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 gloves-
wheezed 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/
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