AS A young philosophy student at Liverpool, Carol Ann Duffy used to blow the cobwebs away by riding the ferries with Adrian Henri , visiting Port Sunlight, the Williamson art gallery and Sydney Buildings in Birkenhead where Henri had spent his early years.

On Monday Carol Ann Duffy returned to Wirral as Poet Laureate to meet year 11 pupils from several schools at Weatherhead High School Media Arts College, who hosted the event as part of ‘Bookfest’.

As the first woman to hold the most prominent literary title she said: “It’s fabulous, and there are so many great woman poets that it’s about time.”

She peppered readings from her anthology The World’s Wife and other poems with gentle anecdotes, taking questions on her influences and technique from the enthralled young audience, before being interviewed by Weatherhead pupils on their own Ice Radio.

Her references are scholarly and classical. She taps a rich vein of stories to subvert and retell, using the voices of people pushed to the margins of events and sometimes sanity.

Her point is that poems add to the world and have a ‘living relationship’ with the reader, they do not have an agenda.

Her advice for aspiring young poets is ‘Read as much as you can, and read backwards through time, starting with the contemporary.’ She herself was an avid reader and writer from an early age, filling notebooks with homages to her favourite poets: Yeats, Tennyson and Shakespeare, (who she says she would have ‘followed home’).

Sadly, her mum threw away those notebooks (as mums do) . As Duffy said: “She’ll be kicking herself now!“ Fortunately the poet laureate is no longer obliged to write for state occasions. She could no more write on demand than fly to her beloved and often featured moon, which NASA experimentally bombed for water last week .

“Imagine if you’d looked up and they’d broken it. I’d have refused to pay taxes!” she said.

However, as the nation’s primary poet in interesting times, she will undoubtedly respond to events in her deeply personal and intuitive style.

The annual honorarium she receives from HM The Queen is being used to fund a new Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

Other highlights of the second annual Bookfest literary festival, organised by Wirral Libraries, include , by crime writers Matthew Booth and David Stuart Davies.

Fran Sandham, who walked solo across Africa, will give an illustrated talk about his trip during the Bookfest, while there will also be workshops on tracing your family history, soap scriptwriting and creative writing.

To see the full programme of events, visit wirral.gov.uk/bookfest and download the leaflet. The festival runs from this Monday.