Selling Manhattan
by Carol Ann Duffy
Genres: PoetryPages: 64
Rating:
Synopsis:The poems in Carol Ann Duffy's highly praised second collection range from the dramatic monologues for which she is noted to love poems, which she writes, Robert Nye remarked, as if she were the first to do so'. Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection Mean Time. On May 1, 2009 she was named the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
Selling Manhattan has been the collection where I recognised least, in my rereads of Carol Ann Duffy’s work so far. I remembered “Warming Her Pearls”, which is still good (and it’s much easier to see how homoerotic it is from this side of being 18). But that was about it, and I didn’t find any poems that really spectacularly stood out to me, either.
I have mused that maybe being in the habit of studying poetry helped my appreciation of the earlier collections back then, but I don’t know. I instantly loved Rapture, and to a slightly lesser extent, The World’s Wife; maybe it’s just that I prefer Duffy’s later style.
In any case, it was interesting to reread it, all the same.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
I really need to read more poetry. I haven’t read much since I graduated—though, at least I did read a fair amount of it in school since I was an English major in University. I don’t think I read any of Carol Ann Duffy’s back in the day, though.
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I read a lot of Duffy as a teenager because she was one of the set poets when I did my GCSEs, but then kept up with her work ever since! I’m not so good at reading poetry in general, at least since I stopped studying English lit, though I want to read more.
When I was younger, “it was okay” would have been good enough for me, but now I’d probably give this a pass. I do love poetry, and Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry is something I’ve never tried, so…
I’d definitely go with one of her other collections, like Rapture!