Have you read … Carol Ann Duffy?

Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and TS Eliot prize, and nominated for the Galaxy National Book Awards, the past month has confirmed Carol Ann Duffy’s status as a shooting star in the world of poetry. Returning to two of her more recent collections, bound up in waiflike volumes, will reveal why the first female Poet Laureate’s writing is so addictive, funny, and beautifully told.

The World’s Wife gives a voice to forgotten housewives and (in)significant others, to fables and fairytales, and to real women. The collection begins with Little Red-Cap. Sixteen years old, she burns to steal words – ‘warm, beating, frantic, winged’ - from the grubby paws of an ageing, paperback-reading wolf. Duffy rewrites history, proving that there are two sides to every story. Her poems deal with being trapped in marriage, bad sex, growing up, with trying to be beautiful, childbirth, and with men. They illustrate the ordinariness, and the extraordinariness, of their female protagonists’ lives.

There is the lonely, burning rage of Mrs Quasimodo eaten up by jealousy, her hunchbacked lover more taken with Notre Dame’s bewitching gypsies and gorgeous bells than her. Jealousy, too, mangles Medusa’s beauty, turning the hairs on her head to snakes. Little wonder that Queen Herod is prepared to murder for her daughter’s sake; to kill the heart-breaking, lady-killing prince that will rip out her heart. And there is the dark, brittle narrative of Myra Hindley, that asks, blankly, ‘what did I do to us all, to myself/ When I was the Devil’s wife?’

But the collection is also very funny. In five short lines that melt with scorn, Mrs Icarus watches her fool of a husband, wings stuck on with wax, flap his way towards a burning sun. And other women tell stories about the ridiculousness of their lives. The limbs of Pygmalion’s Bride are kneaded and bruised by her sculptor, who sinks his clammy hands into her flesh. But she changes tack – ‘grew warm, like candle wax,/ kissed back … screamed my head off/- all an act.’ That’s the last she sees of him. The poet focuses on physicality and touch. Mrs Midas’s tragedy is to crave contact with her selfish husband, whilst Pontius Pilate’s ‘pale, mothy touch’ makes his wife flinch. Duffy’s poems get to the hearts of these proud, long-suffering, wonderful, frightening, and smart women.

Rapture, published six years later, is another, very different collection. Telling a narrative of love, desire becomes tangled up with absence, pain, and death. Its beginning tells us ‘falling in love/ is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart/ like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.’ The story moves from texting and making tea through to breaking apart and messy arguments, ‘when the room swayed and sank down on its knees,/ the air hurt and purpled like a bruise,/ the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled.’ Love hurts. Duffy’s language is sensual; visceral. It smoulders on the page.

But love grows old. The fierce flames burn themselves to ash, whilst the distance between the protagonists brings an emptiness into the poems. In Finding The Words, the poet discovers three ‘at the back of a drawer,/ wrapped in black cloth, like three rings/ slipped from a dead woman’s hand.’ They read ‘I love you.’ The line has a cold, deathly thrill. More muted than The World’s Wife, but with emotion poured into them, these poems are easy to fall in love with.

I’ve seen Duffy twice, most recently within a spire-topped medieval cathedral. Reading from The World’s Wife, Mrs Faust’s whirlwind of words echo around the walls. Rhymes clash, and the lines stumble over their strange syntax: ‘two towelled bathrobes. Hers. His.’ The recital of Premonitions, a poem that reels back the time of her mother’s dying days, is heartbreaking. And then we’re back in Mrs Tiresias’s sitting-room. Her husband has just returned home from his walk. He’s late, and, somehow, inexplicably, female. Chaos ensues. But Duffy’s voice remains level. Her eyes look up, underneath the crook of her eyebrows, to cut straight across the room.

Carol Ann Duffy shines old, ordinary words and colloquialisms into new life. Her language is elegant - ‘my breath was a chiffon scarf for an elegant ghost’ and, at times, jagged - ‘I felt like this: Tongue of stone. Two black slates/ for eyes. Thumped wound of a mouth.’ Diverse and imaginative, these two slender volumes of poetry merit her status as a literary shooting star.

Add Comment

You must log in to submit a comment.