Ritual Lighting: Laureate Poems

Description

Carol Ann Duffy has been Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom since May 2009. In her first five years, she has written brilliant, challenging, lyrical and relevant poetry about people, places and significant moments, past and present.

From Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Valentine's Day to Christmas Eve, from the industrial cities to the White Cliffs of Dover, this selection of her public poems celebrates our nation and its rituals. Beautifully illuminated by Stephen Raw - a wonderful textual artist who recreates words, lines and poems in the most elegant and sumptuous form - Ritual Lighting is published alongside 'Poetry for the Palace: From Dryden to Duffy', a major exhibition of Laureates' manuscripts from the Royal Collection. Held at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, the exhibition also showcases a selection of Stephen's original artwork and runs from August to November 2014.

Ritual Lighting marks the half-way point of Carol Ann Duffy's Laureateship and is a stunning gift book from Britain's most popular poet.

Author description

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. 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, the Costa Prize for poetry, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. In 2005 she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Rapture. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. In 2011 The Bees won the Costa Poetry Award, and in 2012 she won the PEN Pinter Prize. Stephen Raw was born in London in 1952. He studied at Wimbledon and Ravensbourne Colleges of Art and Design, then at Manchester Metropolitan University for an MA. He has exhibited widely across the world. 'Fundamental to all my artwork,' Stephen says, 'is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through those arbitrary signs we call letters - images in themselves.'