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 tim

Do you sometimes find TALKING about texts better than writing about them? Imagine being able to listen into a lively and original conversation about books or poems you need to write about. IMAGINE  how easy it would be for you  to find lots of ideas and insights…. Tusitala Conve

Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry deals with many different relationships, events and predicaments  She is a time traveller fond of exploring the lost narratives of the past through a range of speakers and characters.  If you are working on your revision ideas for GCSE English or perhaps

Quickdraw   I wear the two, the mobile and the landline phones, like guns, slung from the pockets on my hips. I’m all alone. You ring, quickdraw, your voice a pellet in my ear, and hear me groan.   You’ve wounded me. Next time, you speak after the tone. I twirl the phone,

  The December bride who, bored with dancing, skipped from the castle hall to play hide-and-seek, a white bird flickering into the dark . . . The groom, who searched each room, calling her name; then the bridal guests, flame-lit, checking the grounds . . . The fifty Christmases t

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high grav’d books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romanc

‘Falling in love is glamorous hell’ writes Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy in her poem ‘You’ collected in Rapture. Madeleine Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles has recently won the Orange prize for Fiction and lyrically explores the ‘rapturous’

We are on the verge of the GCSE English examinations once more, so I thought I would look again at Carol Ann Duffy’s Hour, a poem originally collected in Carol Ann Duffy’s prize winning collection Rapture.   And in response to some honest readers on the blog, I will try to

Reading a poem can challenge you. It can take you away from the certainties associated with your  understanding. and this can be uncomfortable and exasperating. What is the point you may say?Sometimes however, although  students find poetry more difficult than other genres once they &

Today is a day when we may all feel the hint of the ‘away and see’ part of life. Already at 8-30am there is a soft glow of slow sunshine on my lawn and the squirrels are busy at the bird table beating the feathered crew to what remains of yesterday’s food. There is a

Tusi Notes Carol Ann Duffy’s Havisham and Dickens’ Great Expectations. Carol Ann Duffy is an expert at exploring the uneasy aftermath of love. Both her poetry collections Mean Time and The World’s Wife give representation to the loss of love and the ways in which human bei

I am not sure if this is a great poem, I rather think it too abrupt and unfinished to linger on in the mind,  as great poems tend to do.  Yet there is something of  Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘hard and truthful’ about it that communicates unresolved sadness. Nature is used  t

Carol Ann Duffy’s After Mrs Tiresias is a very popular poem at live readings. Females in the audience enjoy the spirited irony of the joke about a man who becomes a woman, finding the monthly period a painful trial worthy of a week’s bed rest and two gp’s call out. 

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy is the most searched for Duffy poem on Google. The poem is a cyber space megastar and today I felt I would examine the poem again briefly to find out why it is so popular with students, teachers and general readers. The poem’s popularity sugggests th

Steinbeck’s final moments of his short novel, Of Mice and Men are both tragic and yet hopeful. The reader recognises that Steinbeck is offering a glimpse of an equal, potential friendship between the two most respected  characters in the novel, George and Slim. This glimpse of h

Medusa has been explored several times on this blog and I will be writing a full length, Tusi Note on the poem in the next few days. However Carol Ann Duffy’s poem was on my mind as I awoke today, so thought I would ‘jot’ a few ideas about the poem again, this time b

Tusi Notes Just the ideas you need to be different! ”This tender and elemental love poem to our first and most enduring love, that of the mother and child, is to all intents and purposes, a means for Carol Ann Duffy to reconstruct, even to re-invent a past beyond the first perso

Sometimes, not all times because Carol Ann Duffy is human and works hard and perhaps writes more than her energies allow,  Duffy finds a word that changes everything in a poem. I know that was a meandering introduction but I wanted to write out what I feel happens when Duffy is really

Yesterday I had the pleasure of exploring this poem in the AQA Anthology, where it is enjoying the attention of today’s students once again. It has a very particular, if slightly unnerving appeal and like Browning’s other murderous monologues, this poem has a theatricality

I was just playing with the google search engines when I saw this entry about Carol Ann Duffy’s Education For Leisure  on page two. Sometimes when I write something and then find it again , it does feel as if the writing was done by somebody else!I suppose this is a common exper

I am revisiting this analysis as I have just been reading through the AQA English Anthology and this Carol Ann Duffy poem is included in the ‘relationships’ section. The poem encourages students to re-evaluate their relationship with time, especially where intimacy is conc

Human intimacy can be fraught with misunderstanding and misgiving. We all feel D-R-E-A-D at times! This media age, with its obsession with texting,  has escalated the dread of rejection, and of disappointed love intensely. There are so many ways nowadays to communicate and to be found

Yesterday I explored AQA’s Anthology poem Quickdraw from Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture collection. I did express my disappointment with that poem and perhaps its rather self conscious contrivance.The row didn’t convince as it is usurped by the manipulations of  cowboy my

(For a stanza by stanza analysis and commentary on Quickdraw please click here. ) This poem is taken from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection Rapture, for which she won the T S Eliot poetry prize. The collection explores the rise and fall of a love affair, a relationship I find that is

T S Eliot’s Little Gidding was his favourite poem. This section of the poem plays with our sense of orientation, our certainties around time and life’s direction. I find I have to just keep reading and re-reading the poem, hearing its sounds, its cadences as much as its me

I love dreaming. Our night walks with out limits. Coach trips with colour. None of those  daily conventions like looking at your watch. Being tied to time. But dreams can be quite knotty. Sometimes I surprise myself and get scared or wonder why I am dressed like this or that or talkin

We came from our own country in a red room which fell through the fields, our mother singing our father’s name to the turn of the wheels. My brothers cried, one of them bawling Home, Home, as the miles rushed back to the city, the street, the house, the vacant rooms where we did

A student studying at Winstanley College, Wigan,  shared this tip yesterday and right in the middle of a mock English  A level paper, I couldn’t help smiling out loud! For this tip is simple and as I tried it today, it works very well. I think it is inspired! All you need in tru

Great Expectations begins in a churchyard with a young boy called Pip trying to work out how he came to be born. He believes that he can begin to define who he is through a lively, inventive yet naive curiosity about his past. So he starts to read the graves of his family and make up

For a change I will write underneath each stanza of Carol Ann Duffy’s Crush and discuss the poem in this way. My main concern with this method  is that it breaks the poem’s flow and continuity. However it makes the thought processess as I go through the poem,  easier. Anyh