Duffy's poetry has received wide critical acclaim since her first full-length collection, Standing Female Nude, was published in 1985, and she has been awarded various prizes for her work. Duffy is commonly noted as one of England's strongest poetic voices of the Thatcher years, particularly as a feminist, liberal, and controversial voice for underrepresented people on the fringe of society. Much of Duffy's earliest work, however, can be classified as love poetry, although gender is ambiguous in the first poems. Not until the publication of Mean Time in 1993 does Duffy clearly begin to address lesbian love and her own homosexual lifestyle. Whether it involves politics, nationalism, or romance, Duffy's work is generally received with enthusiasm and respect.

The Other Country is one of Duffy's most studied collections among critics, because its subjects are both personal and political, the poems often blurring the line between the two, demonstrating the interconnectedness of national identity and individual identity. This theme is the primary focus of most of the book's critics. In an essay titled " 'Me Not Know What These People Mean': Gender and National Identity in Carol Ann Duffy's Poetry," published in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: "Choosing Tough Words," the scholar and critic Angelica Michelis writes, "The theme of 'af-terwardsness' is a ubiquitous one in The Other Country: the different poems in this volume oscillate thematically between past, present and future interconnecting the personal history of the poet who moved from Scotland to England with that of national history and identity." Michelis points directly to the poem in question in stating, "To define oneself in relation to home, rather than stating a secure and known position, is here developed as a journey in time ('All childhood is an emigration' as Duffy puts it in the poem 'Originally') which propels the subject backwards as much as forwards from a temporal point of view."

In a lecture titled "Notes from the Home Front: Contemporary British Poetry," published in Essays in Criticism, the writer and lecturer John Kerrigan addresses the issue of ambiguous identity in Duffy's work when he states

To say that Carol Ann Duffy hales from Scotland or London, however, would hardly be to the point, since she writes about living in Staffordshire and Liverpool, about the anonymity of rented rooms, and implies that, like many of us, she doesn't come from anywhere much, or anywhere, at least, in particular.

Kerrigan's conclusion is likely one of the most apt in capturing the essence of Duffy's message in her poems about emigration and "the other country": "she doesn't come from anywhere much." But that has not kept her from carving her own definite place in contemporary British poetry.