The poems in Carol Ann Duffy's highly praised second collection range from the dramatic monologues for which she is noted to love poems, which she writes, Robert Nye remarked, 'as if she were the first to do so'.

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection 'Mean Time'. The anthologies she has edited include 'Anvil New Poets 2' and two for teenagers, 'I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine' and 'Stopping for Death'. Her 'Selected Poems' is published by Penguin; her most recent collections 'The World's Wife' and 'Feminine Gospels' are published by Picador.