Older and wiser?

Carol Ann Duffy

Sat 13 Mar 2010 00.05

This remarkable gathering of new work by senior British poets has been some months in the planning, but it seems appropriate to publish the poems over the weekend when we celebrate Mother’s Day (though Father’s Day would have been equally apt). “When I am old, I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in “Warning”, once identified as the nation’s favourite postwar poem, and her beautiful but less well-known “Lullaby” is reproduced here. Roger McGough – perhaps the nation’s favourite poet – revisits his own confidently youthful “Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death” 40 years older and wiser. And poets we have all grown up with – Dannie Abse, Peter Porter, Roy Fisher, Elaine Feinstein, Ruth Fainlight – speak here as freshly as ever, not least Gillian Clarke, whose career was crowned recently when she was appointed national poet of Wales. The Scottish makar, Edwin Morgan, is absent because of illness, but I urge readers to make sure they own a copy of his Collected Poems, published by Carcanet. The Caribbean poet James Berry, too, would have been present but for bad health. Seek out his anthology News for Babylon (Chatto).”