Selling Manhattan

by Carol Ann Duffy

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”)

Standing Female Nude

by Carol Ann Duffy

Synopsis:

This outstanding first collection introduced Carol Ann Duffy's impressive gifts and the broad range of her interests and style. The poems are fresh, skilful, passionate. 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.

I remembered Carol Ann Duffy’s Standing Female Nude, her first collection, better than I thought I might. I knew a couple of the poems very well from reading selections of her work for GCSE English oh-so-many moons ago (how’d it get so long ago!?), and still liked “War Photographer” very much.

I did feel that this collection obfuscated meaning more than I was used to in her later poems, at least for some of the poems, and that I wasn’t overall as keen. I especially disliked “$” — not to my taste.

Some strong poems, but a lot of weaker ones and ones I didn’t care for. “War Photographer” is very worth it, though.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

The World's Wife

by Carol Ann Duffy

Synopsis:

A collection of poems, each of which takes a famous male person or character -- Midas, Darwin, Quasimodo, Pontious Pilate, King Kong -- and presents their story from the perspective of the lesser-known wife.

Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife is at times playful, at times angry, and sometimes (but mostly not) tender. It’s giving voice to the women of various mythological and historical figures — Mrs Darwin, for example, though that isn’t a poem I like at all. Some of them do feel like angry cheap shots, I’ll be honest; I didn’t love them when I first read it, and I still don’t now, even though I do understand some of the anger and spite.

‘Mrs Tiresias’ definitely reads differently than it used to; I don’t think it’s meant to be about a transwoman, personally, but it can definitely be read that way, and that makes it a nasty one.

That said, there are some lovely ones as ever, and ‘Anne Hathaway’ remains a favourite:

“Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.”

And if you’d doubted that Duffy could write a sonnet, well, there you have it.

Rating: 3/5

Rapture

by Carol Ann Duffy

Synopsis:

Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy's seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations -- infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancor, separation and grief -- as simply redemptive or destructive. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity. Yet in showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives, Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all

I remembered Rapture being my favourite of Carol Ann Duffy’s collections, and I think it’s definitely high on the list, on reread, though it’s been a long time since I read the others. Her poems are always so readable: you know what she’s trying to say easily, even as the imagery is bright and the words are being played with. I generally prefer that over something more opaque, pedestrian as that may make some people think me — but I think Carol Ann Duffy’s poems have plenty to dig for, even while being readable and surface-level straightforward.

All of that is present here, along with the love and loss and longing. If I had to pick a favourite, it’d be ‘Art’:

“Art, the chiselled, chilling marble of our kiss;
locked into soundless stone, our promises,
or fizzled into poems; page print
for the dried flowers of our voice.“

Rating: 5/5