We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

POETRY
I couldn’t see Guinness
and not envisage a nun;
a gun, a finger and thumb;
midges, blether, scribble, scrum.

A crescent moon, boomerang, smirk,
bone; or full, a shield, a stalker,
a stone. I couldn’t see woods
for the names of trees- sycamore,
yew, birch, beech
or bees

without imagining music scored
on the air- nor pass a nun
without calling to mind a pint of one,
stout, untouched, on a bar at the Angelus.

Duffy neatly captures the process of association here. She allows enough apparent whimsy or looseness to suggest the natural idiosyncracy of 'free association'. And just as our association goes one way so the next moment it may go another; in reverse! The poem also 'proves' the power of anchoring and the ways we may intervene and redirect our association. Richard Bandler is a fan of 'spiralling' where the feelings can be sent spiralling elsewhere, away from an individual so that the emotional  effects are diluted or rendered comic. Oddly enough and yet not so oddly as Art illustrates so many NLP theories( as it should) this poem seems to spiral away and then back again for me.

CAROL ANN DUFFY (1955–present)
In Mrs Tilscher's Class

You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she'd left a gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce,
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared at your parents, appalled, when you got back home.

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled,
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown,
as the sky split open into a thunderstorm.

This afternoon I attended an end of year show by my daughter's whole school where the year 6 play was especially thoughtful offering a superb allegory relating to Darwin's theory of natural evolution and leaving school. I thought of Duffy once again and in this poem she expressly positions the reader within the momory 'you'  whether it is literally shared or not. It is a very special trusting. imaginative space this world of Primary education and my mother kept smiling at the enchantment of the painted stage and the sense of community that perhaps is never found again in the vast corridors of secondary education.

Five miles up, the hush and shoosh of ash,

yet the sky is as clean as a wiped slate-

I could write my childhood there. Selfish

to sit in this garden, listening to the past-

a gentleman bee wooing its flower, a lawnmower-

when grounded planes mean ruined plans, holidays

on hold, sore absences from weddings, funerals,

wingless commerce.

But Britain's birds

sing in this spring, from Inverness to Liverpool,

from Crieff to Cardiff, Oxford, London Town,

Land's End to John O' Groats; the music silence summons,

that Shakespeare heard, Burns, Edward Thomas; briefly, us.

How liberating to be free of ourselves!

After a night of Political Drama and a morning of warring journalism which suggests that detachment or lord forbid truth shall remain ghosts in the grinding machinery of an everlasting 'spin cycle', I found this on the web; contemplative, quiet and comforting. Duffy reminds us of the brief time capsule we found ourselves in when the skies no longer were noisy motorways, streaked with contamination and aspiration. The garden she sat in, thinking about time and space and geography seems a sanctuary from hectic progress. And just reading the poem this morning, I felt a liberation from myself; a sense of perspective perhaps, engendered by the thoughtful tone and pace of a poem that gives voice to silence and its value in this shrill voiced world of ours.

And the notion of the 'gentleman bee' is perfect! Captures a lost age and seems dignified too!

LAST POSTfficeffice" />

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays ffice:smarttags" />Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Carol Ann Duffy was asked to create a poem to mark the final passing of two of the last World War One survivors Harry Allingham and Harry patch. Here in Last Post she movingly rewinds the mindless slaughter of that war, revealing the promise and expansiveness of futures which were sacrificed for just a few hellish yards of mud. The 'width 'of certain words deployed  in Duffy's new poem yield up  vistas lost, intimacies missed, the sense of any  ‘dailiness’  destroyed. Duffy’s imaginative, compassionate dream of another version of the war is ironically juxtaposed to Wilfred Owen’s terrible, nightmarish indictment of the war, Dulce est Decorum est.

Duffy acknowledges her poetic debt to the terrible ‘dreams’ of Owen through the occasional, terse use of the clipped ’t’ sound in the poem. This staccato sound conveys the inhuman mechanisation of carrying out one's 'duty', through the ordinary soldiers’ loyal obligation to follow often senseless orders. Duffy’s combination of both short and long sounds allows both the ‘old’ story of the war told by poets like Wilfred Owen, where the soldiers’  ‘last breath’ is almost always upon us, with the resurrecting time turning, possibilities of Duffy’s healing ‘what if’ in Last Post.   For the staccato, terse sound of Owen’s poetic testimony  is movingly assuaged by Carol Ann Duffy’s  cinematic rewinding of the serial fatalities of the war, so that the poem seems to resuscitate the long dead through the emerging generosity of the breath, a returning breath,  which reverses and imaginatively heals  the bleak certainties of history.

How powerfully  the word ‘amazed’ works to announce the awe of Duffy’s  soldier  at his second chance at life, his second chance of another day, just as Fitzgerald movingly uses the word ‘wonder’ at the end of The Great Gatsby to suggest a perceptual bewilderment which embraces the wide eyed freshness and expectation of hope. The repetition of ‘you walk away’ catches at a choice wholly unavailable to the serving soldier and thus we hear through the simplicity of such a choice, a Hardy-like note of yearning tenderness. The poet may do what time may not.

As I have said, Duffy’s Last Post is significantly framed by an extract from Wilfred Owen’s famous poem about the horrors of the First World War, Dulce est Decorum est. Owen was a direct witness to the abject horrors of the war and his feeling of nightmarish impotency before the hapless victims of mustard gas described in this poem, finds visceral expression through the very ‘breathlessness’ of the poem’s actual  rhythm. As we read Owen’s poem we feel short of breath, we feel as if we too are gasping for our ‘last breath’ like his forgotten soldier. The desperate activity of the verb 'plunges' in Owen is upheld and sustained by the repetition of the present participles and this conveys the hellish, frenetic panic of the First World War soldiers victimised by the German’s use of mustard gas. The recurrence of such a disturbing image in the poet’s ‘dreams’  adds to the grim intensity of the recollected moment and operates as a very resonant introduction to Duffy's new  poem. It is as if we have to hear again Owen's testimony to the hell of the war, before Carol Ann Duffy can offer up another way, through which and by which hell can finally be alleviated. As Duffy states in her editor’s introduction to the anthology Answering Back, significantly perhaps utilising a word central to the effect of her Last Post:

‘What amazed (my italics) me, once I sat down to choose some kind of order for the hundred poems submitted, was the sense of coherence and community between the living and dead poets. This sense was so strong, that the dead poets, even the long dead, seemed just as vividly present on the page as the living.’

Duffy’s Anthology Answering Back was published in 2007 and it is apparent that this time travelling communion between one poet and another, where ‘Poetry...is language as life..’ finds powerful expression in this ‘amazed’ strange  meeting between Owen and her poet  self.

Duffy also explores the connotations of a form of time travel in her Laureate poem Premonitions and this I have explored in another piece. For what if time could retreat, if we could recuperate lost, dead moments and all that had been taken away from us could regroup and grow again? It seems that grief does make time travellers of us all. Indeed the profound and tragic irony of Duffy's poem Last Post is that the poem can go backwards and healing can take place, when all the orders inflicted upon the soldiers sent them forwards, relentlessly 'over the top' to their deaths. So much language around bereavement is about moving forward, moving on, yet our natural inclination when we lose someone, is to move backwards to find them again.

 The soldiers’ lost potential is named through Duffy's careful delineation of missed life stages, and the pathos of the casual seeming 'shaking dried mud from their hair' is profoundly physical as well as visual. The iconic, seemingly inescapable images of the war’s dead soldiers immersed in mud are beautifully challenged by Duffy’s liberating image. A perfect, tender glimpse of a ‘what if.'

The final pathos of the poet no longer needing to give testimony to the horrors of war, to the grisly events of the past is palpable. One of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems frames this poetic resurrection of lost lives and his voice haunts the entire text.  Compassionately, it is as if Owen himself escapes his terrible, week before Armistice Day sacrifice and can smile too, glad to be alive, to survive and thrive, no longer obliged to write at all.  

'If poetry could truly tell it backwards

Then it would. '

Whoever She Was

They see me always as a flickering figure
on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,
still wet. sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples
burning as I hang the washing out.
Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts
of children on the  telephone. Mummy

A row of paper dollies, clean wounds
or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant
of magic Words repeatedly. I do not know.
Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good.
The film is on a  loop. Six silly ladies
torn in half by baby fists. When they
think of me, I’m bending over them at night
to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight. 

Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings
to the bramble bush. My maiden name
sounds wrong. This was the playroom.
There are the photographs. making masks
from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come.

Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her
as she shapes a church and steeple in the air.
She cannot be myself and yet I have a box
of dusty presents to confirm that she was here.
You remember the little things. telling stories
or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong.
You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror
which they are holding to your mouth.

I stood at the edge of my child's sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.

Without sounding trite and then perhaps I do, the poem reminds me of that song by some chap with a difficult name to spell: 'Where do you go to my lovely..' with the vaguely Parisian music which was once a massive hit on Radio 1.

Captures the heart stopping wonderment of the mother's relation to her child. The 'awayness ' of sleep all the more enchanting for its uncomplexity and naturalness than the more 'thorny' aspects of adult slumber.

I love the delicacy of this poem: ' I stood at the edge of my child's sleep'..as the adult hangs back from the perfection of this tableau...as if the sleep has become a whole world whose words are so very different from those of the adult. The poet who is also a mother elides the sleep with some Shakeperean Arden where magical things happen and time becoems something fluid, tender, mystical.

Lovely detail with the hands embracing light. Defencless purity of their transcenedent beauty.

And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?

Look at me now.

Medusa's final words before her infamous decapitation by Perseus communicate a pathos which emanates from the elegaic tone as much the irony of her observation. Medusa's reflection upon the approach of Perseus with his warrior physicality and powerful sexual aura, involves several misrecognitions or displacements which highlight the imaginative torment inflicted upon her by the jealous goddess Athene. For Medusa's belief in Perseus's subsitutions reveal a lingering idealism which has not been destroyed by the incarceration of her ugliness, dramatically embodied in the serpents writhing about her head. Medusa still finds it possible that there can be a residue of humanity in this hellish new world she is forced to live in and to perpetuate. 

 Hence the shield is standing in 'for a heart' and the sword 'for a tongue.' Our knowledge of Medusa's fate of course challenges this unfortunate reading, yet Carol Ann Duffy reminds us that even Medusa was 'beautiful' and 'fragrant' and 'young'. Does fate and often age take away such anchors? I think not. Words return to haunt us, close time capsules of emotions that just cannot go away. I do wodner at this point about the smell of Medusa. Did she ever smell otherwise? Does  her self neglect anticipate  that  of Miss Havisham? Would it have made any difference if Miss Havisham smelt of Chanel? !

I think so!

And I realised as I was walking through mud with my dogs this morning that the greatest pathos around the compelling tale of Medusa is that in turning everyone who gazes upon her to stone, she has forgotten how to dream, perhaps because she is too bitter to risk dreaming ever ever again. Thus,through Athene's cruel punishment for her natural libido,  she deprives other's of their mutability, of their physical flexibility and mobility by fixing them into stone. They become, as a very astute student told me on Saturday without any ability to 'rot' and thus cannot enjoy the natural cycle of 'invisiblity'. They remain fixed, frozen in ironic, doll like masks of themselves, not unlike( and I will write more on this) Freud's conception of the 'unccanny' in his  hugely influential essay of that name.

The tragedy of the last line ensares the terrible paradox of Medusa's dreamless fate. She is woman who not unnaturally desires to be gazed at, to be looked at with love, even with desire. yet who would dare to gaze upon the Medusa knowing the living death that awaits them for such a look? Hence the last line is both plea and threat. And Carol Ann Duffy is superb at finding such moments in her poetry where a charcter is simultaneously in several psychological and emotional places at once.

'Look at me now.'

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.

My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?

Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better by for me if you were stone.

Duffy's Medusa begins her monologue acknowledging that thoughts are alive. They grow, they mutate and take on shapes that reassemble outside the privacy of the mind and become externalised embodiments of feeling. Thus we hear Medusa charting the progress of her destructive reflections. There is a bitter irony around the qualification 'as though' for her thoughts have become snakes crawling all over her head and such companions render her estranged from any companionship at all. She has become the embodiment of the phallic, abject woman. It is striking that Medusa herself finds her appearance replusive and this self loathing invites pathos and offers an interiority and power to her perspective.

The intimacy of the word 'scalp' reveals the proximity of Medusa to that which she too finds disgusting, she has been violated by a supernatural punishment for her sexual passion and the reader may find the connotations of this word too near for comfort?

Like Havisham in Duffy's earlier collection Mean Time, the aridity of Medusa's relationships exile her from the risk of the new, and inflict a ruinous effect upon her physicality. Her previous beauty degenerates into rank repulsiveness  and her very voice becomes a source of disgust. How can she speak to anyone any more when her very breath is foul? Her rejection has become pathologised. She has become so defensive that there can be no possibility of any further intimacy-ever.

The only emotion Medusa now expects to engender is literal petrification. She is monstruous even unto her own self and knows that her 'perfect man' will either turn to stone himself as he gazes upon her form or she will herself suffer the indignity of being ignored. Cleverly Carol Ann Duffy uses the famous predicament of Medusa to explore an emotional dichotomy. If we look too long and too closely at our beloved do we inevitably find ourselves 'lost' in the stony coldness of disappointment and betrayal? The gaze of the lover upon the beloved in the story of Medusa leads to literal and metaphorical petrification and unsurprisingly is suggestive of male fears around castration. 'Looking' implies dangerous connection and invites petrification and death. If we look 'away' then we preserve our autonomy, but fail in our desire for connection and intimacy. So should we, like the resourceful Perseus protect ourselves through a form of detachment, and carry a mirror to look at our beloved through thus maintaining a 'healthy' distance?!