Mrs. Scrooge: A Christmas Poem - Hardcover

Duffy, Carol Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439176337 ISBN 13: 9781439176337

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2009

Synopsis

· A witty modernized re-telling of the classic Christmas Carol story: Starting with “Scrooge doornail-dead,” Carol Ann Duffy’s elegantly witty take on the Dickens tale, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, takes the reader by the hand through the snowy streets of London and through the touching untold romance of one of literature’s most recognizable characters, Ebenezer Scrooge—through the eyes of his widow, Mrs. Scrooge.

· A rare, uplifting moral tale: As in A Christmas Carol, Mrs. Scrooge learns from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come that the gifts we give to others—including the gifts of love and time spent together—are the most important and memorable. A charming moral for the holiday season, transposed to the present day and spiced with Duffy’s wry references to our struggling economy—conditions that make anyone feel scrooge-like.

· Fresh original work with beautiful illustrations: Mrs. Scrooge combines the melodious language and accessible, cheeky wit of one of the UK’s most popular living poets with endearing full-color drawings by beloved illustrator Beth Adams. A natural successor to the poetry book The World’s Wife that put Carol Ann Duffy on the map ten years ago, this highly giftable book is a gorgeous package for her poem with illustrations enlivening the text.

About this title

About the Author

CAROL ANN DUFFY is a poet, playwright, and freelance writer, and was made Britain's poet laureate in May 2009. She is the author of numerous volumes of poems, including Standing Female Nude, Feminine Gospels, Rapture, and Answering Back. She won the TS Eliot prize in 2005 (for Rapture), as well as the Dylan Thomas award, the Whitbread poetry prize, the Somerset Maugham award and the Forward prize. Duffy is a Professor of Contemporary Poetry as well as the Director of Creative Writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in England.

From Booklist

Britain’s new poet laureate is not only a Scot and a woman but a bisexual, which probably scandalizes many. A fine verse technician, arguably the wittiest laureate since the great satirist John Dryden (1631–1700), she is also highly politically and socially conscious. Her first official poem scored members of Parliament for their bloated expense accounts. Her first book as laureate features a heroine who is the epitome of the little old lady in tennis shoes, seen wherever radicals demonstrate for a cause. She is also the widow of the post–Christmas Carol Scrooge, who seems to have gone so far over to the Light Side, as it were, that he married Bob Cratchit’s mom. In the poem, smartly written around rather than in blank verse, with at least one rhymed couplet lurking within three unrhymed lines (watch for it!), and illustrated by Beth Adams as charmingly and naively as Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline stories, she, too, is visited by the Christmas ghosts and wakes to a happy ending—unreformed, of course. That’s why the ending’s happy. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1439176337
• ISBN 13: 9781439176337
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48