These Collected Poems, published halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s time as poet laureate, make clear that she is a true Romantic poet in the tradition of Byron, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Ridler and Elizabeth Bishop. In his introduction to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined Romantic poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. And these pages do indeed overflow.
I have known Carol Ann Duffy since the late 1970s when her father, Frank Duffy, an AUEW shop steward, was the Labour parliamentary candidate in Stafford, the neighbouring constituency to mine, in Leek. Born in Glasgow in 1955, and educated in Stafford, Duffy left home in the 1970s to read philosophy at Liverpool University. Later, in Liverpool, she lived with the poet, Adrian Henri, who became a passionate supporter of her poetry, then beginning to appear in small magazines such as Outposts.
In the 30 years since, she has produced 11 books of poetry, edited eight anthologies, written five stage plays, become professor of creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and been made Poet Laureate, a CBE and a dame.
People, their emotions and their lives, are at the centre of everything she writes. She writes poems about love and sex, painting and political protest: the Afghan war, the banking crisis, HIV and Aids, climate change and healthcare.
She has been writing about love in all its moods ever since her first collection Fifth Last Song (1982): erotic and ecstatic, sensual and sexual, broken-hearted and weak at the knees, exhilarated and exhausted, rejected and resigned, lofty and lusty, tender and tentative (her own descriptions, in the introduction to Hand in Hand, her anthology of other people’s poems).
She can be romantic, as in ‘Words Wide Night’: ‘For I am in love with you.
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