In 2009 Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain’s first woman Poet Laureate. Ever since her early collections, Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993), all published by Anvil, her distinctive – funny and perceptive – poems have won prizes, pleased audiences and been studied on school syllabuses. Writing in The Observer, Charlotte Mendelson suggested that:
Part of Duffy’s talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism. Like the best of her novelist peers … she slides in and out of her characters’ lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. However, she is also a time-traveller and a shape-shifter, gliding from Troy to Hollywood, galaxies to intestines, sloughed-off skin to department stores while other poets make heavy weather of one kiss, one kick, one letter … from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy.
Her predecessor as Laureate, Andrew Motion, called her “a very, very bright, appealing, clever, ingenious, approachable and … heartwarming writer. She’s a Good Thing, capital G, capital T, one of the poets I most enjoy reading.”
This month we have had the pleasure of reading her Selected Poems (Penguin 2006) – a selection made by Carol Ann herself. The poems we will be looking at in the session include:
Standing Female Nude
Warming Her Pearls
In Mrs Tilscher’s Class
Originally
Translating the English
Mean Time
The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
Away and See
Mrs Midas
Very much looking forward to seeing as many of you who can make it along to Blackwell’s on Tuesday 2nd March at 6.15.
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