Ever since her inauguration as Poet Laureate this May, it’s become increasingly clear that Carol Ann Duffy will not stay still. In the past month alone we’ve witnessed the publication of her New and Collected Poems for Children, Mrs Scrooge: A Christmas Tale, and now this appealing if somewhat wishful anthology of what Duffy terms Lunar Poems. 

Although readers familiar with her poetry are likely to have already passed judgement upon it, we are now invited to make decisions about her reading habits. For Duffy, the material collected here is representative of a larger artistic truth, namely that “the moon has always been, and always will be, the supremely prized image for poets – a mirror to reflect the poetic imagination; language’s human smile against death’s darkness.” While there is something overdetermined in such a cloying metaphysical generalisation, a darkness is pulling observably over our skies this autumn from as early as 4pm.

The purpose of Lunar Poems is to show just how symbolically pregnant the moon has been for writers, a brightness visible out of the darkness which “gives us a real sense of our time on this planet”. To do so Duffy ranges chronologically across literary history for examples to prove her hypothesis, carefully devoting equal attention to ancient, Renaissance, Romantic and Modernist verse.

Many of her suggestions suffer, from a sense of predictability. It is admittedly comforting to linger over Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ once again, before being lead gently into Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ by way of Robert Browning; but comforting the reader like this is unlikely to provide them with any startlingly existential sense of their time on this planet. These accepted classics are a long way from Hart Crane’s warped ‘Chaplinesque’, which appears (somewhat incongruously) midway through the volume. Crane’s tense lyric interrupts a string of seven poems each with the word ‘moon’ in their title, and seems to have had the status of ‘Lunar Poem’ foisted upon it by Duffy. Its lines “…but we have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty can” are governed by the moon, but more poignantly allow the figure of Charlie Chaplin to surpass his clownish nature under its milky transcendent glow.