'... she could well become the representative poet of the present day.' Sean O'Brien

The Salmon Carol Ann Duffy contains poetry chosen specially for Salmon Poetry by Carol Ann Duffy from her last four volumes and includes some work from The World's Wife (Picador 1999, Anvil Special Edition 1999) and some uncollected recent work. Carol Ann's mother is Irish and her grandparents come from Carlow and Hackestown. Carol Ann Duffy is not only one of the most popular poets writing and performing today, but one of the most important of all post-war British poets. Her poems provide voices for an extraordinary number of contemporary characters, from frazzled housewives, and the shabby genteel stewing in their repressions to nervy young delinquents, a fairground psychopath and disinherited American Indians. Many of Carol Ann Duffy's poems reflect on time, change and loss. In dramatizing scenes of childhood, adolescence and adult life, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory and language. She explores not only everyday experiences, but places we visit in our fantasies, memories and imagination. 
 
 

About the Author

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955 and spent her childhood in Staffordshire. She graduated in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. She now lives in Manchester. She has received an extraordinary number of awards, including first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; the Scottish Arts Council Book Awards of Merit for 'Standing Female Nude' and 'The Other Country'; a Somerset Maugham Award in 1988; the Dylan Thomas Award in 1989; a Cholmondeley Award in 1992; and the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1993. 
 

 

Some Poems from The Salmon Carol Ann Duffy Poems Selected & New 1985-1999   The Brink of Shrieks for S. B. Don't ask me how, but I've fetched up living with him. You can laugh. It's no joke from where I'm sitting. Up to the back teeth. That walk. You feel ashamed going out. So-and-so's method of perambulation, he calls it. My arse. Thank God for plastic hips. He'll be queueing. And the language. What can you say? Nothing. Those wee stones make me want to brain him, so they do. They're only the tip of the iceberg. Time who stopped? says I. Ash-grey vests, you try cleaning them. Heartbreaking. Too many nights lying in yon ditch, counting. God's truth. I boil. See him, he's not uttered a peep in weeks. And me? I’m on the brink of shrieks.       Pilate's Wife Firstly, his hands -- a woman's. Softer than mine, with pearly nails, like shells from Galilee. Indolent hands.  Camp hands that clapped for grapes. Their pale, mothy touch made me flinch. Pontius. I longed for Rome, home, someone else. When the Nazarene entered Jerusalem, my maid and I crept out, bored stiff, disguised, and joined the frenzied crowd. I tripped, clutched the bridle of an ass, looked up and there he was. His face? Ugly. Talented.  He looked at me. I mean he looked at me. My God. His eyes were eyes to die for. Then he was gone, his rough men shouldering a pathway to the gates. The night before his trial, I dreamt of him. His brown hands touched me. Then it hurt. Then blood. I saw that each tough palm was skewered by a nail. I woke up, sweating, sexual, terrified. Leave Him Alone. I sent a warning note, then quickly dressed. When I arrived, the Nazarene was crowned with thorns. The crowd was baying for Barabas. Pilate saw me, looked away, then carefully turned up his sleeves and slowly washed his useless, perfumed hands. They seized the prophet then and dragged him out, up to the Place of Skulls. My maid knows all the rest. Was he God? Of course not. Pilate believed he was.       Dark School It is dusk when I enter the classroom, the last of the chalky Latin verbs going out on the board. I sit at a desk at the back and dip my first real pen into blue-black ink. My jotter is dusty pink. I rule a margin, one inch wide, then write the names of the lost, the dead, in a careful, legible list. I memorise this, stand up, recite it word-for-word to twenty shadowy desks. The tall windows blacken and fill with night. But I can see in this blurred school, my carved initials soft scars on the wood, and when I open the lid of my desk there are my books, condition fair, my difficult lessons. I must not run in the corridor, but walk at the speed of smell to the hall, to the empty stage, along the silent passageway to the gym where my hands grasp the hanging rope that brushes my face. Dark school. I learn well; the black paintings  in their burnt frames; all by heart -- the lightless speeches in the library, the bleak equations, the Greek for darkness. Above the glass roof of the chemistry lab, the insolent, truant stars squander their light.   (Copyright Carol Ann Duffy, 2000)

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