Feminine Gospels

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All in all, pretty good, took a while to warm up to, and I'm unsure that I would have understood a lot of the poems if I hadn't been studying it in class. A mysterious giggle grows ineluctably into an all-consuming merriment that destroys the whole structure of grammar school propriety. Throughout Feminine Gospels the reader understands a little bit more about how society views or pressures women, and even how women view and pressure themselves. Duffy is causing the reader to begin to question these very hard and true facts of everyday life in extraordinary circumstances and representations as a way of allowing the reader to become uncomfortable with themselves. Feminine Gospels marks the first time in which I have read any of Duffy’s longer poems; some of those collected here are almost of Tennyson length.

These are great as individual poems (mostly) but, as an anthology, the same themes endlessly repeated become tedious. Feminine Gospels is very much an indictment on the modern world, and how women are still very much controlled. This is a dark book, for all the jokes, exposing equally the trash of our aspirations and the crumbling urban landscape around us. This is exemplified by the subject matter of both poems separately that both deal with certain beauty standards, and the forceful nature in which women are expected to uphold those. And though she uses conventional stanza forms she somehow seems to make their blocks disappear so that they all blend smoothly into a delicious current, causing the poems to flow, carrying the alluvial affection for Duffy's subject.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. This is all done through subject and form as a way of enlightening the reader into very current issues in the modern world. Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions - and revisions - of female identity. My favourites include: The Map Woman, The Diet, Work, Tall, Loud, White Writing, The Light Gatherer, Wish, and Death and the Moon.

From the sadness of Elizabeth I, looking back on her long and powerful but lonely life, to the travails of a woman whose work is literally never done as she continues to trawl the seas to feed her billion offspring, to a movingly lyrical reflection on the beauty of a growing child, Carol Ann Duffy explores in this volume the myriad components of women's lives and loves through the crystallizing prism of poetry. A new collection of poems ranging over the experience of women—historical and imagined, real-life and larger than life—from the award-winning author of The World's Wife. I can’t really describe the collection as much other than an ordinary white feminist poetry collection, which makes sense because Duffy is a white woman talking about her personal issues in the collection which the majority of other women can relate to.The longest poem, although my least favourite, “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High,” is the one where the poet’s pure delight in language is clearly tangible. This is evidenced by the fact that the reader will be reading a poem like “Beautiful” where Duffy examines historic women figures in an expression of use. How a person deals with the ever day situations in life helps to better understand a person as a whole. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and.

Helen and Cleopatra elude us with a certain dignity - well, they are essentially myths - but in our latterday world, to be desired brings more danger than privilege and has precious little to do with magic.Feminine Gospels is an incredibly powerful book, which every woman should pick up at some point in her life. There is much importance here, too; she weaves together the stories of women with history, conflicts, and the family, and all has been masterfully interconnected. This poem also highlights the way these women were forced into a role that is unnatural for anyone, and to their tragic end.