Kathleen McPhilemy reviews Collected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy. Picador (London 2015). Hbk. 592 pages. £25.
The poetry of Carol Ann Duffy is a bit like Nelson’s Column, so much a part of the landscape that it is hard to view it critically. If you are, as I am, an English teacher, you will be so familiar with certain poems or volumes that it becomes difficult not to reduce the poet to these accessible and much accessed works. The Collected Poems come as a reminder of what went before the Laureateship, or even before ‘Poetry Live’, the show where she and fellow poets presented their work to GCSE students up and down the country.
The two earliest collections, Standing Female Nude and Selling Manhattan, are a mixture of sometimes brash, sometimes very angry and sometimes perfectly realised poems. As well as recognising the old favourites, I was intrigued by others I did not know, for example, ‘Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer’ where I had to look up the title to get the full erotic charge. This is a witty poem, a quality less present in the later love poetry. The collections I have most enjoyed and which I would return to are The Other Country and Meantime, where I respond to feelings of displacement and loss and to her poetic skill. I also really like The World’s Wife, which strikes me as a tour de force, ranging between satire, comedy and rage, but rage controlled by wit and art, as in ‘Mrs Beast’.
One of the most noticeable characteristics of Duffy’s work is its intertextuality. She has soaked up literature, particularly English poetry, like a sponge and it is impossible not to be aware of the echoes. In some of the earlier work, she sounds like Larkin:
One chair to sit in,
a greasy dusk wrong side of the tracks,
and watch the lodgers' lights come on in other rooms.
('Room', p.224)
Elsewhere, there are flavours of Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter and even Jeanette Winterson. Sometimes, the technique is overt, as in ‘The Love Poem’, which starts with Shakespeare and ends with Shelley: ‘the desire of the moth/ for the star’. Whereas the use of allusion is a common poetic technique and while it can be argued to be a way of speaking and preserving a shared tradition, for me this is something which Duffy sometimes overdoes. This quotation comes from Rapture, a collection which charts the story of a love affair. I have seen suggestions that the mysterious beloved in this sequence is not a person but poetry itself. Fanciful perhaps, but it is well known that it was poetry which lured Duffy, aged 16, into her ten year relationship with Adrian Henri: ‘In the interval. I made quite sure he spotted me, /sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,/my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.’ (‘Little Red-cap’, p.229)
Herein lies one of the difficulties with Duffy’s poetry, especially the later work. It is so aware of itself as poetry, of its craft and its position in the poetic tradition that the sense of individual urgency is submerged. Moreover, by the time we have reached Feminine Gospels, some of Duffy’s stylistic mannerisms have become almost self-parody. Look out for: single words in lines, frequent caesura, aggressive internal rhyme, repetition of words and letters, refrain at the beginning or end of stanzas, not to mention the (often witty) inclusion of colloquial expressions or catchphrases. Perhaps it is inevitable that in a Collected Poems there will be redundancies.
Born and raised a Catholic, Duffy’s anger against the Catholic Church is very evident in her early work: ‘Miracles and shamrocks/ and transubstantiation are all my ass./ For Christ’s sake, do not send your kids to Mass’. A better, and very creepy poem, which also condemns the repressiveness of the institution, is ‘Confession’ (p.189): ‘C’mon/ out with them sins those little maggoty things/that wriggle in the soul…’ However, although she uses the imagery and language of Catholicism throughout her work, she is not a religious poet and the driving force behind both these poems, as in many others, is childhood experience.
She is a poet who can do so many things: create characters, write love poetry, comic poetry, political poetry. Her best poems are witty, passionate and challenging. It may be the curse of the laureateship that it dilutes the poetic energy, so that poems like ‘Mrs Scrooge’ and ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s Christmas Birthday’ say all the right things but seem rather safe.
Kathleen McPhilemy teaches English at Oxford FE College. Her poetry collections include Witness to Magic, A Tented Peace and The Lion in the Forest.