Answering Back

"What I love about this book is that Carol Ann Duffy asked a whole load of poets to answer another poet back: to choose a poem by someone long dead, and write a response to that poem. I think that idea will encourage people to read poems. It’s a lovely anthology – although all those Picador anthologies edited by Carol Ann are lovely – but Answering Back is one of my favourites. Wonderful poems excite me and poetry speaks in the world we inhabit. Edward Thomas’s poem, ‘Tall Nettles’, spoke to me every time I passed the nettle patch in our garden, reminding me that I should cut them down, yet somehow saying, ‘Don’t do it’. When the caterpillars appeared all over the nettles, hundreds of them, and became peacock butterflies, I knew they were saved by poetry. ‘And I want to say to the dead, look what a poem sings to life: the bite of nettles, caterpillars, wings.’ Carol Ann and I both had to write a poem for the Today programme on Radio Four. Carol Ann said: ‘I’ll go to sleep and with any luck I’ll dream it,’ and she did. She’s right to say that, so don’t struggle with exhaustion. People who can write usually say wonderful things about writing and friends talking about poetry are worth listening to. Yes, and it’s more than just a collection of lovely poems for popular consumption. It does more than that. They are new poems that have been commissioned and referring to old poems is a lovely idea."