Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Writing Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both adults and children, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E.M. Forster Prizes in America. In 2009, she was appointed Poet Laureate. Her collections include The World's Wife, Rapture and The Bees which won the Costa Poetry Award.

Mysterious yet accessible; both truthful and beautiful; this selection is a paean to the power of love and of language’s ability to capture it.