Because it's not been announced yet, let's be the first to congratulate Carol Ann Duffy on her appointment as Poet Laureate.
In as far as there are no parameters by which to appoint a laureate, she is the best choice. Accessible and popular without being trite or sentimental, she has built a reputation as a fine love poet and a feminist poet, although we all know that no such categories are necessary or useful if a poet already qualifies as simply a 'poet'.
In Warming Her Pearls, a widely anthologized piece, the volume Rapture, and poems like Words, Wide Night ('I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross/ to reach you. For I am in love with you/ and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.'), she has written some of the most memorable love poems of her generation and in The World's Wife, she created a series of deeply ironic and hilarious portraits of the women behind great men in history which only improve for hearing her read them aloud.
Although the big news story will be that she is the first female laureate, this will be of less significance to those of us who don't regard the difference between male and female as quite so crucial and it will be of more interest to us what she makes of the job, which is one in which the postholder really can write their own job description. Nobody could have made themselves more available or done more work behind the scenes than Andrew Motion did but his poems largely failed to excite much public interest. Carol Ann Duffy's harder edge and sometimes more forthright attitudes are likely to provoke more reaction and match up to our more challenging times in a way that could make her time in the role a livelier and more satisfactory tenure.
In as far as there are no parameters by which to appoint a laureate, she is the best choice. Accessible and popular without being trite or sentimental, she has built a reputation as a fine love poet and a feminist poet, although we all know that no such categories are necessary or useful if a poet already qualifies as simply a 'poet'.
In Warming Her Pearls, a widely anthologized piece, the volume Rapture, and poems like Words, Wide Night ('I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross/ to reach you. For I am in love with you/ and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.'), she has written some of the most memorable love poems of her generation and in The World's Wife, she created a series of deeply ironic and hilarious portraits of the women behind great men in history which only improve for hearing her read them aloud.
Although the big news story will be that she is the first female laureate, this will be of less significance to those of us who don't regard the difference between male and female as quite so crucial and it will be of more interest to us what she makes of the job, which is one in which the postholder really can write their own job description. Nobody could have made themselves more available or done more work behind the scenes than Andrew Motion did but his poems largely failed to excite much public interest. Carol Ann Duffy's harder edge and sometimes more forthright attitudes are likely to provoke more reaction and match up to our more challenging times in a way that could make her time in the role a livelier and more satisfactory tenure.
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