Depending on your exam board and your
tendency to flick through to more interesting poems in the Anthology
while your teacher tried desperately to make another Gillian Clarke
poem about lambing interesting, then like me you most likely first
encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy around the age of fifteen.
At the time I remember being somewhat taken aback by her graphic and
sometimes violent descriptive and sexual poetry, though enjoying it a
lot more than descriptions of Welsh farmhouses (sorry Gillian).
However, sadly Duffy was not one of the poets on the required study
list of AQA English Language GCSE, and so I largely forgot about
Duffy and her vibrant imagery until a friend gave me ‘The World’s
Wife’ for my birthday last year.
The central concept of the poems that
make up ‘The World’s Wife’ is an amazingly simple and brilliant
one: Duffy writes each poem from the perspective of the wife (or
unmarried partner) of famous men in history. How often have we all
wondered what we would see if we could be a fly on the wall in the
private life of statesmen, philosophers or scientists? What would
they actually be like as people? Well, here Duffy gives us a
fabulously irreverent and feminist take on great men from the
perspective of long-suffering spouses. This is a collection of poems
that run the gamut from funny to poignant, to sometimes righteously
angry, from short and pithy to lengthy and intricate. For instance,
‘Mrs Darwin’, manages to be guffaw-worthy in barely two lines:
‘7 April 1852. Went to the Zoo. I said to Him - Something
about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.’ Others are
surprisingly heart-breaking: ‘Queen Kong’ (where the female
counterpart to the more well-known King turns her human lover into a
necklace after his death to keep him close to her heart) stayed with
me for days, as did ‘Delilah’.
The collection of poems manages to
capture emotions common to us all, and ones that we can imagine being
heightened as an unacknowledged and forgotten spouse of a celebrated
public figure. We have disappointment, anger and revenge following
from betrayed love and loyalty in ‘Mrs Quasimodo’ and ‘Mrs
Tiresias’; lust and disillusionment (‘Little Red-Cap’);
frustration and boredom (‘Mrs Aesop’), and countless other poems
dealing with loss, pain and the dark side of love. This could make
for a depressing read, or become mired in perceived feminist cynicism
towards romantic love, but Duffy has a lightness of touch that means
that even the darkest and most ostensibly disturbing poems retain an
undercurrent of dark humour, and reimagine these shadow women as
active and relatable individuals, not powerless victims of
circumstance or mere adjuncts of their famed partners. As feminist
poetry goes, it combines both anger and fun, and the poetic skill
that means it deserves a wide and varied audience. Men will find
much to relate to in the deconstruction of relationships as much as
women will delight in the non-male-defined perspective. The passage
of time and contemplation of death conveyed by sentences such as:
‘The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near the wise,
drowned silence of the dead’ (Eurydice), speak to the universal
human experience, whether male or female.
I don’t think I
can continue much longer to outline the collection without descending
further into hyperbole, so I will merely urge you to read for
yourself, and further whet your appetite with another amusing and
illustrative example of the poetry of the World’s Wife:
Mrs Icarus
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute,
Grade A pillock.
Happy poetry reading, folks!
NS
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