Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy and the Laureate's Curse

W

hen was the last time a Poet Laureate wrote something really worth reading? Carol Ann Duffy, the incumbent, is just over halfway through her allotted 10 years in the role. Earlier this year she was made a dame; now she publishes her Collected Poems. The new book spans her career from 1985 onwards, and includes the poems that won the Forward Prize, T S Eliot Prize, Costa Book Award, and an eternal place on the GCSE syllabus. It also includes her recent “public” poems, written as the first female Poet Laureate in British history.

The mantle of laureate isn’t easy to wear. The task of writing to order, in response to the issues of the day and always with a mind towards the approval of the monarch, seems to stifle creativity: some great poets wrote their very worst poems while receiving the annual stipend. How is Duffy coping with the threat of the so-called laureate’s curse, an affliction that plagued her predecessors, making their inspiration run dry and their poems worse than before?

Duffy has so far not admitted suffering any drawbacks. “I have found the experience energising,” she said in an interview last year. “So far it has been nothing but a joy.” Partly she relishes the buzz and responsibility of being the first woman to hold the post, but there’s also, perhaps, a sense of defiance. There were rumours that she was ruled out in 1999 because Tony Blair felt she was unpalatable to Middle England, being Scottish-born and a “lesbian single mother”, as the press sniffily described her (in fact she is bisexual, having had a stormy relationship with fellow poet Jackie Kay).

Carol Ann Duffy

She has seen her role as laureate as one of amplifying the national conversation about poetry, and has made it her job to visit schools to spread the gospel, and to promote the poets she admires. When I saw her at a literary festival a few years ago, she commanded the audience to buy tickets for Alice Oswald the following night, declaring: “As your Poet Laureate, I order you to go!” She has funded a new Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry, named for the laureate she most admires. So far it has rewarded pieces including a performance project from Kate Tempest and, in 2014, a radio work by Andrew Motion.

Motion (laureate from 1999 to 2009) seems to have returned to poetic abundance after a dry patch during his tenure. While he was laureate, he publicly complained about the demands placed on him, calling it a “thankless” task that he found to be “very, very damaging” to his work. The threat of establishment scrutiny was stifling. “A poet should be able to speak their mind,” he said. “I’m no Alastair Campbell.”

Could Campbell have written, as Motion did, a “rap poem” for Prince William’s 21st birthday? Possibly unwisely, Motion decided to channel youth music culture in 2003 for the occasion, beginning: “Better stand back/ Here’s an age attack,/ But the second in line/ Is dealing with it fine.” It was not Motion’s subtlest work.

Carol Ann Duffy

John Betjeman (laureate from 1972 to 1984) found the muse to be even less forthcoming, suffering periods of vivid writer’s block. A year into the role, he wrote to a friend: “Oh God, the Royal poem!! Send the H[oly] G[host] to help me over that fence. So far no sign: watch and pray.”

Duffy’s hero Hughes, a particularly patriotic sort, slipped more easily into the role and wrote monarchy-themed verse with gusto, but few would claim that his laureate poems are his best work either. His “Rain-Charm for the Duchy”, a ritualistic-style nature poem written for Prince Harry’s christening, still feels fleet-footed today. Less fruitfully, Hughes also compared the Queen Mother to a lion (a play on her maiden name of Bowes-Lyon), and ploddingly imagined the metalwork involved in making the royal crown. The poems have more of an air of subservience than muscle of their own.

True, Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” while he was laureate, but this achievement stands out as rare. Wordsworth was made laureate in 1843, long after his most prolific period, and he only agreed to it on the understanding that he wouldn’t have to write anything. He duly published nothing at all between his appointment and his death.

But where do Duffy’s laureate poems sit in terms of the supposed curse? Some have already met a scathing response. Her 2012 poem about Stephen Lawrence was described as “patronising”, “poetically dishonest” and “embarrassingly bad” in a London Review of Books blog, though elsewhere she was praised for confronting a topic that still rides high in the national consciousness. She wrote a eulogy for Hillsborough in a similar mood, slightly more successfully.

Duffy has also been inspired by the crown itself, this time in marking the Queen’s diamond jubilee. But “The Crown” reads like a booklet about birth stones in a hippy gift shop: “Its jewels glow, virtues; loyalty’s ruby, blood-deep;/ sapphire’s ice resilience; emerald evergreen;/ the shy pearl, humility.” She ends with an extraordinarily limp comment on the Queen’s sense of duty, saying that Her Majesty’s crown is “Not lightly worn.”

In 2010, Duffy wrote a brief, deliberately overblown poem influenced by Homer in dedication to an injured David Beckham, whom she likened to Achilles in the Trojan War, except with football. It is the closest she has come to a Motion rap. Where Duffy’s work in promoting prizes and outreach looks like a vocation, these public poems feel more like obligation.

Though it would be sad to conclude that a Poet Laureate’s dip in quality after they are appointed is all but inevitable, Duffy’s work so far does little to break with tradition. Yet don’t let recent form stop you from taking the opportunity to revisit her earlier poems, presented in full bloom in this new edition.

Re-reading those confident, searching and strange verses from The World’s Wife and the TS Eliot Prize-winning Rapture, in particular, was revelatory, and I was struck afresh by their warmth and ability to drill deep into the core of the most complex human experiences.

Duffy’s poems are fascinated by lust and grief, and in paying attention to resonances of one in the other. “This love we have, grief in reverse, full rhyme, wrong place,” she writes in “New Year”. She finds aching sadness at the heart of erotic passion (from “Two Small Poems of Desire”: “It’s tough/ and difficult and true to say/ I love you when you do these things to me”), and paints bereavement as glamour mixed with visceral longing (from “Art”: “No choice for love but art’s long illness, death,/ huge theatres for the echoes that we left,/ applause, then utter dark”).

You can see Duffy’s earliest truly confident steps in “Warming Her Pearls”, a suspense-filled dramatic monologue redolent of Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. It’s a catlike, watchful poem about a lady’s maid’s yearning for her mistress: “And I lie here awake,/ knowing the pearls are cooling even now/ in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night/ I feel their absence and I burn.”

Duffy’s most famous poems are justifiably beloved. The entwining of rhythm with evoked silence in “Prayer” is sublime: “Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer/ utters itself… Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –/ Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.” In “Valentine”, she says, “Not a red rose or a satin heart./ I give you an onion./ It is a moon wrapped in brown paper./ It promises light/ like the careful undressing of love.” Here, again, Duffy sees love as not fairytale-perfect but sharp, sexy and terrible, and more desirable for that.

Her best poems are these searing earlier pieces, stamped right through with ecstasy and black despair. Her public poems feel stiff in comparison, a weakening where before there was strength. If Duffy’s works do resonate through history, they’re likely to be her neon-bright poems on love and devastation, not her placid verses about celebrities and jewels.

Carol Ann Duffy's Collected Poems is published by Picador at £25. 

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