Duffy critical quotes

• Xan Brooks

  'With a lot of artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership. She never does. Her aim is to communicate.'
• Xan Brooks

  'Not since Phillip Larkin has a living British poet straddled the commercial and critical arenas with such finesse'
• Eliana Tomkins

  'She is an enormously impressive person, very strong, organised and decisive'
• Elaina Tomkins

  "Duffy's writing is ideally suited to a musical interpretation'
• Xan Brooks

  "Also celebrated for the lustrous eroticism that fuels work"
• Lavinia Greenlaw

  "She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated era"
• Peter Jay

  "I have never felt that her sexuality is an issue in her work"
• Peter Jay

  "She has largely managed to transcend the issue by virtue of writing good poems as opposed to gender studies"
• Peter Jay

  "forthright and uncomprimising"
• Simon Brittan

  "The ability to express powerful emotions in detached 'everyday' language"
• Simon Brittan

  "the most irritating (and potentially misleading)aspect of Duffy is her insistence on writing prose as though it were poetry"
• Jeanette Winterson

  "Powerful and modern voice"
• Elizabeth O'Reilly

  "she writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple"
• Elizabeth O'Reilly

  "Explore[s] memory and nostalgia, resulting in comparisons with Phillip Larkin"