Product Description

Carol Ann Duffy is the most widely-acclaimed poet in Britain today. In FEMININE GOSPELS, Duffy draws on women's experience - both personal and historical - in poems which celebrate, elegise and eroticise the female condition. With themes of beauty, identity and the body, the book tells tall stories as though they were the gospel truth, and presents new myths as strange and powerful as the old. FEMININE GOSPELS is a brilliant successor to Duffy's best-selling collection THE WORLD'S WIFE. The PB is guaranteed to build on the success of the HB.

'Dazzling . . . Duffy deserves to outsell most of the novelists on your shelf' Observer

'One of the most important, and rightly loved, poets of our time' Independent

'In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar' Guardian

'Witty, penetrating and lucid . . . Duffy's ingenuity and virtuosity are fully on display' Evening Standard

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22722 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Review
'Dazzling... Duffy deserves to outsell most of the novelists on your shelf' Observer 'One of the most important, and rightly loved, poets of our time' Independent 'In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar' Guardian 'Witty, penetrating and lucid... Duffy's ingenuity and virtuosity are fully on display' Evening Standard

From the Publisher
Carol Ann Duffy is Poet Laureate.

About the Author

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Stafford and then attended the University of Liverpool, where studied Philosophy. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, as well as the Lannan Award and the E. M. Forster Prize in America. Her previous collection, The World’s Wife , was shortlisted for both the 1999 Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2000, Carol Ann was awarded a five-year fellowship by the National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), which was established in 1998 to support innovation and creative potential in the UK.

Customer Reviews

New Fan
I have read anything I can get my hands on since I was a small child, but have never really been able to get into poetry. Apart from the little amount I did at school with my only remembered poem,"I wandered lonely as a cloud" by Wordsworth, I only recently decided to try poetry, hence Carol Ann Duffy as one bit of blurb I read, said "non-poetry readers should read her". I started with Feminine Gospels and found it very accessible.

It's an easy to read style despite the fact that I still expect poetry to rhyme! Her subjects encompass all female trials, tribulations and sufferings and indeed the human condition. I especially loved "The Diet" and "The Woman who shopped", which was so true to life and so close to home that I cringed at the words!

She really is a storyteller/chronicler of women of today and I can't believe I haven't discovered her before. I will now aim to read her other work while trying to not follow "the woman who shopped"!

Good, and Occasionally Great
After reading the ecstatic newspaper reviews, I opened Feminine Gospels expecting not so much a volume of poetry as a quasi-religious experience; I didn’t quite receive one, but the collection is nevertheless very strong – if not quite up to the standard of her previous book, The World’s Wife.

As always, Carol Ann Duffy’s language is brilliantly structured, with rhymes cropping up unexpectedly and imagery that is both fresh and well chosen; this sets her work apart from much modern poetry, where the metaphors and similes are often original but try too hard to be smart, with the result that they are inapposite, conjuring up nothing other than confusion for the reader. In ‘A Dreaming Week’ the poem’s narrator is ‘dreaming/on the monocle of the moon/a sleeping S on the page of a bed/in the tome of a dim room.’ That scholastic imagery is palpably sharp, and the fact that the poet has achieved the lines’ musicality without making them seem either trite or dated bears testament to her skills.

The collection, focused (as the title suggests) on women, contains mostly very good poems, with a few great ones. ‘Beautiful’ is a moving history of strong women suffering in a male world, in which the leading character changes from Helen of Troy to Cleopatra, then to Marilyn Monroe, and finally to the less mourned-over Princess Diana, who ends the poem with ‘History’s stinking breath in her face.’ ‘The Diet’, about a woman who starves herself until she is size of an atom, ends with a marvellously literal take on the idea that inside every fat woman there’s a thin one trying to get out.

There are some weaker moments. ‘Sub’, in which the narrator recounts her role in various moments of male success (such as scoring Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick in the 1966 World Cup Final, while menstruating) does not convince. Although the mixture of heroism and prissy separateness (she ‘skipped the team bath with the lads/sipped my champagne in the solitary shower’) is funny, the inadvertent falseness of the poem is best summed up by the misspelling of Muhammad Ali as ‘Mohammed Ali’, and by the claim that the ’66 hat-trick was scored in extra time: it wasn’t. (Both errors may, of course, be intentional, but I can’t see why they should be.) The collection’s set-piece, a long prose poem entitled ‘The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High’, is hit and miss. Occasionally, the writing here is neither poetry nor particularly good prose, but the accurate portrayal of a repressed grammar school does ultimately hit the mark, and the sign-off is exquisite: ‘Higher again, a teacher fell through the clouds with a girl in her arms.’

So, essentially a success, and still way ahead of most of her peers’ efforts. Carol Ann Duffy’s slight problem, though, is that being one of the best poets of modern times she is marked according the highest standard – that of her own previous work.

Not a single dud
As a fan of 'The World's Wife', I didn't think it could get much better. Here, however, is proof both of my lack of faith and of Duffy's genius.

The clue to what one may find in 'Feminine Gospels' is contained in the title - a collection of poems at once elegaic, profound, often funny, and always, ALWAYS touching. Here, fantasy blurs with harsh reality, humour with tragedy. Every aspect of every female condition is contained in this slim volume - from love to eating disorders, from shopping to contagious girlish giggling. Her shortest poems are little gems, her longest the most startling treasure trove. Whole lives are condensed into sentences.

Never laboured, always breathtaking, Duffy's multi-layered poetry excites the reader so much that one is compelled to re-read it again and again.