with a "wrong" accent when everyone else seems to use the right one. Children in a new land may be both astonished and repulsed by some of the native children's customs, such as "big boys / eating worms," and sometimes the language barrier goes beyond odd accents into unfamiliar words altogether, "shouting words you don't understand." The speaker and her brothers endure these difficulties and eventually overcome them, as stanza 3 suggests, but enduring and overcoming the difficulties do not abolish them. For the speaker especially, the hardships remain in her memory. The passage of time may blunt most of the sting, but it does not heal it completely.

Lines 15 and 16 reiterate not only the speaker's but also the entire family's fear of displacement. The speaker's brothers' feelings are already established, and in these lines the speaker reveals her "parents' anxiety," a tension apparently so obvious that it is felt by the speaker herself. Describing the parents' anxiety in physical terms, "like a loose tooth / in my head," demonstrates how strong and how bothersome relocating can be for a child. Anyone who can recall losing his or her baby teeth at the age of five or six may remember the discomfort of having a wobbly tooth in the mouth for days or weeks before it actually comes out. Duffy's careful choice of words implies that the speaker is still very much a little girl, but she is trying to deal with some very grown-up worries and doubts. There is no doubt, however, about her ultimate conclusion: " I want our own country, I said."

Line 17, the first line of stanza 3, may be a bit misleading in its suggestion of resignation to childhood emigration: "But then you forget, or don't recall, or change." This notion is brought out further in the speaker's admission that she soon loses her "shame" upon seeing one of her brothers eat a worm as the English boys do and that her Scottish accent soon becomes watered down with an English one like that of her classmates. At this point, it seems that the trauma of moving from one country to another has faded for the children and that their gradual maturity helps ease the initial pain of leaving home. Perhaps they have come to feel at home in England? The end of the poem makes it clear that this is not the case, that the loss of national identity is indeed personal. More specifically, being displaced as a child can lead to a perpetual feeling of displacement as an adult.

There is an abrupt shift in thought in the final few lines of "Originally," beginning with the question, "Do I only think / I lost a river, culture, speech …?" The speaker has reached adulthood, as the word "Now" in line 23 indicates. She has admitted her acceptance of certain changes in her life, both physical and emotional, and has hardened against the overt fears and worries of childhood insecurity. Nevertheless, she has not shaken the concerns entirely. Her self-doubt is subtler, and her sense of emptiness and loss is more ingrained, more a part of her psyche. As a grown woman capable of thinking profoundly, rationalizing, and philosophizing, the speaker may have abandoned her childish assertion "I want our own country," but she cannot shake the underlying feeling that a part of her has been taken away at a young age and cannot be regained.

One may wonder why answering a simple question like "Where do you come from?" would prove so difficult for the speaker in the poem. It is safe to assume that many readers have been asked the same question at some point in their lives and have had no problem responding with the name of a country, a state or province, a city or town, or a community. The chances are, though, that most readers of this poem were not uprooted at five years of age and moved to a new and unfamiliar culture. A sense of displacement is much greater for children who experience this scenario. In Duffy's case, it is great enough to last a lifetime.

The speaker makes it clear that she equates "first space" with "right place," but because she did not get to live in the "right" place for very long, she hesitates when trying to tell someone where she is from. Answering "I was born in Scotland and grew up in England" would seem simple enough but is not necessarily so, especially when the speaker has experienced two very proud, very traditional national identities when she was only a child. The speaker wants to be able to answer the simple question, but what causes her to hesitate is the "originally" factor. In other words, if the question asked of her were "Where do you live?" she would likely answer without thinking twice. "Where do you come from?" brings in new factors, such as national identity, personal identity, roots, ancestry, homeland. When these fundamentals of a human life are shaken up by displacement at a young age, the effects of insecurity and self-doubt a child displays early on will undoubtedly soften over time. For some, however, the uncertainty never goes away.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on "Originally," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of Duffy's work.

Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning English poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic, is the poet of "post-post war England: Thatcher's England." Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economist reviewer described them, are typically "spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world." Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph's convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. Not until her 1993 collection, Mean Time, and 1994's Selected Poems, does she begin to write about homosexual love.

Duffy's poetry has always had a strong feminist edge, however. This position is especially well captured in her Standing Female Nude, in which the collection's title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model's response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model's acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that "the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her," explained DiMarco. "And here the way the poem ends with the model's final comment on the painting 'It does not look like me'—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist's representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle."

Duffy was seriously considered for the position of poet laureate in Britain in 1999. Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration had wanted a poet laureate who exemplified the new "Cool Britannia," not an establishment figure, and Duffy was certainly anything but establishment. She is the Scottish-born lesbian daughter of two Glasgow working-class radicals. Her partner is another poet, a black woman, and the two of them are raising a child together. Duffy has a strong following among young Britons, partially as a result of her poetry collection Mean Time being included in Britain's A-level curriculum, but Blair was worried about how "middle England" would react to a lesbian poet laureate. There were also concerns in the administration about what Britain's notorious tabloids would write about her sexuality, and about comments that Duffy had made urging an updated role for the poet laureate. In the end, Blair opted for the safe choice and named Andrew Motion to the post.

After Duffy had been passed over, Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian Weekend that her "poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She is read by people who don't really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers. Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia; fans talk of greeting her at readings 'with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a rock concert.'" Viner lamented that Duffy only came to the attention of many people when she was caricatured and rejected as poet laureate. However, the poet got some satisfaction when she earned the National Lottery award of 75,000 pounds, a sum that far exceeded the stipend that poet laureates receive.

After the laureate debacle, Duffy was further vindicated when her next original collection of poems, The World's Wife, received high acclaim from critics. In what Antioch Review contributor Jane Satterfield called "masterful subversions of myth and history," the poems in this collection are all told from the points of view of the women behind famous male figures, both real and fictional, including the wives and lovers of Aesop, Pontius Pilate, Faust, Tiresius, Herod, Quasimodo, Lazarus, Sisyphus, Freud, Darwin, and even King Kong. Not all the women are wives, however. For example, one poem is told from Medusa's point of view as she expresses her feelings before being slain by Perseus; "Little Red-Cap" takes the story of Little Red Riding Hood to a new level as a teenage girl is seduced by a "wolf-poet." These fresh perspectives allow Duffy to indulge in a great deal of humor and wit as, for example, Mrs. Aesop grows tired of her husband's constant moralizing, Mrs. Freud complains about the great psychologist's obsession with penises, Sisyphus's bride is stuck with a workaholic, and Mrs. Lazarus, after finding a new husband, has her life ruined by the return of her formerly dead husband. There are conflicting emotions as well in such poems as "Mrs. Midas," in which the narrator is disgusted by her husband's greed, but, at the same time, longs for something she can never have: his physical touch." The World's Wife appeals and astonishes," said Satterfield. "Duffy's mastery of personae allows for seamless movement through the centuries; in this complementary chorus, there's voice and vision for the coming ones." An Economist reviewer felt that the collection "is savage, trenchant, humorous and wonderfully inventive at its best." And Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, concluded that "Duffy's takes on the stuff of legends are … richly rewarding."

Duffy has also written verses for children, many of which are published in Meeting Midnight and Five Finger-Piglets. The poems in Meeting Midnight, as the title indicates, help children confront their fears by addressing them openly. "They explore the hinterland in a child's imagination where life seems built on quicksand and nameless worries move in and will not leave," explained Kate Kellaway in an Observer review. Kellaway also asserted that "these are real poems by one of the best English poets writing at the moment."

In addition to her original poetry, Duffy has edited two anthologies, I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists and Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, and has adapted eight classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales in Grimm Tales. Not intended for young children but for older children and young adults in drama and English classes, Grimm Tales includes adaptations of such stories as "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Golden Goose," which are rewritten "with a poet's vigor and economy, combining traditions of style with direct, colloquial dialogue," according to Vida Conway in School Librarian.

Source: Thomson Gale, "Carol Ann Duffy," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006.

In the following essay, Cox and Swan note the many-layered social, political, and historical references and the multiplicity of voices in Duffy's poetry.

Duffy's poems are set in a specific historical, political and social milieu. This is important for A-level students because the key assessment objective in both the Edexcel and the AQA specifications for Duffy is AO5 (literary and historical context). Fully to appreciate the subtlety and richness of the poems requires an extensive knowledge of the ideas, references and concerns of these periods and places. Many of the personas in the poems construct their meaning and identity from specific cultural signposts—films and pop songs associated with key events and stages in their lives, such as 'the first chord of A Hard Day's Night'.

Several key themes recur in Duffy's poetry. The precarious journey from childhood to adulthood is at the core of much of her work, as she says in 'Originally' and 'All childhood is an emigration'. Some of her personas fail to make the journey, remaining locked in an inadequate childhood, such as 'The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team' ('I want it back', he says bluntly). Others suffer deracination and alienation through emigration to another culture, as emphasised by the collection title The Other Country. Even those for whom the journey has been a reasonable success look back with varying degrees of nostalgia to childhood. Proust-like, Duffy notes the tiny details and associations which encapsulate the most meaningful memories. These are often linked with the pop music, the films or the popular culture of the time and resonate with enormous significance in the psychological development of the personas. The passage of time—'Mean Time'—assumes a profound importance. So many of her characters are, in their secret inner lives, inadequate or failures that this must count as a prominent theme.

Hidden audiences

Virtually all Duffy's poems are narrated by a persona, generally in some form of monologue. Some are wholly internal, non-grammatical stream-of-consciousness sequences of ideas and images. Others are turned and polished, as if for articulation, although not necessarily in public. Most often, it is left to the reader to infer the circumstances of the 'utterance' (if any) of these monologues. Some clearly have no audience. Many are ambiguous, as if a listener might be being addressed, or at least an imaginary listener is in the persona's mind. Even on the rare occasions when there is explicitly an audience ('Weasel Words' and 'Poet for Our Times'), there is no real dialogue; the audience is generally a foil or a device rather than a participant. Some are delivered in real time; many are retrospective, an account or summation of a life's experiences (this is especially true of The World's Wife collection).

Prior to The World's Wife, the identity of the persona is often unclear, and the gender of the narrator (so important to Duffy) has to be inferred, frequently only by tone or characteristic preoccupations. The ambiguity is, of course, deliberate and is part of Duffy's subtle subversion of reader expectation. A relatively small proportion of Duffy's poems are told in the voice of a conventional third-person narrator, generally identifiable with Duffy herself. These poems tend to be reflective, mellow, melancholy and lyrical, and often deal with love, a rather subdued theme.

A window on the soul

Duffy's personas open a window on their souls. The device allows them to speak with an honesty and openness which they would never employ with an audience; and what we share, overwhelmingly, is sadness, inadequacy or a guilty secret. But another tantalising feature of this style is that there are no guarantees of veracity: these are the internal thoughts of a rich selection of individuals, and in a significant number of cases the reader is required to ask whether these 'confessions' are reliable, or fantasy, or a perplexing mixture of the two.

Duffy seems to be suggesting not only that many people harbour a secret, but that a substantial number of them live, at least to some extent, in a fantasy world. This is not necessarily harmful—the persona of 'Dear Norman' has 'turned the newspaper boy into a diver / for pearls', but he intends him no harm, and the persona of 'Education for Leisure' has such a shaky grip on reality that we cannot be certain of his real intentions when he says (unusually, directly to the reader) 'I get our bread-knife and go out … I touch your arm'. In other cases, though, the fantasy spills over into action with worrying consequences, particularly for the girl who meets the persona of 'Psychopath'—'She is in the canal'. Duffy's world is peopled with people who are not what they seem.

Whose voice?

The variety of voices is apparent from even a cursory reading. On closer examination, however, the sensitive reader notices something more subtle going on. In addition to providing the window, Duffy is also furnishing the words which the speakers employ. The more illiterate or uneducated the persona, the more difficult this enterprise becomes, and the more dull for the reader. But in fact none of Duffy's personas is inarticulate; they may choose to 'utter' in an ungrammatical, stream-of-consciousness sequence of thoughts and images, but the language register is often, on reflection, implausibly superior to the persona's capabilities. Similarly, the thoughts, perceptions and feelings of the persona seem, at times, to display a level of self-knowledge at odds with the inadequacy which is being described. These are the cases which tantalise the reader. Whose voice is being heard? Whose ideas are being expressed? The persona's, or the poet's—or an impossibly subtle amalgamation of the two? The reader needs constantly to tune in to these inconsistencies in order to appreciate just how Duffy is working, and the fineness of her craft.

A good starting point is 'Model Village', an early poem from the collection Selling Manhattan. Duffy adopts the unusual voice (for her) of a naive child, although tellingly she is unable to sustain this for very long: by the end the persona has, without explanation, lost her innocence. The whole poem therefore has a double echo of Blake's, Songs of Innocence and Experience: as the child walks around the (literal) model village, noting the outward appearances of the model (in both senses) characters as childish stereotypes, Duffy makes them, one by one, reveal their guilty secrets.

The title is a characteristic Duffy ambiguity. The physical, miniature model village appears to be (is meant to be) a 'model' of how stereotypical village life should be: each eponymous character, like 'Miss Maiden', in her/his place in the happy community. But, of course, in this latter sense Duffy's village is far from model, because all the characters hide guilty secrets (which Duffy would claim is the reality of all real villages, and the concept of a 'model' village would be hypocrisy and humbug).

Miss Maiden has murdered her mother ('I poisoned her, but no one knows.'); the vicar has sadomasochistic schoolboy fantasies ('I shall dress up as a choirboy'); and so on. A child might be taken in, she seems to be saying, but not an adult observer. As if these silent revelations have somehow penetrated the child's consciousness, she (or he?) suddenly becomes knowing in a way she could not have been before: with the benefit of the internal confessions only the reader has heard, she comments 'The Vicar is nervous/of parrots, isn't he?' Although the tone still sounds like the child, this question reveals the transition of voice from the child to Duffy.

Shift of register

This example foregrounds a key question which has to be addressed in many of Duffy's poems: the relationship between the voice of the poet and the voice of the persona. In some cases, such as 'A Healthy Meal', the voice is clearly that of Duffy herself. More often, though, the voice is ostensibly that of the persona, but it becomes clear that the language, vocabulary and perceptions are inconsistent with the character. This subtle blending is what makes Duffy's own position so hard to pin down. To write from within someone else's mind implies a high level of empathy, although not necessarily sympathy. To include perceptions and observations which can only be the poet's muddies the waters. Because of the importance of sensitivity to language and its use in the study of modern poetry, this provides students with both a good reason and an opportunity to analyse language register, syntax and imagery especially thoroughly. Here are two instructive examples:

'Psychopath'

The persona is a semi-literate fairground worker and serial killer whose world has been formed by Hollywood movies. But compare 'These streets are quiet, as if the town has held its breath/to watch the Wheel go round above the dreary homes' with his more typical style: 'I took a swig of whisky from the flask and frenched it/down her throat.'

'Weasel Words'

In this, one of Duffy's subtlest and most overtly political poems, the Weasel narrator is clearly delivering a speech in the House of Commons, as reported in Hansard. He delivers a shallow but persuasive argument, in the typical style of an oily, complacent, Conservative politician, to the effect that Weasels and Ferrets are fundamentally different in nature. But, at the end, the voice imperceptibly changes, and subverts all that has gone before, first by admitting 'Our brown fur coats turn white in winter', and then by acting out the metaphor of the epigram that 'weasel words' have had their 'contents sucked out by a weasel'. Do we really believe that this was said, and publicly performed? Such subtle, ambiguous transitions fascinate, and offer a range of interpretations to, the sensitive reader.

Man and wife

Following the success of her first four collections, all of which cover broadly similar ground, Duffy published The World's Wife in 1999, which differs from her previous work in being her first themed collection. It is more consistently and overtly feminist than much of her earlier work. Other themes also achieve a much greater prominence: religion and classical mythology, as well as a number of explicit language games. In the process, though, a central feature of Duffy's earlier work is lost: because the title of every poem names the historical or mythological character whose wife or female counterpart is to be given a voice, the challenge for the reader of identifying the narrating persona is removed. This leads to a certain uniformity, despite Duffy's efforts to achieve variety, and reduces the scope for the kind of ironic ambiguities which abound in her earlier collections.

The title of the collection is itself a clever turning of a well-known phrase, 'the world and his wife', a deeply patronising commonplace which implies that, in all places and all times, only men have been of importance, and that their wives have been mere appendages. Duffy gives a voice to these previously unheard women, both as individuals and, by extension (as 'The World's Wife') as archetypes of how women respond to male domination and male annexation of credit for ideas and acts which may not have been truly theirs.

The tone is also more relentless and uniform. Unapologetically feminist, the poems hammer home again and again the key themes: men are useless, incompetent, arrogant, vain and, ultimately, unnecessary. The personas, all of course women, are contemptuous of the men they have ended up with, who are generally inadequate, self-obsessed and immature. While it may be true that some men are like this, readers might find the onslaught somewhat unrelieved. Women, by contrast, are resourceful, sturdy and above all capable of taking on the roles traditionally ascribed by society to men. This is an important corrective, especially in the historical contexts in which many of the poems are set.

Some poems plausibly represent the likely viewpoint of these unrecorded women; others are overtly counter-factual, such as 'The Kray Sisters'—an alternative version of history (of the 'What if …' school). The range of voices is not as strikingly wide as in Duffy's earlier collections. A large majority are told as retrospective narratives, with a considerable time often having intervened, giving a sense of distance rare in earlier poems. A certain mellowness creeps into some of the monologues as a result, perhaps most surprisingly in 'Mrs. Midas' where, having lambasted her husband as 'the fool/who wished for gold', the speaker ends on a surprisingly tender note: 'I miss most, I even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.'

Mythical pasts

An important difference from earlier collections is the proportion of poems set either in a historical past before Duffy's own experience, or in Biblical and mythological times. In this, she picks up a central concern of women writers in the Modernist movement: looking at the role of mythology in establishing the archetypal dominance of males and submission of females. No fewer than 11 of the 30 poems in the collection explicitly involve characters from Greek mythology, some brought into a contemporary setting as archetypes, the majority left in their original setting. Similarly, a higher proportion of the poems than in previous collections deals with Christian themes or characters, although their overall tone is significantly more atheistic than in Duffy's earlier work (see, for example, 'Moments of Grace' or 'Prayer').

Many of the poems take historical or mythological characters and translate them to the present day, with the striking result that they are belittled by the trivial, middle-class existence they are forced to lead. 'Mrs Midas' turns the noble king of Phrygia into a pathetic, avaricious middle-aged man, and 'Mrs Icarus', in a brilliant epigrammatic poem, witheringly dismisses the heroic attempts of the Classical Greek original: 'he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock'. Fortunately there are some exceptions to the prevailing pattern. 'Anne Hathaway' proves herself to be a poet just as gifted as Shakespeare (is the implication that she actually wrote his works?) and the resulting sonnet is a delightful mixture of affection and linguistic play ('his touch / a verb dancing in the centre of a noun'). 'The Kray Sisters' present a feminist alternative history in Cockney rhyming slang. 'Deme-ter', the concluding poem, brings us a lyrical vision of how the birth of a daughter can transcend time and culture, 'bringing all spring's flowers/to her mother's house'.

Reversing the streotype

A key and recurring feature of these poems is the reversal of expectations and assumptions. 'Queen Kong' is a remarkably tender giant gorilla, falling in love with 'My little man'. 'Mrs Aesop' dismisses the celebrated fabulist with 'By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory'. 'Mrs Darwin' states that it was actually she who had the idea for the theory of evolution. 'Mrs Faust' does as well out of the deal as Faust does—and proves herself equally brutal and cynical: 'I went my own sweet way'. 'Mrs Faust' also neatly turns the Faust legend: 'I keep Faust's secret still—/the clever, cunning, callous bastard/didn't have a soul to sell.' 'Penelope' is 'most certainly not waiting' for Odysseus to return. 'Mrs Beast' perhaps embodies most clearly the philosophy of the collection: 'words for the lost, the captive beautiful,/the wives, those less fortunate than we.'

The poems which deal with Bible stories are among the most interesting of the reversal poems, if only because in earlier poems Duffy suggested at least an aesthetic sympathy for the Catholicism in which she was brought up. 'Mrs Herod' is warned by Three Queens of the birth of a not-at-all Christlike figure—'Adulterer. Bigamist. /The Wolf.'—and resolves to have him slaughtered to defend her newborn baby daughter from his advances. 'Pilate's Wife' comments: 'Was he God? Of course not. Pilate believed he was.'

Although the variety of voices is narrower than in earlier collections, and there is not the immediacy of the stream-of-consciousness monologues, the speakers of The World's Wife are certainly voicing the inner and unspoken secrets of their characters. Duffy acts as a channel between their silent thoughts and the complicit audience. The old uncertainty about where the persona's voice ends and Duffy's begins has now become irrelevant, as these characters are entirely Duffy's inventions, without even a pretence of historical verisimilitude. As they are all her constructs, they are acting as her mouthpieces and we can say with greater confidence than with her earlier work that this is what Duffy has to say, which no doubt explains the clear, some might say jarring, tones in which themes such as feminism, earlier downplayed or merely alluded to, have now reached centre stage.

Source: Marian Cox and Robert Swan, "The Public and the Private: Secret Lives in Carol Ann Duffy's Poems," in English Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 2004, pp. 14-17.

In the following excerpt, Michelis and Rowland examine Duffy's work as poetry more "interested in questions" than in suggesting any "definite answers," a contention stemming from her doubts and questions about self-identity and nationality.

Cultural identities and 'regulatory structures' in The Other Country and Mean Time

Within Duffy's poetry, the meaning of art is also a construction and is shown to be produced in relationship to economics, the discourse of the body, and the regulatory structures of gender, race, and class.

The Other Country, Duffy's third (major) volume of poetry, published in 1990, is one of her most overtly political collections of poems. In it she explores a wide range of issues of identity, encompassing questions of gender, race, class and national identity. Writing poetry with a political message can be a haphazard enterprise: in the hands of a less talented poet the subject area can take over and eclipse the poetic genre and its formal aspects; the poems gathered in The Other Country are never in danger of falling into that particular trap. As David Kennedy points out so aptly, her poetry emerges as an interrogation of the state of contemporary culture by raising questions such as 'how and to whom is it supposed to be sustaining? If this is the surface then what lies beneath? Who owns it? What is the glue that holds all these items together?' Thus, it could be argued that Duffy's poetry is first of all a poetry interested in questions rather than one which advocates definite answers and empirical truths.

The Other Country establishes its interrogative tone by opening with the poem 'Originally' which is discussed in several chapters in this volume. It also introduces the themes of otherness, displacement and foreignness which so many poems collected here are concerned with. Unlike some of the poems in its predecessor Selling Manhattan—which are similarly interested in the relationship between centre and margin—in The Other Country Duffy focuses on life in Britain itself. 'Originally' traces the move from one part of the country to another, perceived from the perspective of a child. This journey involves more than just a geographical change when the poem insists that this is a move to another country, emphasising the cultural diversity of contemporary Britain and its effect on how identity is experienced. For the child this is predominantly the experience of displacement and loss as the last two lines of the second stanza point out: 'My parents' anxiety stirred like a loose tooth / in my head. I want our own country, I said.' But where and what is our own country? How can we lay claim to a cultural and national identity that can be securely known? This seems to be the most pressing issue here, since the poem concludes with a succession of questions: '… Do I only think / I lost a river, culture speech, sense of first space and the right place? Now, Where do you come from? / strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.' As Angelica Michelis points out in this book, this tone of hesitancy and pausing becomes a pertinacious feature of this volume, and recurs in poems such as 'Hometown', 'Too Bad', 'We Remember Your Childhood Well', Away From Home', 'River', 'The Way My Mother Speaks' and 'In Your Mind', which link the concept of national identity to a more general interrogation of identity as such. In these poems Duffy plays on the theme of displacement, the experience of being an outsider in your own country and culture, presenting alienation as an integral part of lived subjectivity. As Neil Roberts argues when discussing the general trajectory of Duffy's poetic ouevre:

Outsidedness in Duffy's poetry extends far beyond the conventional notion of the outsider as a person set against the norm. Outsidedness is the norm. It is an aesthetic principle in her representation of subjectivity, especially in the dramatic monologue, and radically influences her dealings with language, explicit and implicit.

But it is not only in relation to the question of national identity that Duffy interrogates notions of subjectivity and the experience of the self as informed by cultural contexts. Memory and nostalgia also emerge as consistent subjects of poetic interest and enquiry in The Other Country. Very often these themes are intertwined with those dealing with the search for the meaning of home and belonging, but they also crop up in relation to language and the genre of poetry. 'Weasel Words' and 'M-M-Memory' are the most notable examples of where Duffy explores the contingency of linguistic meaning by revealing the 'palimpsest' layering of language as a medium. Here Duffy is able to show off the most idiosyncratic feature of her poetic voice: a witty but nevertheless pertinacious exploration of an image or metaphor which is probed at and illuminated with verve and intellectual curiosity from a variety of perspectives. Lightheartedness and inquisitiveness are always balanced, opening up the structure of the poem to an active and creative reading experience.

However, some of the most poignant poems gathered in The Other Country exude a sense of despair and hopelessness when dealing with the state of the nation and its inhabitants. 'Mrs Skinner, North Street','Job Creation' and 'Losers' paint a bleak picture of a country where greed, consumption and moneymaking have become the main signifiers of contemporary culture. It is in particular the northern regions of Britain which emerge as places of cultural and economic dearth with their inhabitants stigmatised by a politics that has no moral qualms to eradicate historical traditions and infrastructures. These are places where people may lose their bearings because 'Britishness' is now conflated with the traditions and lifestyle of the more affluent, southern parts of the country. However, these poems manage successfully to avoid an overall tone of propaganda and moral indignation because of the attention paid to structure and form. Fragmented text, gaps in the semantic weaving and a staccato-like language ask the reader for intellectual participation based on empathy and understanding. Britain emerges here as the other country for a vast part of its subjects but these poems also fire the imagination for the possibilities of another country where national identity is constructed in a different and more inclusive manner.

The Other Country also contains some of the poems which established Duffy's reputation as one of the most innovative voices of contemporary British poetry. 'Translating the English, 1989', 'Poet For Our Times' and 'Making Money' are typical examples for her talent to parody the language of Thatcherite England, investing it with an ironic twist to create a poetry which takes issue with the contemporary culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these poems Britain, and in particular England, is represented as a consumer society where commercialisation has become the major denominator of national culture. Alcoholism, drug culture, soap operas, corrupt politicians and criminality dominate the country in 'Translating the English, 1989', and have an effect on every other aspect of culture by turning Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and British history and art into commodities, thus brandishing British culture as a market place where the right amount of money can buy you anything. By presenting national culture as a list of merchandise the poem points out the underlying emptiness of life in a country where only the language of monetary exchange provides a grammar and semantics of understanding and intelligibility. The poem is written in a kind of pidgin English, using short sentences and media-speak and parodying the discursive structures of the tabloid press which became so typical for the Britain of the late 1980s. Whereas the linguistic structure of the poem as such is based on monologue and exclusion, dominated by one autocratic voice, the poem emerges as a dialogue, since it demands to have its gaps filled in and its randomness made sense of by the process of reading. By doing so the text makes a strong point about the national identity since, as David Kennedy puts it so aptly, the

reader, as a consequence, is prompted to consider his or her own relation to and identity in a culture whose confusions, gaps and apparent randomness suggest a debasement or perhaps even total loss of coherent national identity.

However, rather than nostalgically mourning the loss of a coherent national identity which might once have existed and included all inhabitants of the country, the poem develops a rather different trajectory. Culture, it seems to suggest, is never a fixed, historically transcendent entity but always embedded and dialectically connected to political power. Its language of exclusion is never completely successful since its very structure always provides the means for a counter-discourse which works against its presumed intentions. By focusing on language and analysing its intricate relationship to political and social issues, Duffy is able to develop here a poetry which is highly critical of contemporary living, but avoids falling into the trap of nostalgia. As these poems demonstrate, language is for Duffy never a medium that simply represents and reflects reality and subjectivity; on the contrary, her poetry insists on a non-representational status of language with the effect that whatever is signified can only ever be provisional and contingent on the discursive reality of the cultural and political fabric of society. Therefore, one could argue, Duffy's poetry is at its most political when it is, in terms of its content, at its most postmodern.

Source: Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland, "Introduction," in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: "Choosing Tough Words," edited by Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 1-32.