It's emotion, not fact

“Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.” –  Carol Ann Duffy

My choice for “Saturday’s Poet,” Duffy is one of Britain's best known and most admired poets. Her poems appeal to those who wouldn't usually read poetry and they appear on the national school curriculum. "Duffy's poems are at once accessible and brilliantly idiosyncratic and subtle,” noted one reviewer.  “She writes of life in all its sadness - life, as what Eliot calls, that ‘infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.’”

A professor at Manchester University, her award-winning collections, which address 

issues of oppression, gender and violence, include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award, and Rapture, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Here is her short poem “Talent.”

TALENT

  This is the word tightrope.
  Now imagine a man,

inching across it in the space

between our thoughts.

 He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don't you?

I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.

The word applause is written all over him.

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