Love Poems, By Carol Ann Duffy

This life-enhancing harvest of 34 poems reveals Duffy as a poet who covers the stormy waterfront of desire, devotion and despair. From early collections such as Mean Time to a preview of the forthcoming The Bees, the Poet Laureate runs passion's gamut from wild infatuation through absence and infidelity, break-ups, grief and solitude. .

In eclectic outfits that stretch in style from Tudor melancholia to Hollywood and Broadway pizzazz, she moves as adroitly between verse-forms as she does between the stages of affection, and disaffection. From the Victorian yearnings of "Warming her Pearls" to the hi-tech thrills of "Text" ("I tend the mobile now/ Like an injured bird"), Duffy can always show us just "what it is like in words"