Best books… Carol Ann Duffy

The poet, who is also the creative director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, chooses her favourite books. Her new anthology, Empty Nest: Poems for Families (Picador £14.99), is out now

Literary lockdown has been a mixture of the old and the new. A lifetime favourite, lovingly revisited, is The Life

of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901 (Dover Publications £8.49). This enchanting mixture of prose poem and intimate knowledge and observation of bees is language as joy. Now more than ever, its profound ecological and philosophical truths will leave no reader unchanged.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, 2020 (Tinder Press £20). I was unable to put this down. A vivid recreation of Shakespeare’s family life during the plague, an exploration of bereavement and grief, this wonderful novel became more and more resonant during our own dark times.

From imagined history to real: Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville

West, introduced by Alison Bechdel, 2021 (Vintage Classics £9.99), presents a passionate friendship in compulsive, sometimes daily letter-writing from 1922 to 1941, when Woolf took her own life. (The relationship, of course, resulted in Woolf’s Orlando in 1928, a masterpiece of modernist queer fiction.) I was absorbed – albeit guiltily – amused and moved from start to finish.

How the Hell Are You by Glyn Maxwell, 2020 (Picador £10.99). As I was completing

Empty Nest during most of 2020, I read a huge amount of poetry, and this was the best by far of the new collections. A master stylist who shoots from the lip, Maxwell has a range and brio, from elegy to AI, that is constantly erudite and exhilarating.

And I’m currently in thrall to

Matter & Desire by Andreas Weber, 2017 (Chelsea Green £14.99). An “erotic ecology”, in it he looks at a meadow and sees “part of our body, folded outward, ready to be strolled through”. I have found the book I need to be reading now.