John Redmond sums up Carol Ann Duffy in a contribution to Neil Corcoran’s Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry:
Characteristically, these monologues try to close the distance from their audience by imagining the reader to be immediately present (here, close enough to punch the speaker’s stomach). Like many of her other works, it adopts an attacking stance, the effect of which is to establish a sense of collective superiority which is shared with the intended audience. Duffy’s targets are the usual ones of Left-wing
3 comments:
If this really is an attempt to sum up C.A. Duffy it makes little sense. She has written many different kinds of poems, including the much-anthologised sonnet 'Prayer'. The only quote given is from a poem I don't remember (an apparently weak couplet, but nobody's perfect). Monologues? Which ones? Duffy ventriloquised a variety of voices, some of them aggressive or surly, pathologically detached or simply outcast and lonely (one of her best is the blackly comic 'Stealing'). Then there is the gently erotic 'Warming Her Pearls', which could hardly be described as having an 'attacking stance'.
There seem to be rather broad assumptions at work here. How could Redmond know that 'the effect' of many of Duffy's works 'is to establish a sense of collective superiority which is shared with the intended audience'? How could he know who the intended audience is or what effect Duffy's poetry/monologues has on it? Has he done some kind of vox-pop or survey? Speaking as a member of that audience, I can honestly state that Duffy's work has never left me feeling in the least superior. I enjoy the best of it for the usual reasons (the language, imagery, rhythm, etc.etc.).
Redmond's last sentence is downright snotty: 'Because her works do not require any special sources of knowledge to be understood, this sense of superiority is widely available and the invitation to share it is often taken up.' This is singularly Superior.
It reads to me like an all too accurate description of Duffy's style in Feminine Gospels and The World's Wife, which I thought represented a disastrous slump in form and stylistic bellyflop into the easy option.
I don't think it's easy having to sum up a poet in as short a space as JR has in his essay, so maybe a certain amount of blood-letting is inevitable.
If that summary only refers to Duffy's more recent work I think Redmond might have made a bit of space and stated this clearly. Not doing so suggests that he doesn't care if people think he's being dismissive of Duffy's oeuvre, which in turn suggests that he keeps an exquisitely elitist bee in his bonnet.
Regarding The World's Wife and Feminine Gospels, I can see where you (and perhaps Redmond) are coming from. But if you can accept the poems on their own terms, as playful riffs on old fables, the best of them work; 'Mrs Midas' is one of these I think. Not Duffy's strongest by any means, but the imagery and voice/music are compelling:
" ...And then he plucked
a pear from a branch we grew Fondante d’Automne –
and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On."
Well, I like it anyway.
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