Feminine Gospels

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When she wants to, Duffy can write with lyric intensity, noticing "where the lights from the shop ran like paint in the rain", observing a child's beauty in the glow under the skin of her hands, or watching the same child sleeping "with the whole moon held in your arms".

Duffy uses images of places she has lived in ‘Greengate Street’ and others in the stanza belonging to Stafford. Stafford is a city in which Duffy has lived for many years, perhaps suggesting that the Map-Woman is Duffy herself. The reference to ‘Beatles’ also alludes to Duffy’s childhood, growing up in Liverpool. The poem begins by focusing on the personal pronoun, ‘she’. Women are at the center of this poem and Duffy makes this evidently clear from the offset. Helen is said to be born ‘from an egg’, Duffy also focusing on the physicality of this figure in the opening line. It is interesting to note that even in fiction, women are exploited and prosecuted. The triple reception of ‘loved’ signals the happiness that Helen experiences. Now away from her perusers, she is able to experience the happiness of love. Yet, the men still follow her, wanting to contain her beauty from themselves. Duffy introduces a character who helps Helen, her female ‘maid’. This woman ‘loved her most’, loving her for herself instead of her beauty. Indeed, she would not ‘describe/one aspect of her face’, protecting Helen of Troy. Instead of furthering the iconic legend of Helen, she remains faithful, the only friendly character of this section is a female. This could be a mechanism through which Duffy suggests that women always support women, especially in retaliation to the male gaze. Duffy employs a form of epiphora at the end of the second stanza, ‘The whole world swooned’ echoing ‘The US whooped’. Now, her commodification has spread to the whole world, becoming an international sex symbol. She is abused and exploited for the whole world to see.The Long Queen‘ is split by Duffy into 7 stanzas, each measuring 6 lines. The consistency of structure throughout the poem could reflect the stability of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the queen ruling for a total of 45 years. The world this creature inhabits is apocalyptic, with the old alone and vulnerable to thieves in the night: The central theme explored within ‘ The Map-Woman‘ is identity. Duffy presents a woman who contains her identity within her skin. This acts as a metaphor for how events can shape who someone is. The fact that the map on her skin is permanent suggests the inescapability of identity. Duffy suggests where we grow up and childhood events are incredibly important, those moments etched on our skin forever.

Yet, Cleopatra is able to leverage her beauty to get what she wants, Duffy presents the woman’s power. The fact she reduces ‘Caesar’ to ‘gibbering’ displays the control she has. We know this is a sexual power by the location, ‘in bed’. Duffy suggests that Cleopatra gains power by accepting her beauty and using it to manipulate and control men. One of Britain's premiere poets here does what she does best, joining wild, surrealistic imagery and pointillist detail to create sharply realized, visionary poems . . . Duffy never settles for mere cleverness. Her poetic technique is sure and subtle.” — Patricia Monaghan, Booklist The use of consonance in /w/ across ‘witches, widows, wives’ creates an extended ‘w’ sound. This extended sound could reflect the unity of women, the harmonic consonance echoing through the images of women. The united sound becomes a reflection of the united women, everyone coming together under the figure of Elizabeth I. The final law that Elizabeth comes to represent is ‘Childbirth’, safety, and support to all those the ‘lie on the birthing beds’. Duffy presents the pain of childbirth, ‘screamed scarlet’ using the symbolism of deep red to reflect pain, and also the symbol of blood, inherent in childbirth. One technique that Duffy within Sub is a caesura. Caesura, a break or disruption within a line through punctuation, is used frequently within the poem. In doing this, Duffy emphasizes the words that come before and after the pause, adding moments of metrical disruption to pause the rhythm of the lines. One example of this, ‘tampon -‘ uses a caesura to emphasize the presence of the ‘tampon’, the symbol of menstruation, bringing in the feminine element within the masculine atmosphere of the football field. Duffy constantly balances her femininity with the acts she is achieving, doing so despite the patriarchal notions of a woman’s place.After her transformation, finally coming to terms with where she was born, nothing really changes. Duffy uses a rhetorical question to signal how the woman is still unsure of her own identity, ‘was she looking for?’. The semantics of death ‘ghost’, ‘dead in’, and ‘suicided letter’ could represent how her identity has been partly destroyed by this change. Yet, not to the extent she thought it would. She longed for a new start, a completely fresh approach to life. Indeed, there is a moment of false hope. Duffy writes, ‘sun glitter’. While ‘glittered’ may be understood as a moment of happiness and hope, it could also be a reference to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “ All that glisters is not gold”. Duffy states that this happiness is only a false promise. This is further suggested by ‘she rolled’, Cleopatra being the active participant in lines. Cleopatra ‘reached and pulled him down’, controlling Caesar with her intelligence and beauty. References to Queen Elizabeth I, who rejected various suitors. 'Long Queen' could be seen as patron saint of women, as she rejects most patriarchal standards The opening line of the poem instantly outlines what it going to be important within ‘ The Long Queen‘, the focus being on the Queen herself, and the length of her reign, ‘couldn’t die’. The harsh end stop following this line compounds a sense of certainty, the statement emphasized through this grammatical structure. As with all of Duffy’s work which I have read to date, her vocabulary has been carefully selected to create startling imagery, and originality prevails: ‘The sky was unwrapping itself, ripping itself into shreds’ (from ‘The Woman Who Shopped’). So much emphasis has been placed upon all of the senses, and the generational scope too is nothing short of masterful.

Duffy writes] with lyric intensity . . . She moves through the lives she invents with a kind of casual confidence.” — Elaine Feinstein, The Guardian (London) Duffy’s ‘The Long Queen’explores the historical figure of Queen Elizabeth I. Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she was the monarch that headed the Elizabethan age, in which England become a major European power in both political and artistic spheres. She was a popular queen, having a cordial relationship with Parliament and her subjects looking up to her rule. The first English Epic poem, ‘ The Faerie Queene‘ by Edmund Spenser revolves around Elizabeth I immortalized in the figure of ‘Gloriana’. Duffy draws upon the reputation of Elizabeth I, using the figure to begin her collection, Feminine Gospels, with an image of a strong, powerful, and well-respected woman in history. More in-depth references come with ‘ The Long Queen‘ refusing to marry, something Queen Elizabeth, also known as The Virgin Queen, cleverly avoided in her lifetime. The end of this section points to Cleopatra’s downfall, yet is much more subtle than the other sections. This is perhaps relating to how successful Cleopatra was in her life, her demise only a tiny part of her story. The historic romance of ‘armies changing sides, of cities lost forever in the sea’ creates a tone of reverence. Cleopatra is fantastically powerful, her demise coming from a self-inflicted ‘snake’ bite. This section ends with a powerful demonstration of Cleopatra’s success. The clever grammatical division, using caesura, or everything in this section coming before ‘of snakes’ represents her final moment. Death to a snake bite is her final act, ‘snakes’ bluntly finishing her section. Again, Duffy references the female body, blood from her period mixing with ‘soap suds’ and transforming the colour to ‘pink’. The feminine connotation of ‘pink’ being built from the mixture of water and blood, an undeniable sign that the female body is present and will not be hidden. Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.Carol Ann Duffy splits ‘The Map-Woman‘ into thirteen stanzas. Each of these measures a regular 10 lines. The incredibly stable form of the poem could reflect the content of a map, both relying on structure and logic. Although there is not a continuous rhyme scheme, there are moments of rhyme. Some of these are internal, which propel the meter of the poem onward, leading to moments of climax within the narrative. Rhyme is also used to connect key ideas, the final two lines relying on a couplet of ‘bone’ and ‘home’ to display the inescapable nature of identity. I have been a fan of Carol Ann Duffy’s for some years now; she is a wonderful poet, whose work always speaks to me. I was in awe when I read The Bees, and cheering for girl power when making my way through The World’s Wife. Her Christmas books are an absolute delight, and she has even introduced one of my favourite novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in the Vintage Classics edition. When I therefore found two of her poetry books whilst in an Oxfam bookshop, preparing for their Scorching Summer Reads project, I snapped them up immediately. I loved Rapture, but the second volume, Feminine Gospels, was something else entirely. The short, stunted ‘Beauty is fame’ is followed by a caesura. Duffy emphasizes the brutality of this line. Helen did not ask for beauty, yet she is made into an icon that must be pursued due to the male gaze. They look upon her and whisper her name, spreading her name across the globe. The perusers kill her husband, ‘sliced a last grin in his throat’, male rage and jealousy destroying Helen’s life. It is hard to imagine a poem Duffy couldn't write: a haiku? Please. Dactylic battlesong? Easy. In 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High', she takes straightforward narrative poetry and produces that rare thing - a long poem you don't want to end. A brilliant tale of a school transformed by a giggling epidemic, it sings because of her language (sky 'like Quink', the 'passionate cold/ of the snow'), her humour and, most of all, her ability to pin down a lifetime in half a line and, in a few more, tell private, dramatic, dazzling stories on which others would lavish a novel. Duffy’s brand of magical realism is glorious and memorable. ‘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. Duffy describes her as ‘Anorexia’s true daughter, a slip / of a girl, a shadow, dwindling away’. Allow me to share a passage from ‘The Woman Who Shopped’, in which a materialistic lady effectively turns into a department store: