The World's Wife

Duffy, Carol Ann

ISBN 10: 1405032707 ISBN 13: 9781405032704

Publisher: Macmillan US Audio, 2003

Synopsis

`This book is going to be a hit, and can only consolidate Duffy`s position as one of the most widely read British poets of her generation`. Robert Crawford, Herald `It sparkes with wit, intelligence and an impressive lightness of touch, while drawing on some weighty emotional experiences: loneliness, jealousy, self-loathing, desire, the fierceness of a mother`s love` Christina Patterson, Independent `She reveals the foibles of the great, the ghastly and the ordinary bloke and the sufferings of those closest to them. The result is a melange of history lesson, fairy-tale and modern-day domestic tragedy, with the occasional joke thrown in for good measure.... Duffy`s poetics are flawless - she never misses a beat, her pace is exhilarating, and her language is original and exciting`. Scotsman `These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness and cheek. Many of them are very funny... the best are inventive, subversive and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash` Sunday Telegraph

About this title

About the Author

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. A winner of both the Forward and the Whitbread Prize, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Manchester.

From Publishers Weekly

The voices of Mrs. Tiresias, Mrs. Faust, Mrs. Quasimodo and other wives wittily recast myth and history from a woman's point of view in the pages of Manchester-based Duffy's fifth collection. Self-contained Penelope is not waiting for her Odysseus; frustrated Mrs. Sisyphus is married to a workaholic; Pygmalion's statue, tired of being pestered by her groping suitor, "changed tack/ grew warm, like candle wax/ kissed back"--and after sex gets dumped. But while Duffy's revisionist dramatic monologues are rife with clever twists, this material has been well mined by such poets as Alta, Margaret Atwood and Alicia Ostriker. Even references to Viagra, sheep-cloning and Monica Lewinsky seem an updating of Transformations (1971), Anne Sexton's deadpan fairy tales studded with cultural references, with the poems trapped in a similarly polarized conception of gender relations. Thus Thetis is brutalized in a new way each time she changes form--man is cross-bow to her albatross, charmer to her snake, fisherman to her mermaid--and to Queen Herod, the Christ child is simply a threat to her infant girl: he's "The Wolf. The Rip. The Rake. The Rat./The Heartbreaker. The Ladykiller. Mr. Right." The luckiest in love is Mrs. Beast, married to a devoted creature that's hung like a mule, and just as hardworking: "And if his snot and trotters fouled/ my damask sheets, why, then, he'd wash them. Twice." The flippant tone elicits chuckles, but one imagines these characters would've come a longer way by now, baby. (Apr.) FYI: Duffy's anthology Time's Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century includes 50 contemporary poets, each of whom is represented by a poem of his or her own on "time," and by a favorite poem on the same subject. (Anvil [Dufour, dist.], $18.95 paper 160p ISBN 0-85646-313-2).
-, $18.95 paper 160p ISBN 0-85646-313-2).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmillan US Audio
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1405032707
• ISBN 13: 9781405032704
• Binding: Audio CD
• Language: English