Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Reading this collection, I have an exhilarating sense of a poet selling herself free. Duffy is primarily a conceptual poet: she writes each poem to a concept which is worked out in advance or at least early on. She is accordingly a very deliberate writer; stylistic features common in her previous work, like the sudden interjection of short phrases and single words, are intended to create the impression of spontaneity in a carefully worked-out piece. Duffy is entirely open about this deliberation. When interviewed by Vicci Bentley for Magma 3 in October 1994, she was asked how long it takes her to write a poem:

It varies. I can start a poem and complete it maybe in a couple of weeks if I have a pretty relaxed schedule and can work on it for a few hours every day. If it’s a long poem like the ones in The World’s Wife, it may take several months to write, because of the research involved. For Mrs Quasimodo’s Divorce, I had to reread the Hugo novel and dig out the Charles Laughton film, so there’s a lot of work before you put pen to paper. But once you start, it’s pretty obsessional - it will be in your head for two or three months.

It is striking that, five years ago, Duffy had the title of this latest collection and was already advanced in writing it. The interview quotes from Mrs Midas and Mrs Aesop, and quotes Mrs Darwin in full. Duffy comments: “I’ve given myself two years to complete The World’s Wife”. The fact that it has taken five years indicates no lessening of the care with which she writes. Rather, the freedom of The World’s Wife comes from a unifying concept: to write thirty poems in the voices of various women.

Some are from classical myth with Little Red Ridinghood (renamed Little Red-cap to point up her revolutionary potential) representing folk myth. Some are actual women, biblical (Delilah, Salome, Pilate’s wife) and more recent (Pope Joan, Anne Hathaway, Mrs Darwin and Frau Freud). The largest group are the wives of unpraised famous men, classical (Midas, Tiresias, Aesop, Sisyphus, Pygmalion and Icarus), biblical (Lazarus) and literary (Faust, Quasimodo, Rip van Winkle and the Beast, as in Beauty and). Finally and most originally, there are the female versions of hitherto male figures: Queen Herod, Queen Kong, the Kray Sisters and Elvis’s twin sister.

In every case we hear the voice of a woman freeing herself from the historical role defined by her relationship with a famous man. By the time they have finished, Midas is no longer the fabulously wealthy king of antiquity but a “fool who wished for gold” who ends up living alone in a caravan in the woods; Aesop, obsessed with finding moral meanings in everything, “could bore for Purgatory”; and Pygmalion is frightened off by the sexual demands of the marble woman he brings to life. Mordant, self-aware, sometimes angry, sometimes mocking, these woman declare themselves terminally unimpressed by the men with whom they are inevitably associated.

In rendering their voices, their newfound freedoms, Duffy frees herself from the self-imposed constraints of her earlier work. The parallel is satisfyingly multilayered. First and most obviously, it transforms the length, form and tone of the poems. In her four previous collections - Standing Female Nude, Selling Manhattan, The Other Country and Mean Time - very few poems spread onto a second page, none except sequences onto a third. The great majority are 12 to 24 lines in length and are in four-square form with chunky stanzas in basically five-stress lines. Duffy has written little free verse, most of it undistinguished apart from the fierce Plath-like Valentine. Finally, the tone of the poems has been unremittingly serious, usually sombre. Even the anti-Thatcher satires in The Other Country (Weasel Words, Poet for Our Times, Making Money and The Act of Imagination) are angry rather than funny.

The impression given by the four previous books is of an intensely serious poet who has restricted herself to particular lengths, forms and tone in case her essential seriousness is underrated, or possibly because her poetry is written as an act of considered will, not with spontaneity. In temperament as well as style, she has struck me as closer to Hardy than anyone else. Certainly her work lacks the provisional, instinctual quality of the writers with whom, in range and commitment, she should now be compared: Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.

With The World’s Wife, there is a transformation. Most of the poems are two or more pages in length, with Mrs Faust, Euridyce and Mrs Quasimodo running to five and six. At the other extreme, Mrs Darwin is the shortest poem Duffy has published:

7 April 1852.

Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him-
Something about that Chimpanzee over there
                                                   reminds me of you.

The poems have a range of forms and a fluency not previously seen in Duffy’s work. As an example, there is much greater use of free verse. And so with tone. While many of the poems are serious, there is now a lightness of touch which creates many funny moments. Mrs Rip van Winkle who has taken up art during her husband’s long sleep:

Until the day
I came home with this pastel of Niagara
and he was sitting up in bed rattling Viagra.

Mrs Aesop recounting the “appalling evening stroll” when her husband can across “an old hare snoozing in a ditch - he stopped and made a note” and then a tortoise creeping up the road...

The Kray Sisters’
                                                  Rule Number One-
          A boyfriend’s for Christmas, not just for life.

There is also a delight in wordplay : Frau Freud’s piling up of words for penis; in Salome the endless play of half-rhymes with ‘platter’ leading to the grimly sardonic last lines:

I flung back the sticky red sheets
and there, like I said - and ain’t life a bitch -
was his head on a platter.

Similarly in Mrs Sisyphus the rhymes and half-rhymes on ‘work’ throughout the poem prepare for the last line with Sisyphus “giving one hundred per cent and more to his work”. (The origin of this skill was revealed by Duffy in her Magma interview: “What happens with me is that my first lines always end up as the last line of the poem, which is a strange bad habit.”)

The World’s Wife is also a brilliant development of Duffy’s interest in the dramatic monologue, written in the voice of a persona. In her first two books, nearly half the poems are in this genre; The Other Country and Mean Time, with their greater proportion of personal poems, have far fewer. Many are written in the voices of unhappy or disturbed women. Interestingly, at least as many are written as from disturbed or dangerous men: psychopaths (Education for Leisure, Psychopath), a woman killer (Human Interest), a macho bully (You Jane), a burglar (Stealing), an illiterate nuclear survivor (Descendants), a hit man (Too Bad), an obsessional taxidermist (Stuffed). There are also several poems apparently spoken by damaged children.

Although keenly aware of men’s capacity for violence, physical and emotional, until now Duffy has been cautious. The poems dealing with this theme have not been among her best. Only in two earlier monologues does the woman achieve a kind of strength: Standing Female Nude where she is a professional artist’s model and The Literature Act where an imaginary law enables her to use a poem in defence against a brutal husband.

Again, The World’s Wife transforms Duffy’s previous stance. Men’s violence is faced and outdone. Delilah cuts oft Samson’s hair to make him non-violent and therefore civilised. The abused Mrs Quasimodo rips out the tongues of her husbands beloved bells. Circe prepares to eat the sailors she has turned into pigs:

                                                                Mash
the potatoes, nymph, open the beer. Now to the brains,
to the trotters, shoulders, chops, to the sweetmeats slipped
from the slit, bulging, vulnerable bag of the balls...

This poem expresses the most destructive feelings in the book. Interestingly it comes immediately after The Devil’s Wife, the books only sequence which is placed at its centre. Alone in the collection, these poems are unsuccessful because they lack emotional commitment. They attempt to portray Myra Hindley as the modern equivalent of a witch and fail because the poet visibly does not believe that Brady was, or was inspired by, the Devil. Circe is thus the emotional extremity of the book, an outpouring of horrific gloating violence towards which the other poems build and which is finally ‘placed’ by the unifying Mrs Beast.

Elsewhere the violence is distanced by myth or humour: in Little Red-cap the bearded hermit poet becomes a wolf who is slain (with a nod towards Angela Carter’s Company of Wolves) when the girl has learnt all she can from him; Queen Herod sends her soldiers to kill any potential boyfriends for her infant daughter; the Kray Sisters rule London for the good of all: “There was none of this mugging old ladies / or touching young girls”.

Perhaps the most moving poems are those where the violence is the destruction of a previously loving relationship: Mrs Midas’s terrified realisation that they must separate for her to survive, ending “I miss most, I even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch”; and Mrs Lazarus who, having mourned her bereavement and begun to recover, is faced with:

He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mothers crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud
moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew...

Finally, given the public comment on why Duffy may not have been chosen as Poet Laureate, lesbian relationships arise only occasionally, as is perhaps expected in poems dealing chiefly with relationships with men. Queen Herod feels the desire of the black Queen, one of the Three Magae; Mrs Tiresias, whose husband has turned into a woman, takes a female lover; and the Kray Sisters are presented almost parodically as Cockney butches whose pin-ups, somewhat improbably, are Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis. Before Duffy’s sequence of love poems in The Other Country, the only two previous lesbian poems were both written as personae: Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer in Standing Female Nude and Warming Her Pearls - perhaps the most erotic poem Duffy has written - in Selling Manhattan. Given better known speakers, both would fit without difficulty into The World’s Wife.

The climax of the book, though not quite its last poem, is Mrs Beast, a conscious summation of the themes of the book and, for my money, one of the great poems of the century. It advises against seeking a Prince, a pretty boy who will infallibly be unfaithful, and recommends a Beast, a man who is revoltingly ugly and therefore grateful and obedient, especially if he is sexually well-endowed. The poem omits nothing of the physical reality of such a relationship, then moves on to a parody of men’s poker nights in American films:

                                       On my Poker nights
the Beast kept out of sight. We were a hard school,
                                                                tough as fuck,
all of us beautiful and rich...

At the end of the evening, these successful women stand and toast the women who have suffered down the ages:

              Eve. Ashputtel. Marilyn Monroe.
Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair.
Bessie Smith unloved and down and out.
Bluebeard’s wives, Henry VIII’s, Snow White
cursing the day she left the seven dwarfs, Diana,
Princess of Wales.

The poem ends with Mrs Beast alone on her balcony. praying:

thumbing my pearls, the tears of Mary, one by one,
like a rosary - words for the lost, the captive beautiful,
the wives, the less fortunate than we.

And she turns, finally, to the lesser satisfactions:

               Bring me the Beast for the night.
Bring me the wine-cellar key. Let the less loving one
                                                                            be me.

With Mrs Beast, as with the whole book, Duffy rewrites some of western civilisation’s major myths. The World’s Wife is the most radical book of poetry to be published for years in that it systematically undermines the myths by which masculinity has been sustained for millennia. If Duffy can do this for thirty male archetypes, she can do it for all of them. It occupies the same emotional territory as Susan Faludi’s Stiffed but, because it deals with myths, does so permanently. I suspect the book will win no awards except those awarded to women by women, but this will not prevent it from standing as the major achievement of British poetry at this end of the century and millennium.