REVIEW: Carol Ann Duffy, Stone Book Festival

Many thanks to Rebecca Toney for sending this brilliant review of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s Stone Book Festival poetry reading at St Dominic’s Priory School on Sunday 19th September.

I thought that we were in the wrong place. At 6.20pm around 20 people had barely made a dent in the plate of biscuits (and coffee) on arrival. I wondered if the missing masses had, like us, got pleasantly way-laid in the secret garden of St Dominic’s Priory School. More likely, said my friend, they were watching X-Factor and eating frozen pizza. This sounds mean, snobby, ungrateful even: for right now it’s Boot Camp wherein lie the real laughs. And the cruellest voyeurism.

“But she is the Poet Laureate!” I kept saying as I gazed at the empty seats.  I was embarrassed that this was the best Stone could do. Last year was a sell-out at The Crown Hotel. I had sat squeezed like a sardine behind the Vice-Chancellor of Staffordshire University.

Carol Ann started with Mrs Midas from The World’s Wife which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who, like me, is scared of poetry, put off by what I assume I won’t understand. The World’s Wife is a series of poems written from the fictional perspective of the wives of some of the world’s famous (and infamous) men.

Mrs Midas is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also rich in imagery which provides a vitality and life to the poem long after the laugh. I love most the way in which Carol Ann uses what I think is personification (I’m dredging my memory of English at school). Carol Ann read Mrs Midas last year and this year I showed off to my friend by getting in there first with a sort-of accurate recollection of a breathing kitchen. Mrs Midas begins,

It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun
to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen
filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath
gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,
then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow.

Metaphor and simile also feature in Carol Ann’s work. In Text (published in her most recent work, Love poems), Duffy begins,

I tend the mobile now
Like an injured bird.

In Adultery the verse sneers,

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… the slicing of innocent onions
Scalds you to tears. Then, selfish autobiographical sleep

In a marital bed, the tarnished spoon of your body
Stirring betrayal, …

These lines are deceptively simple. The first two make me sad. The second four make me sick. Carol Ann exposes the underbelly of the everyday. Or, in works like Virgil’s Bees, the wonder of the wonderful (in Bees, the majesty of this endangered creature).

Duffy was accompanied at her reading by John Sampson. A jolly fellow, John played a curious array of instruments – flutes, whistles and what looked like my treble recorder from school.  I wasn’t expecting him but he made me laugh. And reminded me that Carol Ann is not your everyday Poet Laureate.

I hope that Carol-Ann comes back next year. The way she reads is so evocative. Not clipped or refined. Not gritty or reliant on a tuneful or trendy accent. But there’s something, something non-verbal about the way she reads. Carol-Ann signed my copy of Love Poems and I confess to taking it home and, later that week, trying to read a poem or two out loud, like her.

But my mouth doesn’t move like hers. Nor, sadly, does my pen. But my ears and my heart and my soul, I think, hear a little of what she says – in words and not-words – judging by my laughter and tears, the butterflies in my tummy and a shiver down my spine that evening.

Carol Ann Duffy was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. Carol Ann lives in Manchester and is Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She became Poet Laureate in 2009, succeeding Andrew Motion.