I don't think this is the first of Carol Ann Duffy's books to advertise its unique selling point of 'Poet Laureate' on the front cover. I imagine that it is thought it will sell a few more copies that way but it hasn't always been a recommendation given some of the dubious literary reputations of some on that roll of honour. The honour such as it is might be better worn as David Gower was once said to wear the England cricket captaincy, 'like a casual, off-the-shoulder number'. It is the last volume that Ms. Duffy will be enabled to advertise as such before Mr. Armitage inherits it but she has been a fine 'ambassador', both for poetry and us, her subjects, as she continues to do what she does, like she's always done it.Sincerity wouldn't be the first thing I want from poetry, either. Surely we are all ironic, detached and far too clever for sincerity by now but, again, this was a rare example of a book of poems that I opened, began at page 1 and read in order to the end. It worked. I can't remember the last time I did that or even if I've actually ever done it before. So, perhaps sincerity is due a recall. Maybe the smartarse who elusively never really means what they say, but we are supposed to realize that, has finally had their day.
But Carol Ann Duffy remains entirely accessible, moving at times, committed to her causes, capable of producing gorgeous moments and, yes, she is here just about 'at the height of her powers' if we can bet without her reading Mrs. Midas to us many years ago.
The book begins with the poet newly bereft, her daughter having left home and there is,
read by sunlight, an open book on the floor.
A good joke is worth recycling, and, like Handel adjusting an aria from a previous opera to fit new purposes, Mrs. Darwin, from The World's Wife, shows up again as Gorilla, that ends,
With a day's more evolution, it could be President.
But she may have blundered there, even if with the best of intentions. If more had been less there, she might have shown more respect for very honourable gorillas and nailed Donald Trump more accurately but we know what she means.
In simply a list, but a rhyming list, of entirely fitting epithets for the Leader of the Western World, in Swearing In, by far my favourite, which did actually make me LOL, he is, among all the other things he most ostensibly is, a
golf-plonker,
a rich phrase that combines all the futile, self-absorbed culture of golf, the President's need to be seen doing it and all that it implies, much more subtly than such equally true but less entrancing terms, like 'tweet-twat', but I intend to read it as a bonus to my small but select audience on Wednesday.
But laugh is all we do, because we know. It might be therapeutic to write it, and it makes one glad she was our appointed laureate if somehow she wrote it on our behalf but she's preaching to the converted, the poem won't change one vote in Iowa in the current election campaign and, however well they are done, political poems don't work for me if political is all they are. Golf-plonker, however, gets an award all of its own and was worth the price of the book without the rest of the very good things in it.
Those poems rhyme signficantly with memories of tawdry machismo in anecdotes from family life. And, yes, feminism has a very good point when blokes are like that. I can't apologize enough for them. Tough guys like Tony Harrison and Sean O'Brien have made similar points so I don't regard it as entirely a gender issue. Some might find the shrill advocacy of purely 'women's issues' as almost a counter-balance but Ms. Duffy has the balance right.
Scarce Seven Hours is a brilliant set of four short pieces on desolation that begins with taking the much-loved dog to the vet's for the last time and develops towards,
Whose bad idea was language? It is a veil
over the face of God; does not reveal
I have half a mind to quote the next two lines that bring in Virginia Woolf but won't. It's only that Ms. Duffy sometimes appears to add in half sentences like 'does not reveal' that might have been something much better if returned to later or, if not, she needed her own editor, a kindly version of Ezra Pound, to cross a few lines out for her.
But one is always convinced by her sincerity, in the face of her fairly vacuous defintion of poetry (which we will be working on on Wednesday) that it is 'the music of being human', which I think is echoed in the lines with which she finishes this admirable book, never having suffered Andrew Motion's laureate block or Ted Hughes's self-appointment as seer and soothsayer, when she looks up,
to see my breath
seek its rightful place
with the stars,
with everyone else who breathes.