Tuesday, 24th August 2021 Carol Ann Duffy Background Dame Carol Ann Duffy (born 23 December 1955) is a British poet and playwright. She is the first woman, the first Scottish-born poet and the first known LGBT poet to hold the position. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. What is she known for? Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Duffy’s poetry has always had a strong feminist edge. Duffy's work explores both everyday experience and the rich fantasy life of herself and others. In dramatizing scenes from childhood, adolescence, and adult life, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. Nature of her writing; issues she raises/addresses Her poems deal with many social issues like gender, violence, oppression, and tyranny. Duffy's themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. Her poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She is read by people who don’t really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings ‘with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a rock concert.’ List her collection of poems (at least 5 poems for each collection) Duffy’s poetry collections included... Standing Female Nude (1985) Selling Manhattan (1987) The Other Country (1990) Mean Time (1993) The World’s Wife (1999) Feminine Gospels (2002) The World's Wife (2000), famous wives and infamous ones Rapture (2005) 1. War Photographer - Carol Ann Duffy (from Standing Female Nude) In his dark room he is finally alone with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows. The only light is red and softly glows, as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass. Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass. He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands, which did not tremble then though seem to now. Rural England. Home again to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, to fields which don't explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat. Tuesday, 24th August 2021 Something is happening. A stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries of this man's wife, how he sought approval without words to do what someone must and how the blood stained into foreign dust. A hundred agonies in black and white from which his editor will pick out five or six for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers. From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where he earns his living and they do not care. 2. Stealing - Carol Ann Duffy (from Selling Manhattan) The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman. Midnight. He looked magnificent; a tall, white mute beneath the winter moon. I wanted him, a mate with a mind as cold as the slice of ice within my own brain. I started with the head. Better off dead than giving in, not taking what you want. He weighed a ton; his torso, frozen stiff, hugged to my chest, a fierce chill piercing my gut. Part of the thrill was knowing that children would cry in the morning. Life's tough. Sometimes I steal things I don't need. I joy-ride cars to nowhere, break into houses just to have a look. I'm a mucky ghost, leave a mess, maybe pinch a camera. I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob. A stranger's bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this - Aah. It took some time. Reassembled in the yard, he didn't look the same. I took a run and booted him. Again. Again. My breath ripped out in rags. It seems daft now. Then I was standing alone among lumps of snow, sick of the world. Boredom. Mostly I'm so bored I could eat myself. One time, I stole a guitar and thought I might learn to play. I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once, flogged it, but the snowman was the strangest. You don't understand a word I'm saying, do you? 3. History - Carol Ann Duffy (from Feminine Gospels) She woke up old at last, alone, bones in a bed, not a tooth in her head, half dead, shuffled and limped downstairs in the rag of her nightdress, smelling of pee. Slurped tea, stared at her hand- twigs, stained gloveswheezed and coughed, pulled on the coat that hung from a hook on the door, lay on the sofa, Tuesday, 24th August 2021 dozed, snored. She was History. She'd seen them ease him down from the Cross, his mother gasping for breath, as though his death was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting, spears in the earth; been there when the fisherman swore he was back from the dead; seen the basilicas rise in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched for a hundred years as the air of Rome turned into stone; witnessed the wars, the bloody crusades, knew them by date and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele, Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers hung by the neck, seen up-close how the saint whistled and spat in the flames, how the dictator strutting and stuttering film blew out his brains, how the children waved their little hands from the trains. She woke again, cold, in the dark, in the empty house. Bricks through the window now, thieves in the night. When they rang on her bell there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted onto the floor. 4. Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy (from Mean Time) Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or a kissogram. I give you an onion. Tuesday, 24th August 2021 Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are. Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring, if you like. Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife. 5. Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy (from The Other Country) Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon. This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear. La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words. References https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-ann-duffy https://www.markedbyteachers.com/gcse/english/duffy-s-style.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy https://www.poemhunter.com/carol-ann-duffy/poems/
