Carol Ann Duffy: Feminine Gospels

By GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

The test of a compelling, readable narrative is how brisk it is, how fast it runs. But not much poetry these days gallops across the page even when it is telling stories.

Though it may be written in accessibly common speech, much of it tends to stutter along and turn in on itself in deeply personal ways.

The Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, with a sardonic shrug, recently told young American poets the impression he had from most of their work was, "I'm hurting inside".

Well, rhapsodist for women Carol Ann Duffy never lets any hurt she may feel linger painfully inside and then emerge as tortured poetry.

She transforms it into glittering stories that move with the pace of ballads, if on more complicated rhythms. The best way to read her is quickly, though the first impression may be of glibness - and then more closely and then more closely again. That way, you understand that, racy though the river is, it runs deeper than at first you think.

This is the seventh collection by Duffy since 1985 and has made her probably the widest-read serious poet in Britain today.

I reluctantly use the word but, yes, she is a literary celebrity. Feminine Gospels can be expected to sell at least 30,000 copies, mainly to women, whom she writes about with gusto. Booksellers in Auckland report she sells as well here as any contemporary poet.

Born in the Gorbals of Glasgow, she is the eldest of five, with four younger brothers. When she was 6, the family moved to the Midlands town of Stafford where she went to a convent and later Stafford Girls' High. She says she decided at age 14 to become a poet.

In 1974, she went to Liverpool to attend university and lived with head of the Grimms band, Adrian Henri, through most of the decade. She now shares a home with poet and novelist Jackie Kay, and in 1995 decided to have a child (a daughter, Ella, as it turned out), "without the involvement of a father", according to a biographical note.

Duffy greatly expanded her audience with The World's Wife, published in 1999, in which every poem was the voice of the wife of a great historical figure - Shakespeare, Aesop, the kings Midas and Herod, and others.

Duffy writes not only in the language of the street but of contemporary figures - the late corporate fraudster Robert Maxwell, for example - and she has sharply satirised the condescension of some men towards women.



Feminine Gospels is all about women and their concerns from an historical as well as contemporary perspective - the exploitation of beauty from Helen of Troy to Princess Diana, diet, shopping, the drudgery of housework, love and more.

But the centrepiece is a long poem called The Laughter at Stafford Girls' High, written in 13-line stanzas with a forward-thrusting, tensile, mostly anapaestic rhythm that never lets up. It starts:

"It was a girl in the Third Form,

Carolyn Clare, who, bored with the lesson, the rivers of England

Brathay, Coquet, Crake, Dee, Don, Goyt,

Rothay, Tyne, Swale, Tees, Wear, Wharfe

had passed a note, which has never been found,

to a classmate in front, Emily Jane, a girl

who adored the teacher, Miss V Dunn MA?

steadily squeaking her chalk on the board

Allen, Clough, Duddon, Feugh, Greta, Hindburn,

Irwell, Kent, Leven, Lowther, Lune, Sprint

but who furtively opened the folded note,

torn from the back of the King James Bible, read

what was scribbled there and laughed out loud.

The laughter infects the class, then neighbouring classes, and finally the whole school, which it gradually destroys.

The poem allegorically tells of inter-generational change - the liberation of the girls in a way that underscores the emotional suppression and depressed lives of their teachers. Gradually, some of the teachers are freed and some are broken.

The poems in Feminine Gospels are similar in style and tone, sometimes confrontational, at others heavily ironic.

I was caught up with these verses, both moved and amused. They're so original I need to wait a few months and go back to them before I can decide whether they're just clever, or more enduring than that.

Her work has been compared to that of the late acute observer of individuals Philip Larkin - which to me is incomprehensible. Their poetry couldn't be more different. Larkin's verse moves with a kind of sighing gait and his view of the human race is essentially bleak, or is that because I've heard too much of it read by the poet himself?

Duffy's, on the other hand, though often belligerent is always upbeat and ebullient, energetic and engaging.

* Picador, $39.95

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist.