Product Description

The wives of the great, the good and the legendary are given a voice in Carol Ann Duffy’s sparkling and witty collection. Her approach offers a quirky vision (and revision) of the accepted versions: Mrs Darwin, Mrs. Midas and Pope Joan all have a say here, in these sharply observational, jaunty slice-of-life poems.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6370 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Elvis's wimpled sister rocks on in a convent she calls Graceland; Nancy Sinatra gets out her boots made for walking with the Kray Sisters; Mrs Midas misses the touch of her now dangerous golden-handed husband; and Queen Herod decrees the killing of each mother's son to protect her baby daughter in Carol Ann Duffy's startling new collection The World's Wife. Doubling is one of the most common themes--and stylistic ploys--of Western culture and thought, and the concept around which Duffy has ingeniously organised this profoundly playful collection. Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Frau Freud, Anne Hathaway, Mrs Rip Van Winkle, the Kray Sisters; these are some of the wives, and sisters, whose stories are told. These inventive, metaphorically precise poems offer much more, however, than just a recovery of the historical voice of her (supposedly) silenced indoors. Duffy dexterously rewrites Judao-Christian and classical mythologies, subverts fairytale and zestfully reinterprets the more modern myths of Darwin and Freud.

Humour is the abundant keynote of this accessible collection. Mrs Rip Van Winkle enjoys the freedom to travel and paint allowed by her husband's permanent slumbers, "Until the day / I came home with pastel of Niagara / and he was sitting up in bed rattling Viagra." Frau Freud analyses her over-exposure to "ding-a-ling, member and jock, / of todger and nudger and percy and cock," and confesses with irony to being, "as au fait with Hunt-the Salami / as Ms M. Lewinsky." Mrs Aesop groans about her husbands unstoppable garrulousness: "By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory," and Mrs Darwin evolves the following summary her husband's research:

"7 April 1852
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him--
Something about that Chimpanzee over there
reminds me of you."

The World's Wife throws open the windows on the stuffy annals of historical myth and breezes through some of its highlights with a sense of revelry and laugh-out-loud observation. In this wry take on the historical ubiquity of heterosexual coupledom that permeates so many cultural myths, Duffy has separated vibrant women from the shadows of their more famous husbands and brothers, and divorced them from the distortions of historical silence. --Rachel Holmes

Sunday Telegraph
‘These poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness and cheek’

Scotsman
‘A melange of history lesson, fairy-tale and modern-day domestic tragedy’

Customer Reviews

Now with extra laughs...
Ms Duffy is loved by readers even more than by the critics. She is wise, and she is clever. She is also very moving and extremely funny. This volume introduces us to Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin and even Mrs Faust and Mrs Quasimodo and so on...

These are not poems meant for academic study, these are poems to be read and enjoyed. And they are very enjoyable, with sharp wit throughout.

There are times in her more recent work when Duffy strikes me as the poet that Elizabeth Jennings was too frightened to be, here however CAD lets her hair down and unleashes a delight of barbs and sympathy.

The only disappointment for me is The Kray Sisters, but then, I hate so called cockney rhyming slang. Stuff your 'lady Godivas' up your 'Khyber pass'.

That minor gripe aside, this is another wonderful volume from one of our most popular poets, and even funnier than usual.

Poetry By Numbers
Carol Ann Duffy is one of the foremost poets in British Poetry in the twenty-first century. And therein lies the first of many problems I have with her.

'Academic' concerns, such as mythology and history are all over this book, yet being an academic is not a prerequisite of being a poet.

Her poetry here (and in everything else she's done) is trite, cliched, and gender-specific, whilst it also tries too hard to be funny. Being able to look up a few reference books to find information about various women throughout history does not a poet maketh.

Besides which, the poetry itself is stilted, obscure, awkward, lazy, and badly written. Carol Ann Duffy treads the same path as just about every single other poet who is published in Britain today; they give the publishers exactly what the PUBLISHERS want, rather than actually writing poetry that more than a few individuals can relate to. But who are these arrogant individuals and what makes them qualified to judge what constitutes 'good' poetry? I suspect that class plays a big part... The poetry business is full of nauseating back-slapping and sycophancy, despite the fact that the number of people actually buying poetry is at an all-time low. Wonder why?

Fantastic
I truly adore this owmna and the way she wites.
She cuts to the quick with the emtions of some of her characters, especially with resentment, which features in a lot of her poems in this book.
Take a close look at Delilah and Mrs Aesop, both absolutely extarordinary poems.