'It's an entertaining and stimulating idea for an anthology and one that should strike many a chord...'

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. '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".

2008-05-03 Kipling, Donne, Larkin (and others) in a new poetic light

If you read only one selection of poetry this year, make it this one. The idea - living poets choosing and responding to poems from the past - is simple enough. But it works really well, and the result is a fascinating diversity of responses. There's straightforward homage (Gillian Clarke's `Nettles', taking its inspiration from Edward Thomas' `Tall Nettles'). Sardonic riposte (Carol Rumens' warm and optimistic countering of Philip Larkin's misanthropic `This Be The Verse'). And moving elegy (Owen Sheers' `Elegy: To her Husband Going to Bed', in which John Donne's wife gives voice to her child-bearing fears, and past grief, in counterpoint to his confidence, as expressed in Donne's `Elegie: to his Mistress Going to Bed'). Throughout, the new sets off the old, shedding light on it from sometimes startling angles. Occasionally, the contrast with the new is unflattering: U.A. Fanthorpe's `A Word, Camerade' (a plea for agnosticism about the nature of animals' communion with God) exposes the narrow-minded, self-satisfied presumption of Walt Whitman's `The Beasts'. Editor Carol Ann Duffy's own contribution, `Kipling', is a brilliant exposé of the banality behind the bombast in Kipling's ghastly poem `If'. Pretty well all the `answers' in this collection work - and in such a variety of ways, at so many levels, that this little volume will absorb and delight even on the umpteenth reading.