CAROL: Yes, I think it’s very important to support young writers in a variety of different ways, either with workshops or teaching or poetry readings, um, festivals, competitions; so I’ve been involved in all of that because I think it’s, um, hugely enriching to pledge the arts: literature, music, theatre, visual arts—all of them in the centre of young people's lives. 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 […]’. 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).

Rapture Quotes by Carol Ann Duffy - Goodreads Rapture Quotes by Carol Ann Duffy - Goodreads

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. I offer no resistance. I surrender to extravagant poetry and the stormy powers of love and sex, and leap into the element of which we are composed, and use every muscle in our souls to stay afloat within. From “River”: The poem is a traditional sonnet comprising fourteen lines, and following loosely an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern. It also follows the metrical rhythm usually associated with sonnets, iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.the desire of the moth for the star” has been taken from ‘One Word is Too Often Profaned’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Carol Ann Duffy - Poet - Scottish Poetry Library Carol Ann Duffy - Poet - Scottish Poetry Library

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— As with all the poems in Duffy’s Rapture collection ‘ Over‘ is about love and romance. It is separated into three stanzas. These are 5, 6, and 7 lines long which makes the poem feel like it is building to a crescendo. Rhyme isn’t employed in this poem apart from in the third and sixth lines, but I’m not sure that this is much more than a coincidence. ‘ Over‘ begins with a sombre tone but the last stanza provides a lighter note. 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":Duffy has been quoted as saying that she is ‘not interested, as a poet, in words like “plash” – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way’; and in the same Guardian profile, ‘Childhood is like a long greenhouse where everything is growing, it’s lush and steamy. It’s where poems come from’ (31 August, 2002).

Poetry Archive You - Poetry Archive

look in thy heart and write”, from Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘ Sonnet 1′ of the sonnet sequence “Astrophil and Stella”.The narrator uses interesting language in the first line of this stanza of the poem. They personify their thoughts and in doing so create a powerful piece of imagery. The fact that it refers to their thoughts as “uninvited” suggests that they are powerless to control how they feel and wouldn’t want to feel that way. This line definitely suggests that the narrator can’t get the object of their affection out of their head. CAROL: Well, I don’t think . . . that it’s important that everyone writes. I think it’s important that everyone reads from a young age and then some of those readers will want to become writers. I think that it’s an enriching and civilising and very human part of life to be able to sing, to be able to paint, to play an instrument, to have a go at writing a poem, to read, to go to the theatre, and we’re very much in danger of those things in education withering on the vine or not being properly invested in. I’m not kind of saying that everyone has to write and be a poet, but I am saying that everyone should read poetry and hear poetry and have it as part of lives and some of those will want to grow up and be writers. 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) CAROL: So, it was a story I was very familiar with and I was playing around with retelling to see if I could do something fresh with it— 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?

I am in heaven, I am in hell | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian

The Love Poem’ is about the difficulty of writing a love poem and that difficulties have been best depicted with the inception, or so to say with the introduction of verses from the past poems, composed by the famous poets of their time. Similar to the first stanza, this section also starts with the subordinate clause “Till love gives in and speaks”, which also shows the frustration of the poet towards the incapability of writing love poems by modern love poets, and makes us believe that the importance of “love” through these poems conveyed in the past, has faded away, or come to an end. Here is where the poem almost turns on its head. It is interesting that Duffy chose to make this transformation midway through a couplet. I wonder if this is deliberate and contains a sort of symbolism. Perhaps her way of saying that love can act at any time. Once again nature is used but here it seems to have far more positive connotations. The word gaped in the final line may have significance as it has subtle sexual connotations as the word is often associated with an ill-fitting blouse. Another provocative piece of language used. The final poem in the collection takes lines from Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy both the title of her collection and the title for this poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is uplifting and thrilling. There is a tradition for the sequence of love poems. It runs from Shakespeare's sonnets or John Donne's poems, through to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems. For the most part, the tale is sad. Only EBB actually got to marry her man . . . and maybe that happy ending was a bit sad too.CAROL: And it’s in a different context rather than the private world of the writer. What goes on in the poetry reading is a different thing.