Feminine Gospels

Product Information

Her many collections include Mean Time , Love Poems and The Bees , which won the Costa Poetry Award. How a person deals with the ever day situations in life helps to better understand a person as a whole.

Throughout, Duffy makes some shrewd observations, and poses some fascinating thoughts and questions; in ‘The Long Queen’, for instance, she asks: ‘What was she queen of? Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana, the latter constantly told to “ act like a fucking princess by “the men from the press -/ Give us a smile, cunt. The longest poem, although my least favourite, “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High,” is the one where the poet’s pure delight in language is clearly tangible.I was in awe when I read The Bees, and cheering for girl power when making my way through The World’s Wife. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

Sometimes erotic and personal, sometimes historical and grand, sometimes witty and full of surprises, the poems here are all beautifully crafted works that are as varied in style as the poems in Duffy's earlier acclaimed volume The World's Wife. the quality never once slips and remains impressive throughout, but instead, it is personal connection that wavers. Apart from the little amount I did at school with my only remembered poem,"I wandered lonely as a cloud" by Wordsworth, I only recently decided to try poetry, hence Carol Ann Duffy as one bit of blurb I read, said "non-poetry readers should read her". In analyzing these two poems, it begins to look at subject matter, but a large part of what makes Duffy’s poetry important is the formatting and word choice.

Together, they will challenge and entertain as they explore the fullness of the female condition through their author's unique poetic voice. There are poems here that warrant a 5* rating to me (like "Loud" which I thought was amazing) and then there were others that I felt lukewarm about.

The Map-Woman’ is a powerful and thoughtful poem, about the experiences and places mapped upon a body; ‘Beautiful’ holds a few echoes of ‘The Lady of Shallot’; ‘The Diet’ is about a woman who starves herself so much that she ends up shrinking.

These poems are slightly aslant from the last volume of hers I read, The World's Wife, in that aside from "Beautiful," which is about the effect of beauty on Helen, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, the women she concerns herself with are those of the everyday, anonymous world.