Today, I've been swimming with Carol Ann Duffy...

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Obviously, not the poet in person, of course, but her collection Rapture. I like to take a book with me to the pool, as my blood sugar levels sometimes stop me swimming immediately.

I am really enjoying Rapture, a collection of love poems. I like Duffy's style, and in particular the way she plays with sound and rhyme. It's ironic, given Rapture won the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize, that so far I still prefer Duffy's collectionThe World's Wife. I suspect it says more about my natural cynicism though - I can only take so much love- than the poetry itself!

Anyway, it's been a good writing week for me too, despite my usual procrastination. You can tell you've become addicted to Scramble (a game on Facebook that involves finding as many words as possible from a grid of letters) when you wake up reciting keel, leek in your head, as I did this week. I think this kind of game may be more than a time-waster though, or at least that's how I'm justifying it, as word play is part of a poetry. Coincidence or not, the next time I woke up, I had the outlines of two poems in my head. Of course, all I need to do know is turn the outlines into proper poems!