Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 to Frank Duffy and May Black in Glasgow as the eldest child of the family, and has four brothers. She moved to Staffordshire at the age of four.
Her father worked as a fitter for English Electric, stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party and managed Stafford Rangers football club in his spare time. Raised a Roman Catholic, she was educated at Saint Austin Roman Catholic Primary School,St. Joseph's Convent School and Stafford Girls' High School - where her literary talent was encouraged by English master J.A. Walker. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and she always wanted to be a writer.
Duffy's poems provide voices for an extraordinary number of contemporary characters, including a fairground psychopath, a literary biographer, a newborn baby, disinherited American Indians, and even a ventriloquist's dummy.
Many of the poems reflect on time, change, and loss. In dramatizing scenes of childhood, adolescence, and adult life, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. She explores not only everyday experience, but also the rich fantasy life of herself and others.
Of her own writing, Duffy has said,"I'm 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 Singer-composer Eliana Tomkins, whom Duffy collaborated with on a series of live jazz recitals, says "With a lot of artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership. She never does that. Her aim is to communicate."
In her first collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she often uses the voices of outsiders.
Her next collection Feminine Gospels (2002) continues this vein, showing an increased interest in long narrative poems, accessible in style and often surreal in their imagery. Her 2005 publication, Rapture (2005), is a series of intimate poems charting the course of a love affair, for which she won the £10,000 T.S Eliot poetry prize. In 2007 she published a poetry collection for children entitled The Hat.
Many British students read her work while studying for English Literature at GCSE and A-level, as she became part of the syllabus in
John Mullan wrote of her in the Guardian that
"Over the past decade, Carol Ann Duffy has been the most popular living poet in Britain, her sales greatly helped by the fact that she has succeeded Hughes and Larkin as the most common representative of contemporary poetry in schools (and, it seems, the most commonly read writer of verse, but there are also aspects of her poetry that appeal to English teachers for good practical reasons. Her poems are frequently humorous; they use clear schemes of rhyme and metre; they can be satisfactorily decoded by the diligent close reader."
According to the journalist Katherine Viner,
"Her poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She is read by people who don't really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings 'with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a pop concert'".
Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999 (after the death of previous Laureate
Ted Hughes but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion. According to the Sunday Times, Downing Street source sources stated unofficially that Prime Minister Tony Blair was 'worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England. Duffy later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that 'I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie.
No self-respecting poet should have to.' She says she regards Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea of a contest between her and him for the post was entirely invented by the newspapers. "I genuinely don't think she even wanted to be poet laureate," said Peter Jay, Duffy's former publisher. "The post can be a poisoned chalice. It is not a role I would wish on anyone - particularly not someone as forthright and uncompromising as Carol Ann." The Guardian has also stated that Duffy was reluctant to take up the role in 1999 as she was in a lesbian relationship at the time, and had a young daughter, so was reluctant to take up a position which would have put her so prominently in the public eye.
In August 2008, Duffy's poem 'Education for Leisure' was removed from the AQA examination board's GCSE poetry anthology. This followed a complaint from an external examiner relating to references to knife crime in the poem. According to news reports, schools were urged to destroy copies of the unedited anthology, although a statement from AQA denied this. Duffy countered the removal with a poem highlighting violence in other fiction such as Shakespeare's plays, called 'Mrs Schofield's GCSE'.
Duffy was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002. She now resides in Manchester and is professor of poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University's
Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) Loss (1986), Casanova (2007). Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture.Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Oldest Girl in the World (2000).
She also collaborated with
- Eric Gregory Award 1984
- Scottish Arts Council Book Award (for Standing Female Nude and The Other Country, and again for Mean Time)
- Somerset Maugham Award1988 (for Selling
- Dylan Thomas Award 1989
- Cholmondeley Award 1992
- Whitbread Awards 1993 (for Mean Time)
- Greenwich Poetry Competition (for Words of Absolution)
“Warming Her Pearls”
for Judith Radstone
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She´s beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
I dust her shoulders with a rabbit´s foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head ... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does ... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
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