversive eroticism to a self-conscious regionalism...This new book contains wonderful poems, which extend her lyric range.

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 of the United Kingdom in 2009. In 2011 The Bees won the Costa Poetry Award, and in 2012 she won the PEN Pinter Prize. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list.