Firstly, Duffy begins this section with a premonition by the end, ‘dead’. The caesura following this word adds emphasis, creating an unsettling moment of pause. Diana, apart from her fantastic activism and philanthropy, is also known for how badly she was treated by the press. Her death came in a car crash while fleeing from the press, perhaps signaling ‘dead’ as her final resting state. Anderson, Hephziba (4 December 2005). "Christmas Carol" . Retrieved 30 January 2019– via www.theguardian.com. This is further suggested by ‘she rolled’, Cleopatra being the active participant in lines. Cleopatra ‘reached and pulled him down’, controlling Caesar with her intelligence and beauty.

Duffy likes to take a familiar psychological reality and extend it as an outrageous metaphor. In "The Map Woman", for instance, an A-to-Z street map of the town in which a woman has grown up is tattooed over the skin of her whole body. Wherever she goes, and whatever she becomes, that geography remains an indelible pattern she cannot escape; until, that is, almost accidentally, she hits on the remedy. She decides to return to the real town that haunts her. In the intervening years, the place she remembers has become almost unrecognisable under newly built arcades and shopping malls. Bewildered by these changes, she retreats to her hotel room. There, she sloughs her skin like a snake. In the last verse, Duffy escapes from the metaphor to close the poem with a resonance that recalls some of Larkin's memorable conclusions:Besides the list-making nuns, she did have two inspiring English teachers at her secondary schools: June Scriven at St Joseph's Convent School and Jim Walker at Stafford Girls' High School. Duffy kept in touch with Scriven until her death this year and regrets that her foremer teacher was not able to read the "school" poem, "The Laughter at Stafford Girls' High", in the new book. At school Duffy absorbed the English canon but her teachers' knowledge stopped at Dylan Thomas. Duffy wanted the contemporary. She found it in the local bookshop, where on one shelf she could browse and buy (with the proceeds of a Saturday job) the Penguin Modern Poets series. These writers - Neruda, Prévert, Aimé Césaire - had a stronger influence on her writing than the English poets she studied at school.

The name Larkin often comes up when Duffy is discussed. She is, of course, in many ways Larkin's antithesis, but they do occupy the same niche in their respective eras. Duffy is the poet of the multicultural noughties as Larkin was the bicycle-clipped representative of the dowdy, repressed fifties. The critic Justin Quinn has noted how many of Duffy's poems echo themes of Larkin's - you can pair them off: "Larkin's 'Posterity', Duffy's 'Biographer'; 'Ambulances', 'November'; 'Mr Bleaney', 'Room', etc". The Larkin/Duffy story has taken a surprising turn recently. Duffy's new book has a long poem set in her girls' school of the 1960s, "The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High", an allegory of the rise of feminism, sweeping away dowdy post-war austerity and buttoned-up emotional sterility. And here is a fat new Larkin book, recently published, Trouble at Willow Gables, girls' fiction written for private entertainment. Duffy's last word on Larkin: "As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets." New Year Honours List" (PDF). Gov.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 January 2015 . Retrieved 17 July 2016. BBC Radio 4 – Woman's Hour – The Power List 2013". BBC. Archived from the original on 19 March 2014 . Retrieved 17 July 2016. About Carol Ann Duffy". The Poetry Foundation. 18 March 2003 . Retrieved 2 June 2020– via poets.org. The hallucinatory, almost feverish, presentation of Monroe’s life begins with ‘slept’. Duffy presents the woman exploited from the moment she wakes right till she sleeps. Everything in between is connected with hellish asyndeton, propelling the poem onwards, ‘coffee, pills, booze’. The reference to addictive substances foreshadows Monroe’s death, overdosing on sleeping pills.

Sign Up to the Newsletter

She was appointed as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009, [12] when Motion's 10-year term was over. Duffy was featured on the South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg in December 2009 [13] and on 7 December she presented the Turner Prize to artist Richard Wright. [14] The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High is the central bridge in the Feminine Gospels, Duffy moving from abstract to personal poems. Due to the role of the bridge, The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High has many shared themes with other Duffy poems.

The fact that the original ’note’ that made Emily Jane laugh came from ‘King James Bible’ could be a form of rebellion. This destruction of the bible, especially considering it is a ‘King James Bible’, could symbolize the rejection of patriarchal control. This first act of rejecting the patriarchy receives the first laugh, the rest expanding out like a ripple. Duffy employs a form of epiphora at the end of the second stanza, ‘The whole world swooned’ echoing ‘The US whooped’. Now, her commodification has spread to the whole world, becoming an international sex symbol. She is abused and exploited for the whole world to see. Finally, Duffy discusses the Princess of Wales, Diana. Lady Di was known as the “People’s Princess”, is a much-loved figure in the U.K. In 1981 she engaged Prince Charles and married later that year. After the couple’s separation in 1992, the media sought details of their marital difficulties. Diana was viciously hunted by the media, eventually dying in a car crash while fleeing the paparazzi in 1997. Her funeral was televised and brought in 32.10 million viewers in the U.K., with millions more watching around the world. In 2011 Duffy, spearheaded a new poetry competition for schools, named Anthologise. The competition is administered by the Poetry Book Society and was launched by the Duchess of Cornwall in September 2011. School students aged 11–18 from around the UK were invited to create and submit their own anthologies of published poetry. The 2011 Anthologise judges were Duffy; Gillian Clarke (National Poet for Wales); John Agard; Grace Nichols and Cambridge Professor of Children's Poetry, Morag Styles. The first ever winners of Anthologise were the sixth form pupils of Monkton Combe School, Bath, with their anthology titled The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead, which was described by Duffy as "assured and accomplished as any anthology currently on the bookshelves." [41] Plays and songs [ edit ] Semantic fields of beauty and sexuality, along with wealth and the juxtaposition of modern and traditional

Similar English Literature resources:

Yet, Cleopatra is able to leverage her beauty to get what she wants, Duffy presents the woman’s power. The fact she reduces ‘Caesar’ to ‘gibbering’ displays the control she has. We know this is a sexual power by the location, ‘in bed’. Duffy suggests that Cleopatra gains power by accepting her beauty and using it to manipulate and control men. These stanzas of The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High explore the lives of the teachers, first focusing on Miss Dunn. She arrives home, ‘her small terraced house’ being oddly tragic. Yet, she loves her home, Duffy uses erotic language to depict her life. She writes, ‘kisses of light’, the connection with light-bearing connotations of positivity and happiness. Yet, the blunt final lines of stanza eleven leave the scene melancholic and uncertain. The life of Miss Dunn is lonely, signalled by ‘lived alone.’, combined with a preceding caesura and harsh end stop. These structural techniques lead to a depressing quality to the line, the meter sharply interrupted, reflecting Dunn’s solitary life. Carol Ann Duffy - Poetry - Scottish Poetry Library". www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk . Retrieved 16 February 2018. The poem begins by focusing on the personal pronoun, ‘she’. Women are at the center of this poem and Duffy makes this evidently clear from the offset. Helen is said to be born ‘from an egg’, Duffy also focusing on the physicality of this figure in the opening line. It is interesting to note that even in fiction, women are exploited and prosecuted. Dame Carol Ann Duffy DBE FRSL HonFBA HonFRSE (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish [3] poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, [4] and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position. [5]