Better than in a memoir, you can trace the arc of a poet’s life from their work. Biography of all kinds suffers the affliction of memory loss and revisionism. Turn to the oeuvre of someone like Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath, however, and you walk with them, as their life unfolds. Novelists can conceal, but for poets that is less possible or desirable. There’s a reason why readers buy each new collection by a favourite as eagerly as if it were a birthday present. Anno Domini advances for all of us, but to be caught in the slipstream of those who can articulate their times, and deepest feelings, better than we ever could, is for a moment to feel released from the ordinary and everyday, while being also made more keenly aware of its importance.

Reading the Collected Poems of Carol Ann Duffy (Picador, £25) has been a mixed experience. On a practical level, this gargantuan book is unwieldy, made more so by its complete absence of dates. While the collections it selects from are arranged chronologically, there is no indication when and where individual poems were first published. Perhaps I am too thirled to history, but I like to know just when something was written, to be able to locate its origins and where it falls in the author’s life. A poem about a baby’s birth could be from a new mother’s perspective, or by a grandmother. The sentiments alone do not always give such clues; but dates do.

And I confess I’d rather read slim collections, one after the other, than such a tome, where the throwaway or dated or less successful are discarded, presenting instead an edifice with sheer, intimidating walls. That aside, this is a handsome book, rather regal in bearing, as befits a poet laureate. The early poems, while confident beyond Duffy’s years, are not burdened with the weight of anything except confidence and ambition. We watch her flex her imagination, and her rhythm, in pieces that are quietly elegaic, as when she writes in Lineage: “I sense my mother’s spirit in the room. Time/has made her a prayer for us”. Or amused, as in Head of English, where, among other small indignities when she goes to talk to classroom, she is met by a teacher who confides “I’ve written quite a bit of poetry myself”, and is eager to wring every last penny of the £40 fee out of her.

I’d admire anyone brave enough to treat her like that now. If they did, though, perhaps she would laugh. Because along with the melancholy, and the anger, often directed towards the situation of those from ethnic backgrounds who are not made to feel welcome here, there is a redeeming rill of humour beneath much of her work that counters its sometimes stern edge.

How much can you really tell about the writer from their poems? Well, who in banal conversation could evoke the misery of an acrimonious breakup the way Duffy does in Mean Time: “If the darkening sky could lift/ more than one hour from this day/there are words I would never have said/nor have heard you say.” Only letter writers and diarists come close to this level of self-revelation, and even then, their art is often less intent on style than on meaning, whereas poets must fuse the two. I can’t think of a better description of a place where one grew up than in Duffy’s Hometown: “in that town there was a different time,/A handful of years like old-fashioned sweets/ you can’t find anymore.”

There has been an unexpected twist in Duffy’s work in recent years, with an annual Christmas poem, published by Picador. A stocking-sized gift, this series started with the splendid Mrs Scrooge, and continues to run. I picked up last year’s offering, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday, from my mother’s bookshelf the other day. I had given it to her on Christmas Day, although it might also have suited as a present, since she shared with Miss Wordsworth, and Duffy, a birthday in the same week. The book opened at the final page, when Dorothy and William and their great friend Coleridge join the carol singers on the doorstep: “their voices drifting, /in 1799, to nowhen, nowhere.../But Winter’s slow turn, and snow in Dorothy’s hair,/ and on her warm tongue.”