Since the early 1980’s, Duffy has also worked as a playwright, having had her plays Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986), Loss (1986), and Casanova (2007) published and performed in various theatres. Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic,is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economistreviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.” Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time,and 1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love.

Jane Dowson and Alice Entwhistle, ‘Dialogic politics in Carol Ann Duffy and others’ in A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 1995, p. 24; July 7, 1995, p. 32; December 3, 1999, Alan Brownjohn, review of The World's Wife, p. 24.

The Love Poem’ by Carol Ann Duffy depicts a modern poet struggling in her thoughts to write a love poem. This book and some of the verses in it were meant for me, for this visit to England, for some of the feelings and thoughts I was going through. Now while that makes up just 5% of the anthology roughly, I am so glad I discovered this little book at all! And boy, am I glad I watched a random programme on the tele the other night!

Carol Ann Duffy's Christmas poems

Christopher Whyte, ‘The 1990s’ in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

The poem comprises three stanzas of twelve lines each, with short choppy lines of varying length. Lines are generally but not always paired. alternating between the extracts and her own ideas. Before we proceed any further with an analysis of ‘The Love Poem’, here are the sources for the poems which Duffy quotes from. The first quotation, ‘my mistress’ eyes’, is from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, which begins ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’; ‘let me count the ways’ is from another love poem, Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘ How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’); ‘come live with me’ appears in a number of Renaissance love poems, including Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ and ‘The Bait’ by John Donne. If love, as Padel suggests, has always been at the centre of her poetry, this is not only romantic and sexual, it is also both daughterly and intensely maternal. Myth and fairy-tale are vital to her imagining of the world, but they are given contemporary voices in her poems. The combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners. As fellow-poet Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Poetry, like love, depends on a kind of recognition. So often with Duffy does the reader say, “Yes, that’s it exactly,” that she could well become the representative poet of the present day.’ Duffy also, perhaps more subtly, explores womanhood and sexuality through this collection. Poems such as ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’ and ‘The Cliché Kid’ potentially subtly explores how homosexual identity adults can re-colour childhood memories to craft a greater understanding of self. Additionally, ‘Litany’ and ‘Small Female Skull’ indicate a frustration at the restrictions placed on women’s language and ideas; the former interrogates how women are taught from a young age to censor themselves, while the latter highlights how males are provided greater appreciation as intellectuals by expressing a firm ideology of rationalism throughout history. In both poems, and across the anthology, the narrative voice expresses a desire to disrupt these restrictions. Even when Duffy explores more morally complex matters, such as infidelity (most particularly in the poem ‘Adultery’), she expresses its superiority, as a mark of freedom, to conformism. The intersection of memory and repression is particularly apparent in the poem ‘Before You Were Mine’. Whilst the title initially seems to portray a romantic relationship, the poem reveals that the personal the narrator possesses is her own mother, thus demonstrating how, particularly in the mid-20th-century, women undoubtedly lost their freedom when they became mothers. The narrator thus seemingly presents guilt at possessively stealing her mother’s freedom simply by being born. Horn Book, May, 1994, Nancy Vasilakis, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, p. 329.War Photographer" is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy that was published in 1991. The poem is written in the first person point of view and is about a war photographer who has returned home after capturing images of the violence and devastation of war. The poem explores the photographer's feelings of guilt and disconnection as he tries to process the horrors he has witnessed.

Valentine’. An onion? This poem, also from Mean Time , centres on the speaker’s gift to her Valentine, not of a red rose or a cute card but an onion, of all things – because it cuts through the clichéd conventions of Valentine’s Day and, oddly, captures what true love is far more accurately, because it will induce tears but its memory will also linger long on your lips. Deliliah: '...but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender. I have to be strong. What is the cure?' I first encountered Duffy's work over a decade and a half ago as a petulant high school pupil, sat in a sweaty English Literature classroom heaving with savage adolescent machismo. Regretfully, I didn't resonate then, barely even listened - much preferring the derisive and crass verses of Larkin.Duffy’s recent collections include her Collected Poems (2015), The Bees (2011), winner of the Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Rapture (2005) , winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Duffy has also written verses for children. Her several collections of children’s poetry include The Gift (2010), New and Collected Poems for Children (2009), and The Hat (2007). Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet, playwright, and freelance writer. She is the first openly lesbian and first woman to be appointed as the United Kingdom's Poet Laureate, a position she held from 2009 to 2019. She is also the first openly gay person to be appointed to the position. She has published numerous collections of poetry, plays, and children's books, and has received numerous awards for her work, including the Costa Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize.We have compiled Carol Ann Duffy's poems for you. Carol Ann Duffy Poems Beyond the fragments taken from famous poems, there is nothing identifiable to pin down; no clarity as to the identity of the speaker is (we may assume it is the poet). The visual imagery is confined to references on the nature of writing — pen, paper, ink. Carol Ann Duffy is often praised (or occasionally dispraised) for her accessibility, and this is a matter of language as well as subject matter. When her poems ask us to recognise common experiences they are not afraid of using common combinations of words. Her poem "Twinned", for instance, takes the comically familiar idea of town twinning – a modern municipal vanity – as a metaphor for the giddy feeling that a person in love inhabits a related, but different place from the one in which they normally live. The ordinariness of the metaphor is signalled by the first line, which deploys a well-worn idiom. "I have been wined and dined / in the town with which this one is twinned". How appropriately easy is that opening cliché, which signals that the speaker has been indulged in a way that cannot last. Overall, I found Mean Time profoundly thoughtful and though-provoking and within it, Duffy seems to have found the perfect medium between the thematic vastness and tight imagery of her earlier works but also her later movement to themed collections and more personal verse.