Congratulations Carol Ann Duffy! A Belated Review Of 'Rapture'...
When Ted Hughes died in 1998, Carol Ann Duffy was, apparently, a whisker away from taking his place as Poet Laureate. Maybe she was considered too risky an option at the time. But now Andrew Motion's term has finished the laurel's finally been passed on to her. And deservedly so.
Duffy's ‘Selected’ was published in 1994, and in 1999 ‘The World’s Wife’ was widely considered as the collection which sealed both her reputation and her popularity. Some of those poems continue to be set texts for G.C.S.E English exams. The Independent has called her ‘one of the most important, and rightly loved, poets of our time.’ This collection, her seventh, was the winner of the 2005 T.S.Eliot Prize. A suite of fifty-two short poems, it is her bravest and most personal to date. Although there seems to be a loose narrative, starting with the start of a love affair in summer, progressing through winter and ending with the end of the affair the following summer, there is a sense in which every poem, no matter where it is placed, both celebrates and mourns. In ‘Forest’, the fourth poem, she writes: ‘… we knelt in the leaves,/ kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned// Didn’t we?’ That ‘didn’t we?’ introduces doubt, the possibility, even in the very midst of her rapture, that she might be misinterpreting or inventing a memory. ‘Haworth’, the sixth poem, begins ‘I’m here now where you were’, already self-consciously making art from absence. The paradox for any love-poet is that the time spent on making the poem is time not spent on the loved one. The poem can only speak of past or future contact. Any ‘now’, any ‘rapture’ in the poem must, of necessity, be insincere because its textualisation makes it second-hand, a simulacra. This submerged theme becomes overt at the end of the suite, in poems like ‘The Love Poem’ which, with more than a hint of the Shakespeare of the sonnets, begins: ‘Till love exhausts itself, longs/for the sleep of words - /my mistress’ eyes - /to lie on a white sheet, at rest/in the language’ and also in ‘Art’ which ends: ‘and where my soul sang, croaking art’. But Duffy is playing a dangerous game, and she knows it. On a first reading she seems to have set out to write a diary of the heart with candour and directness, writing poems which are not afraid to be moving. The very title ‘Rapture’ seems to announce these intentions – and these intentions should be applauded. Since Modernism many poets have used a self-consciously intellectual or allusive language – and this is one reason why the readership of contemporary poetry in this country has so massively dwindled. Duffy might already be reversing that trend. (Show the poems in this little red book to a non-poetry-reader, as I’ve done several times, and the chances are they will be greeted with surprised appreciation. People even want to read more by her). But – and this is a big but – is she, by giving the punters what they want, i.e. emotional candour, also giving them ‘a croaking art’ and ‘a sleep of words’? Is the ‘rapture’ really possible in a poem – or will it always be a ‘lie on a white sheet’? Duffy, in those last poems, admits, humbly, apologetically, that yes, the rapture is a lie. Yet the whole book seems hellbent on undermining this admission.
First of all, we must consider the cover. It has that satisfying cloth-bound texture, dark red with the name, title and a lino-cut of a naked woman praising the moon – all in embossed silver. And a red, cloth ribbon so you can find your place, like a diary or a secret notebook (is it a coincidence that the number of poems – fifty-two – is the same number as the weeks of the year?). The cover is reminiscent of Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and perhaps more particularly the more recent Folio Society reprints of Grimm’s or Hans Andersen’s or Perrault’s fairytales, albeit with a more erotic twist. So the cover has designs on us, reminding us of a pre-digital age when a book could be a treasured, intimate, physical thing, a thing of spells, charms and remembrances. It creates an expectation – or an acceptance - in the reader of naïve pleasures, and a nostalgia for their passing.
This naivete carries over into the poems. They too find themselves indebted to the timelessness and universality of fairytale. There are occasional explicit references – the ‘Beast’s rose’ (in ‘Unloving’), the ‘goblin’ (in ‘Your Move’), the being lost in a forest (‘Forest’). And like the ‘three wishes’ of fairytale there’s the three-word repetition which she leaves like a footprint - a breadcrumb? - throughout: ‘love, love, love’ (in ‘Write’), ‘reprieve, reprieve, reprieve’ (‘Spring’), ‘rhyming, rhyming, rhyming’ (‘Name’), ‘text, text, text’ (‘Text’), ‘gold, gold, gold’ (‘Hour’) and ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ (‘Finding The Words’). It is also evident in the way the contingent world has largely been edited out. There are two poems about communicating via mobile phone (‘Text’ and ‘Quickdraw’), a mention of an ‘Oscar-winning movie’ (‘Art’) and a ‘motorway’ (‘New Year’), but otherwise the landscape is idyllic and pastoral. And the vocabulary, often simplistic, monosyllabic, reflects this – the references to ‘rivers’, ‘kisses’, ‘moons’, ‘roses’, ‘forests’, ‘jewels’, ‘stars’, ‘gold’ and ‘rain’ pile up in poem after poem. The question that must be asked is: are these references and repetitions mythopoeic? Do they have totemic power? Or are they just cliches?
I think Duffy would say yes. Yes, they are mythopoeic. And yes, they are cliches. The important thing to realise is that, as with the cover, we are being asked to covet these cliches, as we would an old children’s book, or an old Valentine’s card – with indulgence and nostalgia. And maybe also with irony. On a closer reading the overt message of those last poems, the ones which talk of:
‘love’s lips pursed to quotation marks’ (‘The Love Poem’)
is one which was inherent throughout. It was in the last stanza of ‘Finding The Words’ which goes:
‘and my breath/warmed them, the words I needed to utter this, small words,/ and few. I rubbed at them till they gleamed in my palm -/ I love you, I love you, I love you -/ as though they were new’.
Here the simplicity of the rhyme - ‘few’, ‘you’, ‘new’ – and the oblique reference to Aladdin rubbing his lamp, are what make the poem seem both accessible and archetypal. Yet the ‘as though’ undercuts the sincerity. It makes it clear that the words she has found are, in fact, just second-hand. And suddenly, when we reread ‘small words/and few’ she seems to be taking a wry sideswipe at the puritan poetics of her whole collection. We realise how deliberately and self-consciously and sadly all of these cliches are used – sadly because, when we want to write directly and honestly about love, she knows that these hand-me-downs are all we have. We also realise that there is a limit to this dangerous game, this rubbing of small, old words till they gleam. Though this may well turn out to be her most widely read and widely cherished collection to date, I sense that she might, for her own artistic survival, have to cast around for newer, bigger words, retrace her footsteps and leave this particular forest, even if this means losing some of her legions of fans along the way.
For her eagerly anticipated next collection, as Poet Laureate, I would suggest that she has to leave this rapture, or ‘rapture’, behind.
