If you liked Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars...
...here’s another couple of collections of contemporary poetry to captivate you with their couplets...
The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
You can’t beat this original, witty and imaginative collection from our first female Poet Laureate, where she envisions the lives of the unseen women in history...
Elvis's wimpled sister rocks on in a convent she calls Graceland; Nancy Sinatra gets out her boots made for walking with the Kray Sisters; Mrs Midas misses the touch of her now dangerous golden-handed husband; and Queen Herod decrees the killing of each mother's son to protect her baby daughter in Carol Ann Duffy's startling new collection The World's Wife. Doubling is one of the most common themes--and stylistic ploys--of Western culture and thought, and the concept around which Duffy has ingeniously organised this profoundly playful collection. Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Frau Freud, Anne Hathaway, Mrs Rip Van Winkle, the Kray Sisters; these are some of the wives, and sisters, whose stories are told. These inventive, metaphorically precise poems offer much more, however, than just a recovery of the historical voice of her (supposedly) silenced indoors. Duffy dexterously rewrites Judao-Christian and classical mythologies, subverts fairytale and zestfully reinterprets the more modern myths of Darwin and Freud. The World's Wife throws open the windows on the stuffy annals of historical myth and breezes through some of its highlights with a sense of revelry and laugh-out-loud observation. In this wry take on the historical ubiquity of heterosexual coupledom that permeates so many cultural myths, Duffy has separated vibrant women from the shadows of their more famous husbands and brothers, and divorced them from the distortions of historical silence.
Selected Poems by Tony Harrison
A thorough selection of poems from 2006 from the renowned Yorkshire poet...
This generous selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes sixty-three poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem ‘v.’, a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard, written during the miners’ strike, which created such a stir when it was broadcast on television in the late 1980s.
