Love, page 3
taking instruction from echoes
to exit the wrong life.
A low sun, nailing its colours to a mast.
My seaweed wreath, left for the tide to accept.
2018
When Then
I knelt in the garden then,
trying to grow a flower from your name;
where blossoms stalled upon their stems,
till you should give permission for the rain.
Hiding in the undergrowth, a wren –
when then was is, I wish my heart had done the same.
2022
About the Author
CAROL ANN DUFFY was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for a decade from 2009 to 2019. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Awards in America. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2012, and was appointed DBE in 2015. In 2021, she was awarded the International Golden Wreath for lifetime achievement in poetry.
Also by Carol Ann Duffy in Picador
Standing Female Nude
Selling Manhattan
The Other Country
Mean Time
The World’s Wife
Feminine Gospels
New Selected Poems
Rapture
Mrs Scrooge
Love Poems
Another Night Before Christmas
The Bees
The Christmas Truce
Wenceslas
Bethlehem
Ritual Lighting
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday
Collected Poems
The Wren-Boys
The King of Christmas
Pablo Picasso’s Noël
Frost Fair
Sincerity
Christmas Poems
Advent Street
Nature
Elegies
Politics
AS EDITOR
Hand in Hand
Answering Back
To the Moon
Off the Shelf
Empty Nest
First published 2023 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2023 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5290-9698-9
Copyright © Carol Ann Duffy 2023
Jacket Design by Moesha Parirenyatwa, Picador Art Department
Illustrations: © Poulina Bogatskaya
The right of Carol Ann Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Carol Ann Duffy, Love
