Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past - Tapa dura

Carol Ann Duffy has asked some of the brightest lights in the poetry world to choose a poem that is meaningful -- or has meant something -- to them, and write a reponse to it. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they've inspired, Answering Back promises to be a truly unique anthology; from old favourites to modern classics, it will be a collection everyone can respond to. Praise for Carol Ann Duffy's most recent collection, Rapture: `Rapture takes the reader on an ecstatic rollercoaster: soaring and swooping and holding one's breath; hurtling, heart thumping through the complexities of human feeling. This is a book that demands to be read from cover to cover' The Times 'I read it on the tube and missed my station. I read it in bed and couldn't sleep. I read it at my desk and started to cry. Affairs are notoriously disruptive; reading about an affair is not supposed to have the same effect. But it does in the case of Rapture' Guardian

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. 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. Her collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list.