Festival Poetry: Carol Ann Duffy

Image: Props used during Carol Ann Duffy's EIBF show.

Carol Ann Duffy’s arrival was signalled by a bugling of the Last Post, an unexpectedly elegiac note to introduce to the start of a reading by a poet who is, and whose work is, very much alive. The music cued her up to read two poems about WW1 inspired by the deaths of the last living British men to serve in the Great War. Serving the Poet Laureate in a musical capacity was John Sampson, an expert on several pipes. “The Queen gave John to me,” she commented.

We moved from one war to another, the battle of the sexes, as Duffy changed gears, her work becoming more comical, if not less incisive, as she read selections from The World’s Wife. King Midas, Faust, and Charles Darwin were seen from the point of view of their significant other, a great device for viewing male foibles. Before reading another one about Mrs Tiresias, Duffy commented she first came across this mythological character in The Wasteland, where he is referred to as possessing ‘wrinkled female dugs’. ‘Being Scottish,’ Duffy continued, ‘I though Eliot was talking about pets.’

We were treated to a guest appearance by Roger McGough, who read typically smart and funny poems from his new collection. ‘As Far as I Know’ made fun of figures called to recent inquiries, whose memory of possibly incriminating events has suddenly gone cloudy. He’s not the only angry one. Duffy, on her return, confessed to feeling enraged by the government’s squeeze on exam boards. Although she then admitted she hasn’t always seen eye to eye with exam boards herself, a cue to read ‘Mrs Schofield’s GSCE’, which was written after her poem ‘Education for Leisure’ was removed from the syllabus for supposedly glorifying knife crime.

The elegiac note that began the show returned at the end, now in a personal context. In ‘Premonitions’, she recalled her last moment with her mother before her death, before unwinding time to an earlier and happier time. I suspect there were many in the audience who, at the session’s close, would like to unwind it back to the start all over again.