Carol Ann Duffy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Poet for Our Times

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 1-45

3. Lyrics of Love, Loss, and Longing

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 47-85

4. Voices from the 1980s and After

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 87-121

5. Words Between Women

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 123-152

6. Poetry and the Public Sphere

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 153-188

7. Poetry About and for Childhood

   • Jane Dowson

   Pages 189-212

8. Back Matter

   Pages 213-240

   PDF

This is the only monograph to consider the entire thirty-year career, publications, and influence of Britain's first female poet laureate. It outlines her impact on trends in contemporary poetry and establishes what we mean by ‘Duffyesque’ concerns and techniques. Discussions of her writing and activities prove how she has championed the relevance of poetry to all areas of contemporary culture and to the life of every human being. Individual chapters discuss the lyrics of ‘love, loss, and longing’; the socially motivated poems about the 1980s; the female-centred volumes and poems; the relationship between poetry and public life; and poetry and childhood and written for children. The book should whet the appetite of readers who know little of Duffy’s work to find out more, while providing students and scholars with an in-depth analysis of the poems in their contexts. It draws on a wide range of critical works and includes an extensive list of further reading.

• poetry
• contemporary
• feminism
• twentieth-century
• twenty-first century
• poet laureate
• women
• culture
• British
• Scottish
• lyric
• Thatcherism
• public poetry
• children's poetry

• De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom

  Jane Dowson

Jane Dowson is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has published broadly on women poets, including Women, Modernism and British Poetry 1910-39, A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (co-authored), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry and Women’s Poetry of the 1930s.

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