Carol Ann Duffy

"Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon."

"Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love...I am trying to be truthful."

"Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief."

"Light gatherer. You fell from a star into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside mirrored in you, and now you shine like a snowgirl, a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder you squeal at and fly in."

"I cannot say where you are. Unreachable by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable in the air, even if souls are stars."

"As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets."

"What do I have to help me, without spell or prayer, endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous, the death of love?"

"When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light."

"There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration – a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning"

"Six hours like this for a few francs. Belly nipple arse in the window light, he drains the colour from me. Further to the right, Madame. And do try to be still. I shall be represented analytically and hung in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art."

"This is the word tightrope. Now imagine a man, inching across it in the space between our thoughts. He holds our breath.There is no word net.You want him to fall, don't you? I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds. The word applause is written all over him."

"One saw I was alive. Loosened his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear. Between the gap of corpses I could see a child. The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye."