Love Poems

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Unlike the poems in Rapture, not all the poems in Love Poems are wholly autobiographical – some of them, as though at the Venice Carnival, are wearing a mask. The first poem, "Correspondents", is written in the voice of a respectable Victorian wife who is having an affair ("I read your dark words. and do to myself things / you can only imagine"). It appears alongside "Warming Her Pearls", a lesbian love poem in the voice of a lady's maid who fancies not the mistress's pearls but the mistress herself. I think what I was interested in at the time of writing these poems was in finding a language and imagery for the erotic and the hidden or secret. The pearls warmed by the pining servant's skin are, of course, a metaphor for her desire; but a poem is also like a pearl – a language-jewel provoked into existence by the grit of feeling or revelation. The First Time" (1999) - This poem is about a soldier experiencing the horrors of war for the first time. The soldier reflects on the senselessness and brutality of war, as well as his own fear and vulnerability. Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955) was the UK Poet Laureate from 2009 until 2019, but she has been a major voice in contemporary British poetry for over thirty years, since her first collection, Standing Female Nude , was published in 1985. And, as seems to be the rule for Poets Laureate, her best work consists of her non-Laureate poems. Below we’ve selected ten of her finest poems, along with a little bit about each of them. Are these the greatest Carol Ann Duffy poems, or would you add any to this list? The poem begins with the photographer in his darkroom, developing photographs of the war. The photographer is described as "a dozen proofs; the light etched with knives," indicating that the images he has captured are deeply disturbing. The photographer is haunted by the faces of the people he has photographed, particularly the eyes of a wounded girl that seem to be "looking up from the scan." Note the title with the definite article ‘The’. Duffy is saying that one poem can encapsulate and represent all poems.

The Love Poem’by Carol Ann Duffy talks about how the poet can’t find appropriate expressions while she tries to write a love poem. She remains blank and thoughts like clouds appear and leave. Ironically, the cloud, in the poet’s case, doesn’t have a silver lining. However, throughout the poem, she quotes the first or the important lines from famous love sonnets and lyrics. Specifically, in the first stanza, the poet struggles to find proper words to write her poem. In the following stanza, the poet is thoughtless. She can’t find hope in herself that she can write a poem or not. Whereas, in the last stanza, the poet somehow manages to start again, with new hope and a burning desire like the moth, desirous of the “star”. Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 1995, p. 24; July 7, 1995, p. 32; December 3, 1999, Alan Brownjohn, review of The World's Wife, p. 24.

Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet, playwright, and freelance writer. She is the first openly lesbian and first woman to be appointed as the United Kingdom's Poet Laureate, a position she held from 2009 to 2019. She is also the first openly gay person to be appointed to the position. She has published numerous collections of poetry, plays, and children's books, and has received numerous awards for her work, including the Costa Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize.We have compiled Carol Ann Duffy's poems for you. Carol Ann Duffy Poems Duffy also, perhaps more subtly, explores womanhood and sexuality through this collection. Poems such as ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’ and ‘The Cliché Kid’ potentially subtly explores how homosexual identity adults can re-colour childhood memories to craft a greater understanding of self. Additionally, ‘Litany’ and ‘Small Female Skull’ indicate a frustration at the restrictions placed on women’s language and ideas; the former interrogates how women are taught from a young age to censor themselves, while the latter highlights how males are provided greater appreciation as intellectuals by expressing a firm ideology of rationalism throughout history. In both poems, and across the anthology, the narrative voice expresses a desire to disrupt these restrictions. Even when Duffy explores more morally complex matters, such as infidelity (most particularly in the poem ‘Adultery’), she expresses its superiority, as a mark of freedom, to conformism. The intersection of memory and repression is particularly apparent in the poem ‘Before You Were Mine’. Whilst the title initially seems to portray a romantic relationship, the poem reveals that the personal the narrator possesses is her own mother, thus demonstrating how, particularly in the mid-20th-century, women undoubtedly lost their freedom when they became mothers. The narrator thus seemingly presents guilt at possessively stealing her mother’s freedom simply by being born.

there is a garden in her face” has been taken from ‘There Is A Garden In Her Face’ by Thomas Campion, One of the things that made this collection work so well (after the initial disappointment) was the constant edge of tension lurking beneath the works. There were some beautiful poems such as The Windows and Ann Hathaway, but The Windows held a note of bittersweet unattainability, and Ann Hathaway encapsulated grief and love almost tangibly. The tension is held throughout the collection with the continuous references to the 'darkening hour' and 'darkening sky' in a style reminiscent of William Blake, although temporarily defied with the revelation 'nothing dark will end our shining hour'... Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic,is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economistreviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.” Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time,and 1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love. Carol Ann Duffy was named Britain's Poet Laureate in 2009, the first woman, first Scot and first openly gay person to hold the position. Her words are literally perfect. She knows love and has such mastery of the poetic form that your heart sings. She's also current and easy to read. War Photographer" is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy that was published in 1991. The poem is written in the first person point of view and is about a war photographer who has returned home after capturing images of the violence and devastation of war. The poem explores the photographer's feelings of guilt and disconnection as he tries to process the horrors he has witnessed.In Love Poems, Duffy deftly depicts the beauty, brutality and complexity of love in all its forms: desire, dejection, pain, longing, control, zeal, lust, cordiality. Editor) Armistice: A Laureate's Choice of Poems of War and Peace, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2018. People come to the work of Carol Ann Duffy via various routes. She rose to public prominence as Poet Laureate in 2009 (or, it could be argued, ten years earlier when she was apparently passed over in favour of ‘safer’ choice Andrew Motion). Her appointment made her the first female Laureate since the position was created in the seventeenth century – she reportedly only accepted the post for this reason – and also the first Scottish-born and openly gay poet in the role. The intertextual references speak for themselves. The fragments she has inserted are truncated; they can be because the reader will be able to complete them anyway. And yet, the very incompleteness is significant, as if there is no answer to the meaning of love; there will never be a definitive love poem that will convey sufficiently the depth and mystery.

Sean O’Brien, ‘Carol Ann Duffy: a stranger here myself’ in The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998) Jane Dowson and Alice Entwhistle, ‘Dialogic politics in Carol Ann Duffy and others’ in A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Here also, the poet has used the extracted lines like “O my America! my new-found land” from another John Donne poem, ‘ To His Mistress Going to Bed’, and “behold, thou art fair” from the ‘ Song of Solomon‘ in the Bible, and “the desire of the moth for the star” from ‘ One Word is Too Often Profaned’ by Shelley. Duffy’s poetry has always been strong and feminist. This position is especially well captured in herfirst collection, Standing Female Nude,in which the title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model’s response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model’s acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that “the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her,” explained DiMarco. “And here the way the poem ends with the model’s final comment on the painting ‘It does not look like me’—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist’s representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle.”

Carol Ann Duffy's Christmas poems

Comparing the modern love poets with the classical ones, the poet says that the earlier love poets were truth-tellers, but such an opinion can hardly be made about modern love poets. To best represent the love feelings of the earlier love poets, the poet has extracted and used several verses from the past love poems and used them to express the feeling of love that has changed over the period. There is also an uncertain, rather ambiguous conclusion and resolution, appropriately as love is timeless and ageless, indefinable and unending. The poem ends with the photographer continuing to develop his photographs, knowing that they will be printed in a newspaper the next day and viewed by people who will never truly understand the horrors of war. The poem suggests that the photographer's role is to bear witness to the violence and devastation of war, but that this role can also be a heavy burden that leaves him feeling disconnected and guilty.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1994, Betsy Hearne, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, pp. 184-185; September, 1996, Betsy Hearne, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, pp. 9-10. Quotations like “my mistress’‘eyes” are truncated, but this doesn’t matter because one can guess the rest. One gets the gist, so a reader can either fill out the rest in imagination or if readers are taken with the line. War-time" (1999) - This poem reflects on the experiences of women during war and the ways in which their lives are disrupted and defined by the violence and trauma of war. Today’s “love poems” are deprived of those true love feelings that great poets like Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Shelley, and Barrett Browning would vent out through their poems. Similar to the first stanza, the poet has extracted lines from previous love poems. For example; line like “dear heart, how like you this?” has been taken from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘ They Flee From Me’; “look in thy heart and write”, is extracted from Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. Additionally, there is a line like “there is a garden in her face” which the poet has drawn from the poem with the same title by Thomas Campion.

Carol Ann Duffy's poetry collections in order

Carol Ann Duffy's poems about war often focus on the human impact of war, rather than on political or strategic aspects. They also often reflect on the emotional and psychological effects of war, such as guilt, disconnection, and trauma. War Photographer Poem by Carol Ann Duffy Throughout the poem we see the poet struggle to convey her feelings, underpinned by Duffy’s use of enjambment to create a free-flowing yet fragmented rhythm which stops and starts. Mean Time begins with a lot of ruminations on childhood and memory with an overarching air of nostalgia. Then we move to a second sort of section which becomes more introspective and internal, focusing more on themes of maturity like personhood, love and sex. Finally the collection takes another turn into a more darker place, one the one hand exploring ideas of obsession and animosity, but on the other deep-diving into themes of retellings and the role of the writer, at times evocative of Margaret Atwood's "On Writers and Writing". However, throughout the collection, Duffy makes consistent reference to language and the beauty in its meaning/s and the writer's ability to play and replay it, its constance and its place within and without us; Duffy's focus on this really is a thing of true lyrical genius. This is further indicated by the references to previous love poems which the reader may be familiar with. The presence of lines from these poems in Duffy’s own work suggests that they are, to an extent, immortal - as the words used to express the love of poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Shakespeare still have influence today. The presence of these works in a contemporary context highlights the immortal nature of the poet’s works. Nature She says the earlier poems were composed by heart and known by feelings. But one’s desire to touch the star-like moth is futile because the modern poems neither have feelings, nor the ardent desire that the lovers have nor had in the past. So, unless a person creates love in his mind, in his heart, he may not write what previous poets like Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Shelley, E.B. Browning had done.