‘Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time’ - GuardianThe wonders of nature have inspired poets for centuries, stretching far back beyond the Romantics. Beautifully curated by Carol Ann Duffy, the poems in Earth Prayers span widely across time, but in their moments of joy, empathy or difference, even the earliest poems reveal a concern for the welfare of our planet. Duffy brings these early eco-poems into conversation with contemporary voices writing into the environmental crisis, and through this dialogue sounds a clarion call to cherish and defend the planet while we can.From John Clare to Lucille Clifton to Kathleen Jamie, the poets collected in Earth Prayers speak at times as stewards and ambassadors of the earth, at others in anger at those who would exploit nature, or to question their own part in its decline. And the earth speaks back: in Stephanie Pruitt’s ‘Mississippi Gardens’ the soil bears witness to the worst of human history, while in ‘Poem’ Jorie Graham relays the earth’s plea: ‘remember me’.To encounter nature, these poems tell us, is to be humbled, to have our own smallness magnified by the presence of the sublime. Earth Prayers is a testament to the immense beauty of the natural world, and a challenging reminder of our place in ‘the living skein / of which the world is woven’.

In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions – and revisions – of female identity.Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect – as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.‘Part of Duffy’s talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism . . . From verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy’ Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist, Observer

Who? Him. The Husband. Hero. Hunk.The Boy Next Door. The Paramour. The Je t''adore.Behind every famous man is a great woman – and from the quick-tongued Mrs Darwin to the lascivious Frau Freud, from the adoring Queen Kong to the long-suffering wife of the Devil himself, each one steps from her counterpart''s shadow to tell her side of the story in this irresistible collection of feminist poems.Original, subversive, full of imagination and quicksilver wit, The World''s Wife is Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at her beguiling best, reissued as part of the Picador Collection.