To wax poetic is nonsense when you are reading Carol Ann Duffy. Sincerity – from the Latin sine cera, literally “without wax” – is the title of one of her latest collections. First and foremost, sincerity is an irresistible imperative. “Poetry comes from the body, from the whole self”, says Duffy. Verses best pour out without a plan or agenda. Likewise, her frank answers eschew classifications.

Earnestness casts its spell. What is poetry about? “All poetry is love poetry”, no matter its subject. Surely, though, desire is central to Duffy’s production. As Silvia Righi comments in her introduction, you read something like Correspondents and think “This is how you write about desire!”.

Duffy’s exploration is self-assured without grandiosity. It’s queer, individual, fresh.

Trying to make sense of it all is the one temptation to resist, perhaps, in the austere high-ceiling room of the Seminario Vescovile. Desire is unflinching and sneaky at once. As Duffy and her Italian translators lay it bare, we quickly transfigure. We become the housemaid who keeps her dame’s pearls warm, goes to bed, and “burns”. We are the lover devouring “paranoia for lunch” or cursing the “mean time” of shorter autumn days at the end of a relationship.

Ultimately, poetry cannot set out to solve the world’s problems, says Duffy, it does not scale up that way. If it’s in a dialogue with something else, it’s with language itself. Asked by Silvia Righi to characterise her poetry, Duffy calls it a “secular prayer”, its purpose “spiritual”, not practical. It “bears witness, finds truth”, most vividly so when paying tribute to Tracey Emin’s decision to marry a stone.

In a similar vein, the collection The World’s Wife is where Duffy turns myth and fairy-tale upside down. With her, we question whether Eurydice really wanted to be saved (by a poet, no less!) or what it would be like to be King Midas’ wife, never knowing your partner’s touch. Duffy’s recent venturing into physics, then, seems anything but a seamless transition. In the multiverse, we can only imagine, desire finds the space to start anew, begging for infinite flavours of “more, more”. The point, Duffy circles back, is to add something to the world.