Just over a dozen years since her much- praised debut, Katherine Duffy's follow-up, Sorrow's Egg, shows an increased maturity of voice, facing, as it does, the twin subjects of loss and grief and the intimations of mortality which accompany them. Inventive in form and agile in movement, Sorrow's Egg is also very much a celebration of the way in which artistic endeavour negotiates with the abyss, and includes poems inspired, for example, by the focus of a traditional piper at play ("all that is not music / elbowed / out of the way of the tune") as well as the title poem which, against a...