From: Caroline Criswell, MA.
Re: Carol Ann Duffy
To Whom It May Concern
I've occasionally dropped in to look over your rag mostly out of curiosity to see who you will be trashing next. Evidently smarm is held in high regard there in the RALPH editorial offices.
You sneering review Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture certainly fills the bill, ranking favorably with a book further down your home page having to do with garbage. Your suggestion that the writers The Guardian or The Times were on drugs when writing praise of our Poet Laureate reminds us of an earlier letter sent you by a professor at Harvard. She said, with incisive wit, that your writer "was far more interested in her own cleverness and ability to dash off a few zingers than in forming a thoughtful, careful, and mature opinion of the poetry."
You might consider the fact that Duffy has won the T S Eliot Prize (for Rapture), the Costa Book Awards for The Bees, and, most recently, in 2012, the PEN/Pinter Prize. Is your reviewer now going to suggest that these prestigious awards were handed out by street-corner acid heads?
As another correspondent wrote you some time back: Grow Up.