Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish-born poet and playwright whose works often focus on gender-based oppression and violence. In 2009, she was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate, becoming the first woman and first openly gay or lesbian person to hold that position in its 300-year history. Even then, however, her male colleagues referred to her as a “poetess,” which I think is akin to a man calling his beloved spouse “wifey.” Duffy’s writings include Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize; The Other Country (1990); Selling Manhattan (1987), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1985), for which she received a Scottish Arts Council Award.
Dramatic characters and narratives, voiced with a sharp edge of wit and social critique, characterize Duffy’s early work, while her recent collections have wrestled more directly with dark and tangled themes of love. But, perhaps her most intriguing compilation of poems is the “The World’s Wife,” published in 2000, which examines some of history’s most famous events and myths strictly from the viewpoint of the women or female characters who dutifully stood off to the side. In many cases, she creates a female version of the male. The figures include Mrs. Faust, Mrs. Quasimodo and Mrs. Tiresias. A self-contained Penelope doesn’t wait for Odysseus; frustrated Mrs. Sisyphus is married to a workaholic; and Pygmalion’s statue, tired of being pestered by her groping suitor, “changed tack/ grew warm, like candle wax/ kissed back” – and after sex gets dumped. She provides twisted updates to Viagra, sheep cloning and Monica Lewinky. This material has been mined by feminist writers before. But, as women gain more economic and political power – even in such unlikely places such as Brazil and Egypt – it’s always refreshing to contemplate how historical events might have appeared if their creators had been filled with estrogen and not testosterone.
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