I gather Carol Ann Duffy is the most popular poet in the UK, and the American publication of her seventh (adult) collection may be an opportunity to extend her empire. It could happen: Duffy’s work is so rich that it can’t help but be thoroughly of the place it was written in, but her consistent moxie, her affable rambunctiousness, may well hit some kind of public bull’s-eye here. And Duffy’s poems are getting better and better. In her first couple of books you get the feeling that a claustrophobic talent is squeezing itself into the tight spaces of girlhood and minor monologues, when what she really wants to do is let it rip. She is now doing that; the poems feel simultaneously more playful and more necessary. Utterly uninterested in wisdom, rhetoric, or meditation, she imagines the poems with systematic vigor, as if they were bathyscaphes she were going to descend in and their soundness depended on the quality of her invention. A poem may start out being about dieting or shopping and, just when it seems about to run into a brick wall of predictability, Duffy skid-turns into a fantastical variation that may be allegorical but is principally just clever. The dieter in “The Diet” shrinks into a mote drifting on the breeze and, accidentally swallowed, finds herself—where else?—“inside the Fat Woman now,/trying to get out.” My favorite romp is “Sub,” a thoroughgoing exercise in penis envy in which Duffy beats McEnroe to win Wimbledon in five sets, sets a Formula One speed record, decks Mohammed Ali, rides the winner at Aintree, performs some sort of cricket feat I dimly comprehend (involving—tantalizingly—“googlies, bosies, chinamen, zooters”), walks on the moon, scores the winning goal in the World Cup, and is tapped to play the drums when Ringo has the flu:

                         Minus a drummer, the gig was a bummer
till I stepped in, digits ringed, sticked, skinned,
in a Beatle skirt, mop-topped, fringed, to wink
at Paul, quip with John, climb on the drums,
clever fingered and thumbed, give it four to the bar,
give it yeah yeah yeah. The screams were lava,
hot as sex, and every seat in the house was wet.

—From Sub

If her readings are half this good on her next book tour, I’m there.

— D. H. Tracy