(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 expressed rather idealistically, if impractically, as it strives to identify this love as the love of all loves in the tradition of such poets as Marvell and even Petrarch. But this lack of tolerance may be just my prejudice! I felt that there was too much pastoral and abstraction. This diluted the intensity of the feelings and left me rather unsatiated!
I did find too that the collection was (unusually for Duffy), lacking in the passionate, sweaty eroticism of her other superb love poems, a lack that for me diminished the power of the professed love.
Give your beloved a real, breathing body I wanted to say many timesthroughout the collection, or have a really bad row! This poem below does explore a row, but with a very obviously clever poetic conceit in its formulation, which distances the emotions, and creates obscurity. This is not Duffy at her most powerful or emotionally intense by any means. However it is an artful poem and Duffy does get to dress up as a cowboy or cowgirl metaphorically and that must have been fun at the OK Corral!
Arguments are often verbal duels, where reaction follows reaction, each ‘assailant’ equipped with their own emotional ammunition, hiding the special grudge away from immediate view, waiting to be brought out later, when the time is ‘right’ yet probably very wrong!
You did that to me. I”ll do this to you. Self righteous revenge is the name of this game!
We play at being Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday or Billy the Kid. Take your pick. You can even be Calamity Jane!
Of course it could also be argued that the collection is more about the poet and therefore the beloved doesn’t really need to make an appearance; like Thomas Hardy perhaps in the 1912-3 poems all dedicated to his much missed and loathed dead wife Emma, and not a sign of her anywhere!
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,
then squeeze the trigger of my tonge, wide of the mark.
You choose your spot, then blast me
through the heart.
And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liqour
in the old Last Chance saloon. I show the mobile
to the sheriff; in my boot, another one’s
concealed. You text them both at once. I reel.
Down on my knees, I fumble for the phone,
read the silver bullets of your kiss. Take this …
and this … and this … and this … and this …
Thanks for a useful post! A friend of mine recently produced this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukK65O2JJKg&feature=g-u-u
Helped me maybe it could help others!