Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. RORY: It seems to me that in your career, you’ve done everything that you could ever hope to do with poetry. I mean you’ve taught it at degree level, you’ve published collections, what would you say would be the highlight of your career so far? RORY: What kind of terms do you think in then? What’s the most important thing when you’re writing? 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’). a b Duffy, Carol Ann (2005). Rapture: poems. Recorded Books, Inc. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p.6. ISBN 9781466895867. OCLC 966079995.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - Poem Analysis

MILLY: Um, I was just going to say that obviously this journal is going to be edited by BA and MA students in Creative Writing. Is there anything that you’d kind of like touch on in terms of like, what’s the most important, kind of, almost philosophy to have going into a career of writing, or you said earlier that you don’t really think of it as a career being a poet, but like when you kind of— CAROL: I’m very fond of something Picasso said . . . in his case painting, but I’ve taken it on board as a writer which is “Inspiration will come, but it must find you working.” And I find that really really useful. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part RORY: Well you, y’know, your poetry and your former status as a Poet Laureate would’ve, kind of . . . You would’ve thought that it would’ve inspired more people, especially more women to get into poetry. Would you say that you’ve left, like, a legacy there then, for future female poets to follow their dreams?

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Logan, William (11 April 2013). "Heart's Desire". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 24 June 2019. Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire. As a student in Liverpool she wrote poems and plays, became involved with "the scene" and Adrian Henry. With the collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she established her name. Three other important collections followed: Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread poetry award and the Forward prize. For someone who has made a comparatively quiet career, away from the public eye and the literary celebrity round, she has a loyal following and a high profile. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. She was made a CBE in 2001.

Rapture, By Carol Ann Duffy | The Independent | The Independent Rapture, By Carol Ann Duffy | The Independent | The Independent

MILLY: Yeah, so obviously you’ve just finished your tenure as the Poet Laureate, um, and alongside being the first female Poet Laureate, you’re also the first openly gay Poet Laureate for Britain. With this, did you find it was hard to balance the idea of being vocal about women’s rights and gay rights and being, like, an activist or would you say that some of your poetry is an act of activism, perhaps? Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize. Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. CAROL: was retell the story from Ovid's metamorphoses of Midas and I decided to do that from the point of view of Mrs Midas— CAROL: The poetic, literary. So, this interview is with a poet. I think in terms of the poem and how I might approach, um, a poem, how I might rewrite it, why am I writing it, what’s the poem about, how does the poem stand in tangent between form and content. I’m not thinking in any way other than in a literary way when I’m writing.CAROL: You write with your five senses, you write with your memory, your points of view, your language, and all that comes to bear on the poems one writes, but I wouldn’t think I’ve ever written a poem for a reason beyond writing a poem, so I don’t think of myself at all as an activist although, um, I’m in favour of activism but I think it’s a different talent. British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards.

Carol Ann Duffy – Rapture | Genius

CAROL: Yeah, I don’t really know . . . I suppose I don’t think of being a poet in terms of having a career. So for me, every new piece of work or new poem I start is what’s exciting and interesting about being, um, a poet and . . . one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in that writing life is writing poetry for children, which I didn’t do until my daughter was born, because I only wrote for adults. She’s twenty-three now, and when she was around two or three, I suddenly found that I wanted to write poems to share with her, for her, so that was the most surprisingly and lovely thing that happened to me as a poet, writing for children. These poems are almost old-fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance and metre. In several poems there is a fairytale vocabulary, and ballad forms appear in "Betrothal" and in "Give": 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). Poems such as 'The Cord' and 'The Light Gatherer' rejoice in new life, while ‘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 […]’.The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] POEM ANALYSIS FROM RAPTURE COLLECTION (Carol Ann Duffy) - Document in A Level and IB English Literature An Unseen’, published in Duffy’s Laureate Poems collection Ritual Lighting, was commissioned as a poetic reaction to Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’. But it also strikes a chord with readers of Rapture, envisioning “all future / past” as the speaker asks, “Has forever been then?” and is told, “Yes, / forever has been.” It seems only right that the real answer to ‘now what?’ comes to us not from the living but from the dead. In ‘Snow’ (from her 2011 collection The Bees), the icy flakes scattered by the ghosts that walk beside us offer space and silence, and the possibility of healing and redirection. The dead also offer a different question: “Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?” CAROL: So, it only kind of evolved over a period of time — the poems in The World’s Wife— I hadn’t intended to do it or known that I would do it. I very much enjoyed doing it and each time I wrote a poem, I’d be dealing with that and then it seemed that it would become a collection, but over maybe two or three years. It’s an organic process, rather than a project. Now when you introduce, or any poet introduces, poetry at a poetry reading— Reynolds, Margaret (7 January 2006). "Review: Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 July 2019.