Duffy, Carol Ann 1955-

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DUFFY, Carol Ann 1955-

PERSONAL: Born December 23, 1955, in Glasgow, Scotland; daughter of Francis (an engineer) and Mary (Black) Duffy; partner of Jackie Kay (a poet), since early 1990s; children: Ella. Education: University of Liverpool, B.A. (with honors), 1977. Politics: Socialist.

ADDRESSES: Home—4 Camp View, London SW19 4UL, England. Agent—Penny Tackaberry, Tessa Sayle Agency, 11 Jubilee Pl., London SW3 3TE, England.

CAREER: Worked for Granada Television, c. 1977-81; Ambit magazine, London, England, poetry editor, 1983—; full-time freelance writer, 1985—. Writer in residence in East End schools, London, England, 1982-84; North Riding College, Scarborough, England, visiting fellow, 1985; Southern Arts, Thamesdown, England, writer in residence, 1987-88; part-time creative writing instructor, Manchester Metropolitan University, 1996—; visiting professor, Wake Forest University.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Letters (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: C. Day Lewis fellow of poetry, Greater London Arts Association, 1982-84; first prize, National Poetry Competition, British Broadcasting Corp., 1983, for "Whoever She Was"; Eric Gregory Award, British Society of Authors, 1984; Book Award, Scottish Arts Council, 1986, for Standing Female Nude; first prize, "Poems about Painting" competition, Peterloo Poets, 1986, for "The Virgin Punishing the Infant"; Somerset Maugham Award, Society of Authors, 1987, for Selling Manhattan; Dylan Thomas Award, 1989, for The Other Country; Book Award, Scottish Arts Council, 1989; Cholmondeley Award, 1992; Book Award, Scottish Arts Council, 1993, for Mean Time; Whitbread Award and Forward Poetry Prize, both 1993, both for Mean Time; Lannan Award, 1995; Order of the British Empire, 1995; Signal Poetry Award, 1997, for Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, 2001, for The Oldest Girl in the World; shortlist, Forward Poetry Prize, 1999, for The World's Wife; National Lottery grant, 2000.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Fleshweathercock, and Other Poems, Outposts (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England), 1973.

Fifth Last Song, Headland (Wirral, Merseyside, England), 1982.

Standing Female Nude, Anvil Press (London, England), 1985.

Thrown Voices, Turret Books (London, England), 1986.

Selling Manhattan, Anvil Press (London, England), 1987.

The Other Country, Anvil Press (London, England), 1990.

Mean Time, Anvil Press (London, England), 1993.

Selected Poems, Penguin (London, England)/Anvil Press (London, England), 1994.

The Pamphlet, Anvil Press (London, England), 1999.

The World's Wife, Picador (New York, NY), Faber & Faber (London, England), 2000.

PLAYS

Take My Husband (two-act), first produced in Liverpool, England, at Liverpool Playhouse, December 4, 1982.

Cavern of Dreams (two-act), first produced in Liverpool at Liverpool Playhouse, August 3, 1984.

Loss (one-act), first broadcast by BBC-Radio, July 22, 1986.

Little Women, Big Boys (one-act), first produced in London, England, at Almeida Theatre, August 8, 1986.

FOR CHILDREN

(Adaptor) Grimm Tales, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1996.

Meeting Midnight (poems), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1999.

(With Jackie Kay, Roger McGough, Gareth Owen, Brian Patten) Five Finger-Piglets (poems), Macmillan (London, England), 1999.

The Oldest Girl in the World, Faber & Faber (London, England), 2000.

OTHER

(Editor) Home and Away, Southern Arts (Thamesdown, England), 1988.

(Editor and contributor) I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Anthology of Women's Poetry, illustrated by Trisha Rafferty, Viking (New York, NY), 1992, published as I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, Holt (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor) Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, illustrated by Trisha Rafferty, Holt (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-first Century, Anvil Press (London, England), 1999.

Duffy's manuscripts are housed at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

ADAPTATIONS: Duffy's version of Grimms' fairy tales has been adapted for the stage.

SIDELIGHTS: Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning English poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic, is the poet of "post-post war England: Thatcher's England." Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economist reviewer described them, are typically "spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world." Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph's convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. Not until her 1993 collection, Mean Time, and 1994's Selected Poems, does she begin to write about homosexual love.

Duffy's poetry has always had a strong feminist edge, however. This position is especially well captured in her Standing Female Nude, in which the collection's title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model's response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model's acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that "the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her," explained DiMarco. "And here the way the poem ends with the model's final comment on the painting 'It does not look like me'—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist's representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle."

Duffy was seriously considered for the position of poet laureate in Britain in 1999. Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration had wanted a poet laureate who exemplified the new "Cool Britannia," not an establishment figure, and Duffy was certainly anything but establishment. She is the Scottish-born lesbian daughter of two Glasgow working-class radicals. Her partner is another poet, a black woman, and the two of them are raising a child together. Duffy has a strong following among young Britons, partially as a result of her poetry collection Mean Time being included in Britain's A-level curriculum, but Blair was worried about how "middle England" would react to a lesbian poet laureate. There were also concerns in the administration about what Britain's notorious tabloids would write about her sexuality, and about comments that Duffy had made urging an updated role for the poet laureate. In the end, Blair opted for the safe choice and named Andrew Motion to the post.

After Duffy had been passed over, Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian Weekend that 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 rock concert.'" Viner lamented that Duffy only came to the attention of many people when she was caricatured and rejected as poet laureate. However, the poet got some satisfaction when she earned the National Lottery award of 75,000 pounds, a sum that far exceeded the stipend that poet laureates receive.

After the laureate debacle, Duffy was further vindicated when her next original collection of poems, The World's Wife, received high acclaim from critics. In what Antioch Review contributor Jane Satterfield called "masterful subversions of myth and history," the poems in this collection are all told from the points of view of the women behind famous male figures, both real and fictional, including the wives and lovers of Aesop, Pontius Pilate, Faust, Tiresius, Herod, Quasimodo, Lazarus, Sisyphus, Freud, Darwin, and even King Kong. Not all the women are wives, however. For example, one poem is told from Medusa's point of view as she expresses her feelings before being slain by Perseus; "Little Red-Cap" takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood to a new level as a teenage girl is seduced by a "wolf-poet." These fresh perspectives allow Duffy to indulge in a great deal of humor and wit as, for example, Mrs. Aesop grows tired of her husband's constant moralizing, Mrs. Freud complains about the great psychologist's obsession with penises, Sisyphus's bride is stuck with a workaholic, and Mrs. Lazarus, after finding a new husband, has her life ruined by the return of her formerly dead husband. There are conflicting emotions as well in such poems as "Mrs. Midas," in which the narrator is disgusted by her husband's greed, but, at the same time, longs for something she can never have: his physical touch. "The World's Wife appeals and astonishes," said Satterfield. "Duffy's mastery of personae allows for seamless movement through the centuries; in this complementary chorus, there's voice and vision for the coming ones." An Economist reviewer felt that the collection "is savage, trenchant, humorous and wonderfully inventive at its best." And Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, concluded that "Duffy's takes on the stuff of legends are . . . richly rewarding."

Duffy has also written verses for children, many of which are published in Meeting Midnight and Five Finger-Piglets. The poems in Meeting Midnight, as the title indicates, help children confront their fears by addressing them openly. "They explore the hinterland in a child's imagination where life seems built on quicksand and nameless worries move in and will not leave," explained Kate Kellaway in an Observer review. Kellaway also asserted that "these are real poems by one of the best English poets writing at the moment."

In addition to her original poetry, Duffy has edited two anthologies, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists and Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, and has adapted eight classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales in Grimm Tales. Not intended for young children but for older children and young adults in drama and English classes, Grimm Tales includes adaptations of such stories as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Golden Goose," which are rewritten "with a poet's vigor and economy, combining traditions of style with direct, colloquial dialogue," according to Vida Conway in School Librarian.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, winter, 2001, Jane Satterfield, review of The World's Wife, p. 123.

Booklist, March 1, 1994, p. 1260; April 1, 2000, Ray Olson, review of The World's Wife, p. 1426.

Book Report, September, 1994, p. 49

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1994, Betsy Hearne, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, pp. 184-185; September, 1996, Betsy Hearne, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, pp. 9-10.

Economist, March 18, 2000, "Whose Voice Is It Anyway?," p. 14.

Guardian Weekend, September 25, 1999, Katherine Viner, "Metre Maid," pp. 20-26.

Horn Book, May, 1994, Nancy Vasilakis, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, p. 329.

Independent (London, England) October 2, 1999, Christina Patterson, "Street-wise Heroines at Home," p. WR9.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 1994, Review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, p. 66; June 15, 1996, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, p. 897.

Mosaic (Winnipeg, Canada), September, 1998, Danette DiMarco, "Exposing Nude Art: Carol Ann Duffy's Response to Robert Browning," pp. 25-39.

New Statesman, November 29, 1999, review of Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-first Century, p. 83.

Observer (London, England), August 15, 1999, review of The World's Wife (audio version), p. 14; October 24, 1999, Kate Kellaway, review of Meeting Midnight, p. 13.

School Librarian, November, 1992, Doris Telford, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, p. 154; May, 1996, Vida Conway, review of Grimm Tales, p. 70; summer, 1999, review of Five Finger-Piglets, p. 96.

School Library Journal, January, 1994, p. 66; August, 1996, Sharon Korbeck, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, p. 168.

Sunday Times, March 28, 1999, Richard Brooks, "Laureate Favourite Tells of Lesbian Love," p. N5.

Theology, May-June, 1997, James Woodward, review of Stopping for Death, pp. 234-235.

Times Educational Supplement, January 22, 1999, review of The Pamphlet, p. 13; April 23, 1999, review of Five Finger-Piglets, p. 27; December 17, 1999, review of The World's Wife, p. 22; January 19, 2001, John Mole, review of The Oldest Girl in the World, p. F20.

Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 1995, p. 24; July 7, 1995, p. 32; December 3, 1999, Alan Brownjohn, review of The World's Wife, p. 24.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 1994, p. 48; October, 1996, p. 238.