|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Carol Ann DuffyCarol Ann Duffy
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyPoet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. She is a former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit and is a regular reviewer and broadcaster. She moved from London to Manchester in 1996 and began to lecture in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her papers were acquired by the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University in 1999, and in October 2000 she was awarded a grant of £75,000 over a five-year period by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess's Blankets (2009).
Anthologies edited by Carol Ann Duffy include Out of Fashion (2004), in which she creates a vital dialogue between classic and contemporary poets over the two arts of poetry and fashion; Answering Back (2007); and To The Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Children, Drama, Poetry, Radio drama
BibliographyFleshweathercock and Other Poems Outposts, 1974 Beauty and the Beast (with Adrian Henri) Carol Ann Duffy & Adrian Henri, 1977 Fifth Last Song Headland, 1982 Standing Female Nude Anvil Press Poetry, 1985 Thrown Voices Turret Books, 1986 Selling Manhattan Anvil Press Poetry, 1987 The Other Country Anvil Press Poetry, 1990 I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine (editor) Viking, 1992 William and the Ex-Prime Minister Anvil Press Poetry, 1992 Mean Time Anvil Press Poetry, 1993 Anvil New Poets Volume 2 Penguin, 1994 Selected Poems Penguin, 1994 Penguin Modern Poets 2 Penguin, 1995 Grimm Tales Faber and Faber, 1996 Salmon - Carol Ann Duffy: Selected Poems Salmon Poetry, 1996 Stopping for Death (editor) Viking, 1996 More Grimm Tales Faber and Faber, 1997 The Pamphlet Anvil Press Poetry, 1998 Meeting Midnight Faber and Faber, 1999 The World's Wife Anvil Press Poetry, 1999 Time's Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century (editor) Anvil Press Poetry, 1999 The Oldest Girl in the World Faber and Faber, 2000 Hand in Hand (editor) Picador, 2001 Feminine Gospels Picador, 2002 Queen Munch and Queen Nibble (illustrated by Lydia Monks) Macmillan Children's Books, 2002 Underwater Farmyard (illustrated by Joel Stewart) Macmillan Children's Books, 2002 The Skipping-Rope Snake (illustrated by Lydia Monks) Macmillan Children's Books, 2003 The Stolen Childhood Puffin, 2003 The Good Child's Guide to Rock N Roll Faber and Faber, 2003 Collected Grimm Tales Faber and Faber, 2003 Doris the Giant (illustrated by Annabel Hudson) Puffin, 2004 New Selected Poems Picador, 2004 Out of Fashion: An Anthology of Poems Faber and Faber, 2004 Overheard on a Saltmarsh: Poets' Favourite Poems (editor) Macmillan, 2004 Another Night Before Christmas John Murray, 2005 Moon Zoo Macmillan, 2005 Rapture Picador, 2005 The Lost Happy Endings (with Jane Ray) Penguin, 2006 Answering Back (editor) Picador, 2007 The Hat Faber and Faber, 2007 The Tear Thief Barefoot Books, 2007 Mrs Scrooge: A Christmas Poem (illustrated by Beth Adams) Simon & Schuster, 2009 New & Collected Poetry for Children Faber and Faber, 2009 The Princess's Blankets (illustrated by Catherine Hyde) Templar, 2009 The Twelve Poems of Christmas (compiler) Candlestick Press, 2009 To The Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poetry (editor) Picador, 2009 Love Poems Picador, 2010
Prizes and awards1982 C. Day Lewis Fellowship 1983 National Poetry Competition ('Whoever She Was') 1984 Eric Gregory Award 1986 Peterloo Poets 'Poems About Painting' Competition ('The Virgin Punishing the Infant') 1986 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Standing Female Nude 1988 Somerset Maugham Award Selling Manhattan 1989 Dylan Thomas Award 1990 Scottish Arts Council Book Award The Other Country 1992 Cholmondeley Award 1993 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Mean Time 1993 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Mean Time 1993 Whitbread Poetry Award Mean Time 1995 Lannan Literary Award (Poetry) 1995 OBE 1997 Signal Poetry Award Stopping for Death 2000 Whitbread Children's Book Award (shortlist) Meeting Midnight 2001 CBE 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize Rapture
Critical PerspectiveCarol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. Some critics have accused Duffy of being too populist, but on the whole her work is highly acclaimed for being both literary and accessible, and she is regarded as one of Britain’s most well-loved and successful contemporary poets.
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. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one, for her style, as discussed above, is conservative, not experimental. Many critics, such as Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland have commented on this interesting tension between style and subject matter in Duffy’s work: ‘[Duffy] might be termed “postmodern” ideologically, but not aesthetically […] tension thus ensues between the conservative form and the politicised content. These tensions can be analysed as productive in their very contradictoriness’ (Michelis and Rowland, The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, 2003).
Deryn-Rees Jones’ brief but useful study, Carol Ann Duffy (Writers and Their Work Series, 1999), lists the many diverse influences on Duffy’s work. Her use of demotic, everyday language can be traced back to Wordsworth, while her interest in the dramatic monologue links her to Browning and Eliot. Her work also shows the influence of Philip Larkin (nostalgia and dry humour), Dylan Thomas (elements of surrealism), the Beat poets and the Liverpool poets. Rees-Jones comments on this eclectic mixture and its effect on Duffy’s work: ‘[T]here is an impulse towards realism running through Duffy’s work’, along with ‘her early interest in the Romantics and her journey through Modernist and Surrealist practices’.
Although Duffy’s status and reputation rest predominantly on her poetry, she has also written various plays, and there is a lot of overlap between her poetic and dramatic skills. When her first major poetry collections, Standing Female Nude (1985) and Selling Manhattan (1987) were published, Duffy was immediately acclaimed for her outstanding skill in characterisation, timing and dialogue, particularly in her use of the dramatic monologue. She is acutely sensitive and empathetic as she places herself into the mindset of each character and articulates the respective points of view in the idiom of the characters’ own speech. Duffy often incorporates humour with serious insights and social commentary, as in ‘Standing Female Nude’ (from the collection of the same name):
'Six hours like this for a few francs.
Other poems, such as ‘Shooting Stars’ (also from Standing Female Nude) are acutely poignant and disturbing, and jolt the reader with their sharp dramatic timing. ‘Shooting Stars’ articulates the voice of a dying woman in a Nazi concentration camp:
'[…] One saw I was alive. Loosened his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear.
Duffy’s more disturbing poems also include those such as ‘Education for Leisure’ (Standing Female Nude) and ‘Psychopath’ (Selling Manhattan) which are written in the voices of society’s dropouts, outsiders and villains. She gives us insight into such disturbed minds, and into the society that has let them down, without in any way condoning their wrongdoings: ‘Today I am going to kill something. Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored […]’ (‘Education for Leisure’).
In The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993) Duffy began to explore memory and nostalgia, resulting in comparisons with Philip Larkin. These collections contain fewer dramatic monologues and more personal poems than her previous collections, but she continues to address political, social and philosophical issues. One of the most poignant of the personal poems is ‘Valentine’ (Mean Time). Duffy often writes about love, with heartfelt feeling but never with sentimentality, and she explores its complex nature, its pain as well as its bliss. The personal is also combined with the philosophical - ‘Valentine’ is one of many poems in which Duffy investigates the way in which meaning is constructed through language, as the speaker tries to move beyond clichés and find a more authentic way of expressing feeling and experience:
'Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. […] I am trying to be truthful.'
The World’s Wife (1999) returns to the dramatic monologue with an innovative collection of poems that articulate the voices of the wives of various historical figures, both real and fictional. Titles include ‘Mrs Midas’; ‘Mrs Lazarus’; ‘Mrs Aesop’; ‘Mrs Darwin’; ‘The Kray Sisters’. Though not regarded as one of her greatest collections poetically, it has nonetheless been extremely popular and Duffy intends to write a sequel. Throughout her career, Duffy has been applauded for addressing gender issues without being one-sided or overtly political -- Deryn Rees-Jones notes that she moves beyond ‘a straightforwardly feminist poetry’ and shows ‘the difficulties that patriarchy presents to both men and women’ (Rees-Jones, ibid).
Nonetheless, Feminine Gospels (2002), as the title suggests, is a concentration on the female point of view. It is a celebration of female experience, and it has a strong sense of magic and fairytale discourse. However, as in traditional fairytales, there is sometimes a sense of darkness as well as joy. Birth, death and the cycles and stages of life feature strongly, including menstruation, motherhood and aging. Duffy’s beloved daughter Ella was born in 1995, and her experience of motherhood has deeply influenced her poetry (as well as inspiring her to write other works for children). ‘The Cord’ answers a child’s curious questions about her origins with a delightful fairytale story:
'They cut the cord she was born with
‘The Light Gatherer’, meanwhile, is a beautiful, visceral and slightly surreal celebration of the magical experience of having a child:
'Light gatherer. You fell from a star and now you shine like a snowgirl,
As these poems rejoice in new life, ‘Death and the Moon’ mourns those who have passed on: ‘[…] I cannot say where you are. Unreachable / by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable / in the air, even if souls are stars […]’.
Critic Elaine Feinstein noticed in her review of Feminine Gospels that the poems near the end of the book are those which are prayer-like and intense with feeling, whether love poems or elegies for the dead. Feinstein wonders: ‘Are these poems placed at the end of the book to signal a movement or development? We shall have to wait for the next book to know’ (The Guardian, 14 September 2002). The next collection, Rapture, would seem to confirm Feinstein’s speculations, for it is indeed intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works. The poems of Rapture chart a love story (thought to be based on Duffy’s relationship with Jackie Kay, which ended in 2004), from the first heady stage of falling in love (‘Falling in love / is glamorous hell’) to the end of the relationship:
'[…] What do I have to help me, without spell or prayer, (Extract from ‘Over’)
This is Duffy at her most serious - the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms. Rapture is one of Duffy’s most highly acclaimed works, and it was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2005.
For an in-depth critical overview see Carol Ann Duffy 2nd edition by Deryn Rees-Jones (Northcote House, 2002: Writers and their Work Series).
Contact information
Related links
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
