Collected Poems, by Carol Ann Duffy - book review: From clunky to sublime, and still with places to go

The first woman in the post’s history, Carol Ann Duffy's collection of poems are chronological, commencing with her debut Standing Female Nude from the mid-Eighties

The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy poses for photographers in the John Rylands Library (AFP)

Only Simon Armitage rivals Carol Ann Duffy as the most visible poet in Britain. Widely anthologised, her work has seeped into successive generations as set texts. “Warming her Pearls” is well-known, as is “Prayer”, her “shipping forecast” poem that ends: “ … the radio’s prayer – / Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finistere”. They represent two of her major techniques: the list and the monologue.

Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009, the first woman in the post’s history, and she follows Andrew Motion’s example as a sterling ambassador for poetry, volunteering her stipend for a prize for new writing. Now this slab-like Collected Poems invites us to see her oeuvre as a whole, and to consider where it might be going.

The poems are chronological, commencing with her debut Standing Female Nude from the mid-Eighties. It’s intriguing to speculate how this book might have struck poetry readers on its first appearance. Towards the end of the Eighties a raw new voice began to emerge in poetry. The poets had ordinary jobs, were a touch belligerent and were northern, or Scottish. They were anti-Oxbridge. They went to pubs and had difficulties with girls.

Duffy, though older, was certainly belligerent, and she had difficulties with girls too. Standing Female Nude, though it preceded them, seems to slot neatly alongside Armitage’s Zoom! (1989) and Don Paterson’s Nil Nil (1993), without being quite as skilful as either. For Duffy, shock value trumped finesse. “Ash Wednesday, 1984”, angrily ends: “Miracles and shamrocks / and transubstantiation are all my ass. / For Christ’s sake, do not send your kids to Mass.” She might as well have rounded the rhyme off with “crass”.

Poetry Review’s 1986 review commended the collection’s “unifying sense of purpose” and the “unconsolatory, tough-minded and bleak” poems it contains. The reviewer, John Lanchester, noted with a wince Duffy’s tendency to stereotype the male but claimed this as an example of a fault which was “the consequence of a great virtue (concentration, directness)”.

Collected Poems, by Carol Ann Duffy, Picador, £25