Environmental Studies

For Maureen Duffy, pictures are magical creations and recreations – of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death – where artists take risks analogous to a poet’s with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence Burdsong. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington...

Inspired by and devoted to absent friends, this selection of poems from 1989 onwards shows Duffy at her bravest and most colourful, a consummate performer who transits without a jolt from Venice to the Underworld, from war-torn elegy to aesthetics. Though the grand theme is that of memorial and resignation, the verse is full of Gaelic wit and linguistic trickery. Amongst many highlights, ‘Lament for the Scribblers’ is a clarion...