Rereading / Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz's centenary

Czesław Miłosz

REREADING

Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz's centenary

Czesław Miłosz was a veteran of European turmoil. His fellow Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney pays tribute to a Polish poet poised between lyricism and witness

Seamus Heaney
Thu 7 Apr 2011

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here is a story that Czesław Miłosz, on a return visit to his birthplace in Lithuania some 50 years after he had left, walked up to an oak tree and embraced it. An image of the return of the native, of course, but also an image of someone drawing strength – the psychic, moral and physical strength of a great poet – from his home ground.

The man with his arms around the trunk had needed all the strength he could muster to be able to stand alone for the previous half century, to be an exile, see his home country invaded, witness the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the destruction of the ghetto, the doomed uprising of the Poles against the Germans and the eventual seizure of power by the communists. All of which formed a prelude to his 40-year stint as a professor in the Slavic languages department of the University of California at Berkeley.

Miłosz, whose centenary occurs this year, was born to a family of Polish-speaking landed gentry, a group that related to Poland rather as the Anglo-Irish gentry did to England. Over a lifetime, memories of the old manor grounds and surrounding woods provided him with his own vision of the land of youth. He attended university in Vilnius and as a young man moved to Warsaw, where he survived the war, working in the underground resistance, publishing anti-Nazi poems and, in 1943, writing "The World", one of the most bewitching sequences of the century.

What "The World" did, at a moment when brutality and atrocity were the daily reality, was to create a picture of the very opposite state of affairs. In this idyll, children are trusting and secure, parents kind and reliable, the landscape and seasons a storybook delight. And all this was presented while the country was in the cruel grip of the occupying army. But the childlike idiom – Miłosz called it "a naif poem" – was a deliberate artistic ploy that drew on William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and scenes from an idealised childhood Lithuania. It was a case of beauty holding a plea with rage, a kind of answer to Shakespeare's question about how such a thing might be done.

One of the words that recur in Miłosz's prose and poetry is "incantation", meaning rhythmical language dictated, he would affirm, by a "daimonion". And from beginning to end the poems do seem to arrive with an unforced certitude, to be touching down into the here and now out of an elsewhere, as if he were "no more than a secretary of the invisible thing". And that brimming creativity gives credence to his traditional sense of himself as the inspired poet:

Whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, reed, quill or a ballpoint,

Wherever I may be, on the tiles of an atrium, in a cloister cell, in a hall before the portrait of a king,

I attend to matters I have been charged with.

And yet the poem which opens on these long perspectives ("From the Rising of the Sun") is suddenly dramatising the displaced person's predicament in an immediate heartfelt idiom:

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,

So that what is stone in me could be dissolved,

So that nothing would remain but my tears, tears.

"I attend to matters I have been charged with": having outlived many of his Polish contemporaries, having watched the Soviets clamp down in Poland, Lithuania and the other Baltic states, Miłosz saw it as his writerly responsibility to bear in mind the dead who had perished in the uprising and the concentration camps and those others who were still suffering in the gulags. Hence his poem "Dedication" and its much-cited lines, "What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?".

He was poised between lyricism and witness. In "The Poor Poet", written in Warsaw in 1944, the eponymous poet finds that his pen is putting forth twigs and leaves and blossoms and a scent that is "impudent", "like an insult to suffering humanity". This sense of guilt and the impulse to rebuke (himself as much as others) is a constant throughout the work, and never more powerfully deployed than in The Captive Mind, the prose book by which he was principally known in English until the poems began to be translated and published from the late 1970s (and then came the Nobel prize in 1980).

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The Captive Mind attends sternly to matters Miłosz was charged with. Written in France in the mid-1950s, it is a j'accuse directed at members of the Polish intelligentsia who had succumbed to the lure of Marxism. It is, however, written with such insight into those particular minds as they become captivated that it is clear the poet must have thought and known, "There but for the grace of God go I". And in fact Miłosz had gone a little bit of the way, had worked as a secretary in the diplomatic service of the People's Republic of Poland, a post he relinquished when it became clear that the regime was being sovietised and Stalinised.

The Captive Mind is as much a meditation as it is a polemic, yet Miłosz had an equal or more than equal gift for praise and elegy: "It seems I was called for this," he would eventually declare, "To glorify things just because they are." And yet such praise was hard-earned since there was always an inner accuser or sceptic who could see his kind and his calling as "A tournament of hunchbacks, literature".

It was the strange destiny of this poet so entangled in dread historical experience to end up in 1960 in Berkeley. This was the dawn of the era of the loose garment and the waterbed, of flower power and the love-in, and Miłosz, veteran of the European turmoil, was to spend almost the whole of his life there. His eyrie was a small house on a hill above Berkeley, which afforded with hallucinatory clarity a view of San Francisco Bay. "I did not expect to live in such an unusual moment . . . / Roads on concrete pillars, cities of glass and cast iron, / airfields larger than tribal dominions." At the same time, as his poem "Gift" attests, California wasn't all anti-Vietnam protests and lightness of being: it did provide him Edenic moments.

Miłosz, however, had his own counter-cultural practices, attending Sunday Mass at the Catholic church near the university, and the visionary qualities that prevail in the poems have their origin in his strongly religious sensibility. There is something unabashed about his readiness to pull out all the stops, as at the end of "And yet the books", where the books, "In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up, / Tribes on the march . . ." "will be there on the shelves, well born, / Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights".

This impulse towards the transcendent contributed to his faith in poetry itself, up until the very end when he returned to the land of his "faithful mother tongue" and lived in Kraków. As he writes in his poem on reading the Japanese poet Issa: "To know and not to speak. / In that way one forgets. / What is pronounced strengthens itself. / What is not pronounced tends to non-existence."

What distinguishes Miłosz as a poet is the abundance and spontaneity of the work, his at-homeness in so many different genres and landscapes, his desire for belief and his equally acute scepticism. Chiefly, however, what irradiates the poetry and compels the reader is a quality of wisdom. Everything is carried and feels guaranteed by the voice. Even in translation, even when he writes in a didactic vein, there is a feeling of phonetic undertow, that the poem is a trawl, not just talk. And this was true of the work he did right up to his death in Kraków in 2004.

Miłosz once wrote: "The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth." At this centenary moment, he himself has become one of those wise men.

• This article was amended on 12 April 2011. The original referred to the poem "And the books". This has been corrected.

Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy / Of course it's political 
Rereading / Childe Harold by Lord Byron
Rereading / Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz's centenary

Lord Byron

Rereading: Childe Harold by Lord Byron

The overnight success of Childe Harold arguably made Lord Byron the first modern celebrity. But it would be several years before he understood the full significance of his creation

Benjamin Markovits

Friday 12 August 2011

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s Byron himself observed, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. He was 24 years old and had just published his third book, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a loosely autobiographical account of the continental tour he made after leaving Cambridge.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of its publication, and the poem, like Byron himself, has had a strange history. It is now most famous for making him famous. Byron is sometimes called the first modern celebrity, and much of the interest in him is biographical: the affairs with Caroline Lamb and his half-sister, the breakdown of his marriage, his death fighting for Greek independence. His writing tends to get lost in his biography; the line between his life and his work was always blurred. In early drafts of the poem Childe Harold was called Childe Burun, and even though Byron publicly objected to any identification between poet and hero, later cantos eventually abandoned the distinction altogether. His readers sometimes became his lovers: women who liked the poem acted on their admiration by offering themselves sexually to the poet.

Can you measure a book's quality by the number of lovers it gets you? Byron himself later justified his most controversial long work, Don Juan, in terms of his sexual experience. He wrote to his publisher, John Murray, that it could only have been written by someone who has "tooled in a post-chaise . . . in a hackney coach . . . in a Gondola . . . Against a wall" etc.

John Mortimer, in the character of Rumpole, talks about the sadness he felt when he realised that Wordsworth was a better poet than Byron – one of the rites of passage for a bookish teenager. You're meant to outgrow Byron. Only Don Juan is still considered truly first-class. But it's a mistake to dismiss the early work. There are questions still worth asking about Childe Harold. Did the poet know what he was doing or did he get lucky? What biographical factors prepared him to write the poem? Why was it so successful? What influence did it have on other writers? Is it any good?There is some evidence that Byron got lucky. Up to that point good luck and bad had been mixed fairly evenly in his life. He was born with a club foot. His father ran through his mother's fortune, then ran off himself and died when Byron was three. His mother took out on Byron her passionate conflicted feelings towards her husband. A nurse may have abused him sexually when he was nine. The Byrons didn't have much money and moved around rented lodgings in Aberdeen. Byron went to local schools and kept getting into fights. Other kids made fun of his lameness, which several people who knew him described as the greatest misfortune of his life.

When he was six, he got his first real piece of good luck – a distant cousin was killed by a cannonball in Corsica, making Byron heir presumptive to the title. At 10, he became a lord and inherited the rundown Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire and various other estates. The title got him to Harrow, where he was miserable at first, and then to Cambridge. He began writing poetry in school and published his first book of poetry, privately, after a year at Trinity. Later this formed the basis for his first public collection, Hours of Idleness. The mixed critical response inspired him to write a satirical reply, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers", which he published just before leaving for Lisbon. The poem took a swipe at several prominent critics and writers, one of whom, the poet Thomas Moore, challenged him to a duel.

His continental tour lasted just over two years and changed his life. He experimented sexually, faced down bandits and dined with a pasha, who tried to seduce him. He saw famous historical sights and witnessed history in the making. The war with France had closed off much of Europe to English travellers, but Byron was among the first to visit key battlegrounds. Along the way he managed to write several short lyrics, some of which would still have been familiar to an educated Englishman a generation ago. He arrived home having completed two substantial works, a follow-up to "English Bards" called "Hints from Horace", and the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

TS Eliot wrote that great works of art exist in a timeless continuum. By this standard, Childe Harold is certainly not a great work of art – it has dated. But even to Byron's readers it would have appeared old fashioned. The poem took Spenser as a model, and was written deliberately in archaic language. After the conventional epic invocation, the second stanza introduces our hero: "Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth." "Whilome" appears at least three more times in the first canto.

Much of the poem is simply a travelogue. It describes the history, appearance and political context of the places Byron visited on his tour, and it seems likely that this kind of first-hand information was part of its appeal. Byron, in his preface, suggests that he guessed as much: "The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author's observations of those countries."

First-hand information, however, can hardly account for the poem's sudden success. Byron's awkward, symbolic method of referring to places and events must have confused his readers. So what did they respond to? The answer lies in the personality of the poet, and his relation to the character of Harold. Those who argue that Byron was the first celebrity writer talk about his careful stage-management of his public personality. While management might not be the right word, Byron was clearly curious from the start of his career about the relationship between author and man. He prefaced his first publicly released volume, Hours of Idleness, with a kind of pre-emptive apology that made heavy weather out of his youth and nobility. Critics rightly mocked him for this preface, but it introduced into the reader's mind the idea of Byron as a character – as a young man and a lord.

He strikes the same note less apologetically in the preface to Childe Harold: "A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece; which, however, makes no pretension to regularity. It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value, that in this fictitious character, 'Childe Harold', I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim – Harold is the child of imagination . . ."

Readers generally ignore such disclaimers, and writers have their own reasons for making them. Byron and Harold clearly had a lot in common: they were both British, noble and young; they possessed "ancient piles" and had travelled the continent.

So what are the other characteristics of this Harold, which the public imputed to Byron? Most are sketched out in the opening stanzas, and I imagine many of his readers would have waded through the political/historical material in the hope of seeing that sketch occasionally filled out. Harold is sinful, and "few earthly things found favour in his sight / Save concubines . . ." We'd seen such characters before, from Tom Jones to Toby Belch, but Byron adds three crucial details to this picture. Harold is unhappy ("Worse than adversity the Childe befell / He felt the fulness of satiety"), unrepentant ("For he through Sin's long labyrinth had run, / Nor made atonement when he did amiss"), and unrequitedly in love ("Had sigh'd to many though he loved but one / And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his"). In short, he grounded the love-sick metaphysical world-weariness of Werther and Hamlet in extreme worldliness, and the Byronic hero was born.

Byron's poem posed his more ardent readers with a difficult challenge: they not only had to redeem his virtue but restore his sense of pleasure. And women, who themselves must have suffered from the paradoxes implied by their sexual role in society (to be chaste and attractive) rushed to meet the challenge. The fact that Byron married the chastest of his admirers, Annabella Millbanke (whom he once described as "a very superior woman a little encumbered with virtue"), suggests that he suffered from this paradox himself.

By adding debauchery to alienation, Byron had created a new kind of hero. I don't know whether he recognised the significance of this innovation when he conceived Childe Harold, but he certainly recognised it after the poem was published. He followed Harold with a series of "verse tales" that had little in common with it except that they allowed him to explore the character of the Byronic hero. "The Giaour", "The Bride of Abydos" and "The Corsair" sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication.

Other writers responded to the creation of this new type. Macaulay's description is probably the best: "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection". This is a guy we all recognise, from Heathcliffe to Jim Stark.

What's curious, though, about Byron's verse tales is that none of them play off that tension between character and writer that established the Byronic hero in the first place. "The Giaour" and "The Corsair" are both unBritish, and the plots in which they appear leave no room for conflation with their author. It wasn't until "Beppo" in 1819, a very different kind of poem with a different kind of hero, that Byron played again with the blurry line between fact and fiction.

His real literary descendants are 20th-century novelists – writers such as JM Coetzee and Philip Roth. It's no coincidence that Disgrace's David Lurie is a lecturer working on Byron. And Portnoy's Complaint is probably the closest modern equivalent to the instant success of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Roth, like Byron, made sexual capital out of his literary fame and responded to the problems of that fame by writing books which teased their readership with autobiographical hints and pseudo-revelations.

I don't think Byron fully understood the potential of fiction to conceal and reveal yourself before Childe Harold was published, and it took him seven years to work through the various temptations of success to get to the kernel of the breakthrough and develop it further. Byron once complained about Wordsworth that he made "the bard the hero of the story" – a criticism he levelled not at The Prelude (which went unpublished in their lifetimes) but at "The Idiot Boy". The Prelude is now considered one of the founding texts of modern poetry, partly because of its influence in turning poetry into a form of autobiography. But Wordsworth wrote without the veil of fiction, and what interested Byron, and what interests Roth, is the way you can use that veil.

Of course, it doesn't hurt to be famous. The point of celebrity, in this context, is to suggest half-knowledge – both to create the demand for real knowledge and give it something false to play against. All of which seems a pretty good summary of the writer's art. Byron may not have mastered that art by the time he wrote Childe Harold, but the success of the poem established a new relation between a writer and his public. Byron learned to exploit this, and it remains his legacy.

Childish Loves, the third novel in Benjamin Markovits's Byron trilogy, is published next week by Faber.

THE GUARDIAN

Carol Ann Duffy

Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy – of course it's political

Duffy’s 1999 collection The World’s Wife gives the women behind the scenes – from Mrs Midas to Queen Kong – a glorious and powerful voice. She is a poet of vast imagination

Jeanette Winterson
Saturday 17 January 2015 08.50 GMT

Poetry is pleasure.

Sometimes people say to me, “why should I read a poem?” There are plenty of answers, from the profound – a poem is such an ancient means of communication that it feels like an evolutionary necessity – to the practical; a poem is like a shot of espresso – the fastest way to get a hit of mental and spiritual energy.

We could talk about poetry as a rope in a storm. Poetry as one continuous mantra of mental health. Poetry as the world’s biggest, longest-running workshop on how to love. Poetry as a conversation across time. Poetry as the acid-scrub of cliche.

We could say that the poem is a lie detector. That the poem is a way of thinking without losing the feeling. That a poem is a way of feeling without being too overwhelmed by feeling to think straight. That the poem is “the best words in the best order” (Coleridge). That the poem “keeps the heart awake to truth and beauty” (Coleridge again – who can resist those Romantics?). That the poem is an intervention: “The capacity to make change in existing conditions” (Muriel Rukeyser). That poetry, said Seamus Heaney, is “strong enough to help”.

Yes.

And pleasure.

Carol Ann Duffy has often spoken about poetry as an everyday event and not as a special occasion. She wants us to enjoy poetry, to have as much as we like, to be able to help ourselves to a good, fresh supply, to let poetry be as daily as talking – because poetry is talking. Words begin in the mouth before they hit the page. Speech is older than writing, and poetry is as old as speech. Poems are best spoken to get the full weight and taste of the words and the run of the lines. Difficult poems become easier when spoken.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry.

Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in 20th-century classical music – atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness – so modernism rebranded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea towels; not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet.

It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap and the rise of performance poetry have played a part in that return.

As a powerful modern voice, Duffy has been unafraid to use rhyme from the beginning. In her TS Eliot prizewinning collection, Rapture, poem after poem deployed rhyme with accurate beauty.

Her poetry is a practical proof of rhyme as expressive, flexible, purposefully baited. Dangle a rhyme at the end of a line and the mind-fish bites. Not only end-rhymes, but off-rhymes, hidden rhymes, half-rhymes, ghost rhymes, deliberate near-misses that hit the mark:

I was wind, I was gas

I was all hot air, trailed

Clouds for hair.

I scrawled my name with a hurricane, When out of the blue

Roared a fighter plane. (“Thetis”)

The poems in The World’s Wife – about women behind the scenes, women behind the throne, women behind history – are rhyme-rich, though not always obviously so:

I flew in my chains over the wood where

we’d buried

the doll. I know it was me who was there.

I know I carried the spade. I know I was

covered in mud.

But I cannot remember how or when or

precisely where.

The complacent end-rhymes of lines two and four are taunted by the askew “buried” and “carried”, and made sinister by the pagan sacrifice embedded in “wood” and “mud” with the ancient “wude” and “daub” sitting behind the rhyme. Repetition of “I know”, three times in four lines, works as a locked rhyme – lethally right for a mind that can never escape itself or be set free by others; a mind that belongs to Myra Hindley.

Other poems rhyme with cheeky exuberance. In “Mrs Sisyphus” the repetitive idiocy of the rock and its roll suits the uphill build of the poem (towards its inevitable collapse). The punishment of the gods turns out to be a 24/7 meaningless managerial job, where no matter how many emails you answer, your inbox will be full again the next day.

Then there’s the glorious “Mrs Darwin” with its Edward Learnonsensical sense: “7 April 1852. // Went to the Zoo. / I said to Him – / Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.” Hidden behind this ditty in diary form is the shadow of Dorothy Wordsworth, endlessly walking, endlessly writing her Lake District journal so that William could use it for that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” he liked a poem to be. The famous daffodils, we remember, were Dorothy’s.

The title of The World’s Wife is both a tacit understanding that it’s (still) a man’s world, and a joke on the world’s most popular dedication: To My Wife.

Ask who was at a party and the answer is often, “Oh, the world and his wife.” Our language pictures are inherently patriarchal – unless challenged. But the fact that three simple title-words can be the challenger affirms the power of language to disclose the unthought norm.

And the unthought known. Men and women alike know that more than half the world is female but men and women alike forget it every day. It takes a poet to jog our memory.

The characters in The World’s Wife come from fairytales, Bible stories, legends, modern horrors (Hindley, here recast as the devil’s wife) and ancient myths. Their common link is that the poems themselves are told by the spouse-voice of the famous male.

This headstand, the world turned upside down, gives us another look at history through her-story. The “other”; the angry and the ignored, as well as the sure-footed and sexy. Of course there’s a political agenda – there always is: poets write poems because they have something urgent to say.

First-world-war poet and soldier, Wilfred Owen claimed of his work that “the poetry is in the pity”. In The World’s Wife, the politics is in the poetry. The politics is feminism.

But there’s nothing po-faced about these poems. They are written with such humour or poignancy, or insight or recognition, that we get the point, the many points, the points of view and the points of light. Like every good atom, these poems are composed out of empty space and points of light – the dazzle of the poet’s vision, the space for the reader to reimagine matter, the matter, what matters, what is the matter?

Here is Frau Freud, in mad lexical delight, listing every word she can think of for Penis – and at last, in a bout of new theory-making that would have given us a very different psychoanalysis, she drops Penis Envy and opts instead for Penis Pity. It’s a short poem – a loose sonnet – but it says as much as bookshelves of debate. The fact is that women don’t suffer from penis envy. (Actually or symbolically, practically or poetically). Only a man would think anyone could.

Here’s Red Riding Hood gutting the wolf-poet to get at his words. She has no objection to sleeping with him first, or bringing him breakfast in bed. When she gets on with the axe-work and slits him “scrotum to throat”, she discovers it’s her grandmother’s bones inside. The skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue.

There’s Mrs Midas, who has to lock the cat in the cellar and jam a chair against the bedroom door, while her husband turns their life into gold. What you risk reveals what you value. This thoughtful, funny poem questions the masculine obsession with money – far from the stereotype of woman as a gold digger. What Mrs Midas misses most about her husband is the one thing she can never have: his touch. “Mrs Faust” conjures up a much more money-minded female. It’s Faust who has amassed world-pools of cash but she’s happy enough to spend it:

“I grew to love the lifestyle / not the life. / He grew to love the kudos / not the wife.”

The ballad-form rhyming here is tidy and deadly. Duffy, throughout her work, has made good use of both the English ballad and its 19th-century development, the dramatic monologue.

The ballad form is made for narrative stretch. It’s an old form – the Robin Hood ballads date from the mid-to-late 15th century. It’s a form for storytelling, for late-night firesides, for pub entertainment, for the popular chapbooks (cheap books) that were just folded printed papers sold at fairs. It’s street corner, it’s troubadour, it’s busking.

Ballads had a lucrative disruptive sideline as political agitprop, in broadside ballads, as they became known. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Lennon and McCartney of the 18th-century poetry scene, published their Lyrical Ballads, a moody, up-close, melodic extension of the ballad form, making it both personal and political – about ordinary people, not legends or hate figures, and using natural speech and the sights and sounds of what was around them. They were modernising poetry.

The ballad is usually a third-person narrative, and it can run on forever – it was designed to have verses added – while its later development, the dramatic monologue, throws the reader into a highly charged first-person narrative, closer to the urgencies of the stage than the shaggy dog of a story.

But both forms have a story to tell. The poems in The World’s Wife are hybrids: first person, dramatic situations, at once intimate and theatrical, as you’d expect from a monologue, but with the authority of a ballad – a legend being told, a larger-than-life figure that belongs in myth as well as history. And there’s something of the broadside here, too, in their high-stepping protest at the truth that the story unfolds. Some of these poems are laments for women in captivity.

The dramatic Mrs Beast pictures a world where smart women with their own money ditch the prince and choose the beast. Better sex. Keys to the wine cellar. The women run a weekly poker game.

But behind each player stood a line of

ghosts

Unable to win. Eve, Ashputtel. Marilyn

Monroe.

Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair.

Bessie Smith unloved and down and out.

Bluebeard’s wives, Henry VIII’s, Snow White

Cursing the day she left the seven

dwarfs, Diana,

Princess of Wales.

The startling last line? A paraphrase of Auden: “Let the less-loving one be me.”

From women who need a lesson in loving less to a creature who could not love more, “Queen Kong” is the story of a female gorilla who falls in love with the documentary film-maker who turns up in her remote part of the world. They have an affair. He leaves for home, much like Aeneas leaves Dido, but this gorilla doesn’t kill herself: she goes after him to New York city, squeezing herself between the skyscrapers, “pressing my passionate eye / to a thousand windows, each with its modest peep-show / Of boredom or pain, of drama, consolation, remorse.” Until … “I picked him, like a chocolate from the top layer / Of the box, one Friday night, out of his room”.

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It’s a wonderful image, and as she dangles him there, high over the Manhattan grid, we get a new sense of what is meant by arm candy.

The range of Duffy’s imagination is vast. She moves easily from gorilla-scale to the interiority of the sonnet. Duffy loves the sonnet form – she says: “They remind me of prayers.” “Anne Hathaway” is also a sonnet – a gentle vindication of the love between the famously neglected wife and the most famous writer in history. For those who fear that feminism doesn’t include men, except at the level of anger or contempt, read this one.

The final poem in the collection, “Demeter”, is also a sonnet, as mysterious and complete as the moon. It is about nobody’s wife. That choice is an audacious signal. A message that something else is happening now. We are leaving for elsewhere. A new beginning.

“Demeter” celebrates mother and daughter in their ancient form as the two-that-is-three of the Great Goddess – mother, daughter, wise woman. I guess the invisible third is writing the poem – or perhaps she’s renewed, as she always is, in the new moon of the last line. “Demeter” is a love poem. A poem of spring and the coming future – its symbol, fresh flowers. A future, perhaps, where there will be no need to voice history with the words we never heard.

A future that starts with a prayer.

THE GUARDIAN