Empty Nest: Poems for Families, edited by Carol Ann Duffy review â the agony of absence Fathers, mothers and grownup children reflect on leaving home and the âdance between closeness and distanceâ in an outstanding anthology Carol Ann Duffy: her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images Carol Ann Duffy: her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images Tue 16 Mar 2021 05.00 EDT This is not, as is the usual rule of this column, a collection but an outstanding anthology in which fathers, mothers and grownup children speak of themselves and, sometimes, to one another. A new form of homesickness is identified in which it is home itself that sickens. In the poem from which the anthology gets its title, Carol Ann Duffy suggests that her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Gabriel Griffin in Alone describes his homeâs echoing uncanniness, a âgolden hum in the house now theyâve goneâ, and Sharon Olds registers a âstrange quietâ in her wildcard of a poem Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil in which even her daughterâs thankless gerbils have died.