Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy, more formally Dame Carol Ann Duffy, is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is most famous for her poetry, becoming England’s first female, first Scottish, and first LGBTQ Poet Laureate between 2009 and 2019.

Duffy says that as a poet, she does not like complex words. She prefers simple words that express complexity.

Fig. 1 - Carol Ann Duffy is a prominent Scottish poet who is still studied in schools and universities today.

Carol Ann Duffy's biography

Born in Glasgow on December 23, 1955, Carol Ann Duffy moved to Stafford, England at age six. Her father, Frank Duffy, was an electrical fitter who also ran unsuccessfully as a Labour parliamentary candidate and successfully managed the Stafford FC football club. Her mother, Mary, is the subject of a few of her poems, most notably the eulogy Before You Were Mine (1993).

She attended various convent schools, where teachers encouraged her creative writing ability. She began publishing her poetry in magazines and pamphlets at age 15 when her teacher sent her poetry to publisher Bernard Stone.

At 16, she met and moved in with poet Adrian Henri. Although she says that he was not exactly faithful, she also mentions that he gave her confidence in her poetry. She lived with him until they separated in 1982.

Following school, she began a Philosophy degree at Liverpool University, which she completed in 1977. While at university she composed two plays, which were performed at the Liverpool Playhouse, and published a pamphlet, Fifth Last Song (1977).

After leaving university, Duffy worked at The Guardian and Ambit, a poetry magazine. In 1983, she won The National Poetry Competition and began to publish collections of poetry starting with her breakthrough work, Standing Female Nude (1985). She has also written several plays and many works of literature for children and adults.

Other than spending a decade as England’s Poet Laureate, Duffy has won the Scottish Art Council Award, The Costa Award, and the T.S Eliot award. In 1999, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Outside of numerous literary and poetry awards, she was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British (OBE) in 1995, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 2015.

She holds multiple honorary degrees from the University of Hull, University of Dundee, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Warwick. As if this were not impressive enough, Duffy is also an Honorary Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.

Currently, Duffy lives in Manchester where she is the Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Duffy is in a long-term relationship with Scottish poet Jackie Kay, with whom she has a daughter, Ella Benson (1995).

Carol Ann Duffy: fun facts

Here are some facts to summarise Carol Ann Duffy's life and works.

Carol Ann Duffy’s poems

Best known as a poet, Duffy's poems are both accessible and literary. Her overarching themes include the use of language, the nature of reality, gender inequality, alienation, love, and contemporary culture. Political, social, and philosophical themes run through her work.

Similar to Literary Realist novelists, she uses everyday vernacular that can be deceptively simple. This type of day-to-day language in literature is called demotic language. Elements of surrealism, dry humor, and nostalgia are also a part of her distinctive style.

By addressing contemporary themes in contemporary language, Duffy creates modern poetry, updating traditional poetic forms like the internal monologue or the sonnet. Her use of demotic language has led some critics to link her to classical poets like Wordsworth, while her use of the dramatic monologue has been compared to Browning and Eliot.¹

'Mean Time' (1993)

'Mean Time' is a four-stanza poem from an anthology of the same name, published in 1993. It was awarded the Forward Prize.

The title is deliberately separated into two words as opposed to one, meantime. This immediately creates multiple meanings and interpretations of Mean Time. It is now, it is while something else happens, it is an interval of time. It is also mean, as in not pleasant or even cruel. This sets the scene for the main analogy of the darkness that comes with daylight savings and the loss of love.

Structure

The poem consists of four four-line stanzas that do not conform to a rhyme scheme except for the last stanza, where lines 1 and 4 rhyme. In addition, various meters are used including anapaestic, iambic, and trochaic meters. These serve to create structural complexity and variation in what is a simple poem on the surface.

Devices

Duffy makes use of both assonance and consonance in Mean Time. Assonance can be spotted in the use of the long ‘e' sounds in ‘bleak’ and ‘street’ or short ‘i’ sounds in ‘light’ and ‘life’. The latter is also an example of consonance, as is the use of ‘felt’ and ‘heart’. These two devices are particularly useful for creating rhythm in a poem.

'Valentine' (1993)

'Valentine' was published in the Mean Time collection in 1993. This poem subverts the commercially accepted Valentine gift or expression of love by using an onion as a symbol of love, instead of heart-shaped candy or something similarly cliched.

Fig. 1 - Valentine's onion.

Form

The poem is written as a first-person dramatic monologue with no rhyme scheme. First-person dramatic monologue creates a sense of intimacy with the reader as well as introduce the concept of irregularity or a lack of perfection. This sense of the irregular or off-balance is used to convey the ups and downs of love in a variety of structural ways.

The form also includes the use of long and short stanzas and irregular sentence lengths. It is a Duffy trademark to use the form of a poem to emphasise her point.

Devices

The poem is an extended metaphor where love and an onion are so closely compared that they become almost inseparable by the final stanza.

Alliteration is used to convey the predictability and perceived perfection of traditional Valentine's gifts such as ‘cute cards’ or ‘red roses’. Duffy’s use of the onion metaphor makes the point that love is not balanced or twee or perfect. Her use of alliteration for the juxtaposed and more one-sided Valentine's gifts uses both form and meaning for emphasis.

The second stanza makes use of enjambment to create both pace and a sense of tension or unease.

Why is Carol Ann Duffy important?

Other than being critically acclaimed and award-winning in the literary world, people who may not read much poetry otherwise also read Duffy’s work. This is an unusual combination and serves to promote the widespread appreciation of poetry within popular culture.

As a woman and particularly as an LGBTQ woman, Duffy brings a different perspective to poetry, which is a genre that is often dominated by famous men. Her work is contemporary and accessible without being simplistic. She writes about things like love and even David Beckham. These are everyday subjects relevant to everyday people, delivered in everyday language. This approach helps to make her work more relatable to more people.

Her use of humour and colloquial language does not detract from the more serious political, societal, and philosophical issues her poems raise. This makes her relevant on many readership levels from the lay reader to the literary world and academia.

1. Deryn Rees-Jones, Carol Ann Duffy, Northcote House, Writers and Their Work Series. 1999.