Day One - Mrs Scrooge: a sweet read about the effect one person can have on the world. All the global warming content was a bit sad for a Christmas poem, but it did make me feel all warm and cosy. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1994, Betsy Hearne, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, pp. 184-185; September, 1996, Betsy Hearne, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, pp. 9-10. However, in 2009, she justified her acceptance of the role on feminist grounds, telling listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, “I think my decision was purely because there has not been a woman. I see this as recognition of the great women poets we now have...and I decided to accept it for that reason.” The Game: Christmas Day, 1914’. McMillan, Ian. http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/the-game-christmas-day-1914/ Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester. She is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches on the Poetry route of the MFA and MA in Creative Writing and is creative director ofcity-wide, national and international literary projects. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She wasPoet Laureate of the United Kingdom 2009-2019. Her collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. Words of wisdom

Take My Husband (two-act), first produced in Liverpool, England, at Liverpool Playhouse, December 4, 1982. Anthologise, which saw schools selecting their favourite poetry, the winning anthology published by Picador with a foreword by the Duchess of Cornwall; The poem goes on to describe the horror of war through its evocative imagery of the damage it inflicted on the soldiers: Day Six - Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday: a nice poem but the star of the show of this one is the illustrations!!! I want them framed.urn:lcp:christmastruce0000duff:epub:75b8ae52-bca4-415d-ba0d-f6ac55810955 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier christmastruce0000duff Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s27wfd5q5m1 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781447218449 Day Five - Bethlehem: the illustrations of this one are absolutely stunning. I enjoyed the focus on the culture of the city rather than the retelling of the story! I feel it's quite often white washed, so this was a refreshing change. Duffy’s poetry has always been strong and feminist. This position is especially well captured in herfirst collection, Standing Female Nude,in which the title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model’s response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model’s acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that “the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her,” explained DiMarco. “And here the way the poem ends with the model’s final comment on the painting ‘It does not look like me’—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist’s representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle.”

Day Four - Wenceslas: not a huge fan of this one, but that may be largely due to the fact I don't eat meat and 80% of it describes a monstrosity of a pie. Editor) Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, illustrated by Trisha Rafferty, Holt (New York, NY), 1996. Times Educational Supplement, January 22, 1999, review of The Pamphlet, p. 13; April 23, 1999, review of Five Finger-Piglets, p. 27; December 17, 1999, review of The World's Wife, p. 22; January 19, 2001, John Mole, review of The Oldest Girl in the World, p. F20. New Statesman, November 29, 1999, review of Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-first Century, p. 83. Carol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. Some critics have accused Duffy of being too populist, but on the whole her work is highly acclaimed for being both literary and accessible, and she is regarded as one of Britain’s most well-loved and successful contemporary poets.

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Beasts and Beauties: Eight Tales from Europe, first produced in Bristol, England, at the Bristol Old Vic,April 2004. A beautiful collection of Carol Ann Duffy's Christmas poems from the 10 years she was Poet Laurette, exclusively for independent book stores. I read this like an advent calendar over the past 10 days, and here are my thoughts. Mother Tongue, Other Tongue, which encourages children with English as a second language to express themselves and share poetry written in their mother tongue, and students who are native English speakers to experiment with writing in a learned language, now a national campaign run annually; Duffy’s recent collections include her Collected Poems (2015), The Bees (2011), winner of the Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Rapture (2005) , winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Duffy has also written verses for children. Her several collections of children’s poetry include The Gift (2010), New and Collected Poems for Children (2009), and The Hat (2007).