The World's Wife (York Notes Advanced)
In her fifth volume of poetry, British poet Duffy presents to us the world of the liminal wife. Here we do not find annals of Victoria or Medea or Eleanor Roosevelt, but rather catch an imaginative glimpse into the lives of real and mythic women whose stories were not exactly their own: Mrs. Faust, Queen Herod, and Frau Freud, to name a few. Each of the 30 or so women featured in Duffys collection regales us with her side of her famous partners story, and the result is often insightful and always entertaining. Duffys verse is at once tight and resonant, her language colloquial and engaging, her rhymes refreshing. While a great strength of the volume is its thematic unity, these poems are better swallowed in short snatches, for the tone of the wifes lament is often so consistent that the uniqueness of each womans plight gets debased. For instance, Mrs. Tiresiass dilemma (All I know is this: / he went out for his walk a man / and came home female) differs quite a bit from Eurydices discomfort in hell (the one place youd think a girl would be safe / from the kind of a man who follows her round / writing poems), yet they come to us in a strikingly similar voice. Reminiscent of Sextons Transformations (1971), these works take the plots of some classic tales and give them a wry, mod twist.For lovers of myth, or just a good tell, this dark and darkly comic volume has much to offer. (Kirkus Reviews) --na<DIV>"[Duffy] offers us the past as it could have been. . . . [Her] project recalls the poems of the Americans Ai and Pamela White Hadas, but the élan of this volume sets it apart, the characters (and poems) triumphant."--The New Yorker"Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry--any poetry--for years."--Eavan Boland,The Independent on Sunday(London)"These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness, and cheek. . . . They leap off the page even in a silent reading. . . . The best are inventive, subversive, and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash." --Anthony Thwaite,The Sunday Telegraph(London)</div>