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The Women's Review of Books
May 1995
Remembering Life before Thatcher
Jody Allen-Randolph
| That the English and American poetry worlds are openly suspicious
of each other is nothing new. In England, aside from some interest in Robert
Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, less in C.K. Williams and Sharon Olds, and the
unending journalistic assault on Sylvia Plath, there is little enthusiasm
for contemporary American poetry. When I press American poets on this subject, the usual reply is that there are no contemporary English poets worth reading, although the exception is often made for Philip Larkin and, less frequently, Ted Hughes. Irish poets like Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland have found large American audiences, yet it remains true that no British poet since Dylan Thomas has made a significant impact on American taste. As I look back over several decades, it seems clear that English poetry has suffered a retreat into parochialism, a retreat that may disguise a traumatic introspection about the transition from imperial state to welfare society. From 1950 onward, English poetry has narrowed into a populist stance. Anachronistic and deeply conservative, the upper levels of the English poetry establishment are dominated by a fraternity of editors and critics who have specialized in building big reputations on the slenderest grounds. A coterie of male poets -- Craig Raine, Andrew Motion, James Fenton, Blake Morrison, Alan Jenkins and Christopher Reid -- review, edit, anthologize and run the major publishers' poetry lists. Here in the US, English editor Tina Brown's decision to run long, tedious swaths of English poet Craig Raine's verse novel in The New Yorker has reinforced the worst American suspicions -- both of the English publishing coteries and of the inflated reputations they generate. What then, one might well ask, is the situation for England's women poets? While increasing numbers of younger women poets are being published by the more progressive English publishers -- Bloodaxe and Carcanet, for example -- the older generations seem to have been shown their places and kept them. There is no woman poet who, like Adrienne Rich in the US or Eavan Boland in Ireland, has taken on the burden of rocking the patriarchal boat. There is no woman poet who has risen to the stature of a Rich or a Boland, or a Louise Gluck, for that matter. England's senior women poets -- Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Jenny Joseph, Carol Rumens, Vicki Feaver -- seem, even more noticeably under the circumstances, to suffer from modest aspirations and that vice anglais, gentility. Against This Gloomy Backdrop of coterie and auxiliary, Carol Ann Duffy is a sparkling exception. Publishing four volumes with Anvil Press over the past decade -- Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993) -- Duffy is one of the most courageous and original talents to emerge in British poetry for years. As the poet who has most broken for years. As the poet who has most broken with tradition and most successfully established independence from the coteries, she is well on her way to becoming the central poet of her generation. Now that Penguin, in association with Anvil Press, has brought out Duffy's Selected Poems in Britain, perhaps we can hope that an American publisher will soon transport her to this side of the Atlantic. Born in Glasgow in 1955, Duffy moved to Staffordshire as a child. She was educated at Liverpool University, where she studied philosophy, before moving to London, where she now works as a freelance writer. Duffy has edited an anthology called I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists (Henry Holt, 1992), and has worked extensively in theater. Selected Poems contains poetry she chose from her first four volumes, together with six poems from her work-in-progress, The World's Wife. Duffy's style varies between a shorthanded free verse -- clipped phrases and one-word sentences -- and formal stanzaic work in traditional rhyme-schemes. Her dominant stance is the heroic within the populist: imagine, she constantly bids us, yourself in the place of people who life "like you do, a dozen slack rope-ends/ in each dream hand..." Her dominant form, which opens and closes Selected Poems, is the dramatic monologue. These reverberate with a babel of voices, giving Duffy's verse a feeling of density and population. They cover a virtuoso's broad range: from a woman in mid-life depression ("I've let myself go, I know./ Children? I've had three/ and don't even know them"); from more than a few psychopaths ("...The cat/ knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself./ ...The budgie is panicking"); to a dying Holocaust victim ("Tell them I sang the ancient psalms at dusk/ inside the wire and strong men wept..."). If Larkin, Duffy's most obvious progenitor, was, as A. Alvarez described him, the poet of "post-war provincial England in all its dreariness, with the boredom of shortages no longer justified, the cheap plastic surfaces of things nobody wants and everybody buys," then Duffy is the poet of post-postwar England: Thatcher's England, sitting in anaesthetized unconcern in front of television's perpetual violence, indifferent to social problems and decreased employment prospects, suffering from the severe privatization of meaningful experience. In "Comprehensive," fourteen-year-old Wayne tells us: ...I support the
National Front. Paki-bashing and pulling girls' knickers down. Duffy specializes in giving voice to the outcast -- the criminal,
the mentally ill, the rejected, the unemployed, the immigrant. In "Foreign,"
she bids us: "Imagine living in a strange, dark city for twenty years./ There
are some dismal dwellings on the east side/ and one of them is your... ."
Later in the poem, you see "a name for yourself sprayed in red/ against a
brick wall. A hate name. Red like blood." By using the eye of the outcast
as her lens on English society, Duffy relocates the illustrative experiences
of contemporary Englishness precisely in the voices of the traditionally
disenfranchised. In doing so, she exposes narrow assumptions of a centralized,
orthodox Englishness as simply points of view within a wider, more discordant
medley of perspectives. I want it back. The Captain. The one with all the answers. Bzz. Here and elsewhere in Selected Poems, nostalgia for a vanished cultural
life dominates the private life, and empties the present of its reality.
Moments from the past seem more real to Duffy's speakers than the present.
These poems about nostalgia function both as social satire and as elegy, registering
the loss of the communal aspects of cultural life for which rock-and-roll
music is only one metaphor. In an England where it is increasingly less
likely that any two people will have seen the same TV program, read the
same book, or shared any culture at all in a meaningful sense, this is a
poignant lost and a true deprivation. But the word was
out. Some would never fall in love had they not heard of Duffy shares Larkin's tragic view of life. Failure, loneliness, isolation and emptiness haunt her verse. Yet reading her is anything but dispiriting. She has an optimistic side that Larkin did not, most visible in her many love poems. One love poem in particular, "Warming Her Pearls," is simply masterful: Next to my own
skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, resting in the
Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She's beautiful.
I dream about her in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall In her original and subversive use of the mistress/ servant trope,
Duffy has created a drama of class, gender, power, intimacy and desire that
radically restates the traditional love poem. Moving beyond ornament, the
pearls -- scented, milky, warmed slowly with body heat -- become the dangerous,
provocative object of relation between the two women, and the symbol of the
anguish of unfulfilled longing. Selected Poems, by Carol Ann Duffy. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1994, 152 pp., £5.99 paper. |