£4.995
FREE Shipping

Feminine Gospels

Feminine Gospels

RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.995
£4.995 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

Upon deciding on a man to be with, Helen ‘fled’. Again, Duffy uses caesura to emphasize this word. The use of ‘fled’ plays into the semantics of hunter and prey, with Helen being reduced to a fleeing animal. The reaction to this escape inspires ‘War’, the grave impact of her beauty leading to total chaos. Helen is followed and prosecuted only for her beauty.

Duffy begins this stanza by focusing on the longevity of Cleopatra’s reign, ‘She never aged’. Once again Duffy begins a section by focusing on the female pronoun, ‘she’. Yet, the focus on ‘aged’ could link to the notion that women’s beauty fades as they age. Duffy could be retaliating against this idea, demonstrating how Cleopatra ‘never’ changed during her life. 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. Duffy rose to greater prominence in UK poetry circles after her poem "Whoever She Was" won the Poetry Society National Poetry Competition in 1983. [31]Duffy’s themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one: consequently, there is an interesting contrast between the postmodern content and the conservative forms. For the new National Qualifications Higher English Course in Scotland, Duffy's agents, RCW Literacy Agency, refused permission for her poem, "Originally," to be reproduced in the publicly accessible version of the paper. [40] Anthologise annual competition for schools [ edit ] The use of caesura, running through ‘twice a week, after school, for them both, seemed enough’, slows the meter of this line. Duffy reflects the intimate mood through this device, the slow meter reflecting their comfortable evenings. Indeed, the slow ambling of the meter could reflect their growing curiosity, getting more daring as they progress. The keyword, ‘seemed’ suggests that something about their relationship is going to change, this sole form of physical companionship not being enough for the women.

The stories of the women are told by a third person narrator. The tone is ironic and bleakly humorous. The pace is fast, relying particularly on lists that carry their own significance to the reader. Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize. 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. In 2011 Duffy, spearheaded a new poetry competition for schools, named Anthologise. The competition is administered by the Poetry Book Society and was launched by the Duchess of Cornwall in September 2011. School students aged 11–18 from around the UK were invited to create and submit their own anthologies of published poetry. The 2011 Anthologise judges were Duffy; Gillian Clarke (National Poet for Wales); John Agard; Grace Nichols and Cambridge Professor of Children's Poetry, Morag Styles. The first ever winners of Anthologise were the sixth form pupils of Monkton Combe School, Bath, with their anthology titled The Poetry of Earth is Never Dead, which was described by Duffy as "assured and accomplished as any anthology currently on the bookshelves." [41] Plays and songs [ edit ]

Join Get Revising

Miss Batt and Miss Fife ‘had moved’ together ‘to a city’, finally experiencing true freedom. They ‘drank in a dark bar where women danced, cheek to cheek’, being able to express their love publicly. In her new happy life, Miss Fife dreams of the oppressive school. She pictures it as a ‘huge ship/floating away’. Miss Batt’s lips, ‘a warm mouth’ wakes her, causing the ‘school sank in her mind’. The semantics of water return, symbolises how the school was lost to the battle of laughter. Mean Time (Anvil, 1994) continued in this nostalgic vein with the addition of poems about broken and budding relationships. It contains what are perhaps her finest short lyric poems. The title poem, "Prayer" ("Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer / utters itself") is a sonnet and a prayer for faithless times. Does she think that in a secular society poetry to some extent takes the place of religion? "It does for me: I don't believe in God." Then came The World's Wife (1999), with her new publisher, Picador.

Duffy suggests that women are brought up to nurture, transforming into teachers that carry the legacy of the past. The ‘safe vessels’ which will continue the passing on of knowledge seem like an important role. Yet, the attached ‘sensible’ seems boring and tasteless. Duffy could be suggesting that this form of learning numbs both teacher and student equally.Honorary Graduates 2009" (PDF). 1.hw.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 August 2009 . Retrieved 17 July 2016.

It is ironic that the first two women cited — one mythological and the other drawn from ancient history — were powerful and high status. The other women lived in the twentieth century but, despite the burgeoning feminist movement, were powerless victims. Michelis, Angelica and Antony Rowland (eds). The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: Choosing Tough Words. Manchester University Press, 2003. In 2015, Duffy was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. [16] Poet laureate [ edit ] In person, Duffy's mild, sympathetic manner belies the ferocious, fire-eating tone of many of her poems. There is no trace of Scots (she left Glasgow at six) in her voice, rather a Midlands-cum-Liverpool intonation but minus the classic Scouse twang. Modest personally but exceptionally confident in her writing, she has an infectious sense of fun and can talk dirty with the best of them; she has the best repertoire of street slang in poetry. She is very loyal to longstanding colleagues in the art and has helped many younger poets through teaching on Arvon courses, editing the anthology Anvil New Poets 2 (1995), and generally tipping editors in the direction of new talent. Colette Bryce, Kate Clanchy and Alice Oswald are among those who have received her support and encouragement. This is not a case of the poet admiring her own reflection in the pupil. There are poets who write in Duffyesque but the ones she has supported are originals, none more so than Alice Oswald, whose poems offer a defiantly rural counterpoint to Duffy's city muse. The language is a mix of colloquial and lyrical, the opening stanza about Helen of Troy being a good example, with “divinely fair” juxtaposed with “drop-dead gorgeous”.

Dame Carol Ann Duffy DBE, HonFBA, HonFRSE - The Royal Society of Edinburgh". rse.org.uk . Retrieved 16 February 2018. This book is not bound by a theme like The World's Wife, which trained an idiosyncratic eye on the women at the side of historical or legendary men. Yet, rather as the Long Queen - in the poem that opens this collection - rules over a female population of "wetnurses/witches, widows, wives, mothers of all these", Duffy too knows her constituency. a b "Interview: Carol Ann Duffy". Stylist. Archived from the original on 7 October 2011 . Retrieved 4 October 2011.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop