Carol Ann Duffy on Sylvia Plath

Duffy recalls her first encounter with Plath's work

Sylvia Plath Poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy (The Guardian): 'Poets are ultimately celebrators, of life and of poetry itself. A vocational poet like Plath gives life back to us in glittering language – life with great suffering, yes, but also with melons, spinach, figs, children and countryside, moles, bees, snakes, tulips, kitchens and friendships. There can be a chilling detachment about Plath's poetic personality – like Yeats, she casts "a cold eye / On life, on death" – but she also deploys a comic playfulness, a great appetite for sensuous experience, a delight in the slant rhymes and music of her verse, bravado, brio, a tangible joy in the unflowering of her genius.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Sylvia Plath meets Elizabeth Bowen
• Sylvia Plath Drawings Exhibition
• Sylvia Plath on US Postal Stamp
• Carol Ann Duffy on Texting and Facebook
• Faber & Faber Writers' Gallery

Carol Ann Duffy on Texting and Facebook

Is poetry the original 'text message'?

Carol Ann Duffy

On The Guardian website, Joanna Moorhead picks up on a recent quote by poet Carol Ann Duffy: 'The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text [...] It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.' [Read More]