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Carol Ann Duffy - The World's Wife

ISBN: 033037222X

I first came across Carol Ann Duffy's poetry in the mid-1980s and immediately enjoyed her subversive wit and humour and admired her poetic skill and capacity to home in on central contemporary issues and experiences. The World's Wife was her fifth collection and a new departure for her in that it was organised around a single theme or perspective: a feminist revision of male biography, history, literature, legend, fairy tale and myth. The book opens with "Little Red Cap", a fable of the young female poet's emergence - clutching her talismanic "grandmother's bones" - from the belly of the wolf. From this point on, the news for men mainly goes from bad to worse as the female poet, in various metamorphoses, dismantles masculine myths and illusions - from the Orphic to the Darwinian - with wit, energy and occasionally violence! Aesop, Icarus, Darwin and Freud don't come out at all well in their wive's telling. Nor does Tiresias, the reluctant transsexual, who has problems with menstruation: "The curse, he said, the curse".

In an interview Duffy has insisted however that these are all love poems and there are certainly ambiguities in the presentation of feminine/masculine relationships which complicate the crusading feminist agenda. "Mrs Midas", for example, after an vivid exposure of her husband's folly, ends on a note in which vexation and anger transmutes into tender regret for the loss of his human "touch"; and "Queen Kong" expresses "massive" love for her "little man" in a way which would seem tragic if it wasn't so bizarre. And the incipiently tragic note is also sounded in "Mrs Beast" whose defeat of the Beast in the name of female solidarity has her wishing: "Let the less loving one be me".

The book ends with "Demeter" in which the mother celebrates - "choosing tough words" - the birth or re-birth of Persephone. In a sense, it's out of line with the primarily satirical or subversive direction of the rest of the book. On the other hand, as a poem about the transforming power of parental love, it provides an appropriate closure to the volume and at the same time takes us back to the very different arrival of "Little Red Cap". "Demeter" will, I suspect, be one of the poems by which Duffy is remembered in 100 years time: a perfect demonstration of how she allies feeling and form, precise emotion and poetic expertise.

Reviewed By: Barry Wood

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