To the Moon [Hardcover]

Carol Duffy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2009

'Editing Answering Back, in which living poets replied to poems from the past, I was astonished to see how many of the poems, old and new, referred to the moon. I then started to keep a record of such references, and from my notebook, I see that in one morning alone I came across no fewer than nine poems, from the likes of Coleridge, Graves, Rosetti and Rowe and it was this selection that initially inspired To the Moon. There's something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 BC, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the Moon itself: I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed, I saw him coming on the southern road. My heart lays down its load. In collecting together poems such as these poems that span continents and centuries To the Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are like space itself infinite.'

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool, where she studied philosophy. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, and the Lannan Award and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. In 2005, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Rapture.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Picador Hardbacks (October 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330461311
• ISBN-13: 978-0330461313
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 8.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,476,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Poetry on Kindle?, February 8, 2011

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General reader (SoCal) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: To the Moon (Kindle Edition)

This is the first book of poetry I tried in the Kindle format. Not successful. Even adjusting the font sizes for different poems, the layout is uncertain (lines that run over at the right go flush left). For modern poems, you don't know if what you are seeing is what was intended or not. You can't skip and page, unless you search by a remembered special word. For poems longer than one page, you have to click forward to know who the poet is. So I started reading them from the end.
Duffy has, by the way, collected here poems by different poets in which the moon appears, for English translations from ancient Greek, up to the present, including some ancient Asians, Ted Hughes, a Silvia Plath, one by herself, some lovely Dylan Thomas ... But it's not the kind of collection that one marches through. So this trial tells me something about what a book of poetry is, too.