Christmas Carol

Carol Ann Duffy, a firm believer in Santa Claus, explains why she has revisited a classic festive children's poem
Another Night Before Christmas by Carol Ann Duffy
Buy Another Night Before Christmas at the Guardian bookshop Public domain

It has taken motherhood to bring out the conservative in poet Carol Ann Duffy. The bisexual daughter of a Labour councillor, she seems an unlikely cheerleader for tradition, yet her latest book for children, Another Night Before Christmas (John Murray, £9.99, pp64) is a very loyal retelling of Clement Moore's Victorian classic.

Softer in person than her photographs suggest, she answers the door of her Manchester home looking a little bit like a good witch, swathed in dusky knits, her curly brown hair tipped with autumnal bronze. Inside, ghosts, spiders and bats bob, leftover props from her 10-year-old daughter, Ella's Halloween party.

Duffy, 49, is big sister to four brothers and has 13 nieces and nephews. She 'always, always' wanted children, but Ella has been a revelation she could never have prepared for.

'When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's,' Duffy tells me over instant coffee. 'It's like living in a house and then suddenly finding a room that you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light. Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.'

Marked by the death of her mother in the spring, this has been a difficult year, bereavement following close behind the heartbreak she chronicles with such searing brilliance in Rapture, her seventh adult collection, published in September.

Not that this has broken her creative stride. She has just finished a book of children's poems, and is about to knuckle down to another adult collection - The World's Second Wife, a follow-up to her bestselling 1999 collection, The World's Wife. One day a week, she teaches the poetry MA at Manchester Metropolitan University with Simon Armitage.

Profligacy has defined a career garlanded with almost every important poetry prize, together with a CBE to make up for the poet laureateship that she so narrowly lost out on. A two-year break following Ella's birth was the longest she'd ever taken before or since, and she made up for it with a flurry of children's books - more than she can ever remember, she now confesses, all of them written in a new-mother daze.

Until then, Duffy was convinced that she couldn't write for children. Motherhood gave her a sense of herself as an 'ex-child', allowing her to revisit the imaginative landscape of her own early years. 'I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine,' she explains, adding: 'I don't know - it all sounds a bit sinister this.'

Born in Glasgow and raised in Stafford, Duffy's flat vowels suit her deadpan wit, but even when chatting about iPods and car pools, she will single out words to relish. It's this physical love of language that underpins her poetry for both adults and children.

'It all comes from the same place. There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration - a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.' The idea of updating The Night Before Christmas came from Anya Serota, a young editor at John Murray. Duffy was doubtful at first, not wanting to tinker with a classic, but her own childlike passion for all things Christmassy made the challenge irresistible. (She will turn 50 on 23 December, making this holiday season doubly festive.)

In Another Night Before Christmas, the Christmas tree poses, 'flirting in flickers of crimson and green,/ Against the dull glass of the mute TV screen.' There are 'snow duveted cars' in the street, and in the sky, 'aeroplanes sped to the east and the west/ Like a pulled Christmas cracker.' Despite these 21st-century touches, it stays faithful to the original in both form and spirit. When I ask if she considered making Santa Mrs Claus, she looks aghast.

'Never! Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.'

Duffy has the sharp yet miles-away expression of a reader disturbed. There's a hint of bashfulness, too: her hands are remarkably small, her feet she tucks girlishly beneath her. It's when she jokes that she's at her most serious, you sense. She reads poetry every day in the loo and she's very serious indeed about her belief in Christmas.

'Halloween, Bonfire Night, Christmas - I'm a great believer in preserving those festivals. They're like beacons in childhood; they make children feel safe and special.'

And what about concessions to multi-faith Britain? 'I couldn't care less. I think we should all be a bit more tolerant about what we do and don't believe.'

Raised Catholic, Duffy dispensed with religion aged 15, when her convent school became an old people's home. She's escaped the guilt of the lapsed, but remains gripped by a heightened sense of the ritual of language. 'Poetry and prayer are very similar,' she explains. 'I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.'

It was under the guidance of an inspirational teacher in year six that Duffy turned from prose to poetry. She hasn't been tempted back since. 'My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.'

Fairy tales are the sole exception, and her children's back list runs to stories of poetic revenge wreaked on evil step-parents, of underwater farmyards, moon zoos and the gluttonous Queen Munch.

There's a fairy-tale element to her home, too. On the fringes of Manchester's urban sprawl, no amount of art and colour and ethnic touches can dispel the carpeted, suburban hush that fills its rooms but, thanks to Ella's attic library, its roof is lined with books.

'I'd have died to have this when I was little,' Duffy sighs. Shelved alongside Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo are Duffy's own girlhood favourites: Alice, Enid Blyton, a whole row of Wodehouse titles. There's also plenty of Grimm.

When she was a girl, her mother would invent fairy tales for her. As an adult, she finds the form's archetypes endlessly appealing, along with the danger and darkness and, most of all, the happy endings.

Has childhood become a smaller, scarier place?

'I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety - childhood for children yet to be born will be darkened in ways we can't imagine.'

Ella has been demanding a novel. 'I can't do it, I don't have that kind of talent,' Duffy confides, 'I've got a feeling she'll outgrow me and I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.'