Love and Masculinity in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

Abstract

T his essay explores the shift in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry from the exuberance of the love lyrics in Standing Female Nude to the rejection of masculinities in the satirical poems of The World’s Wife. Male subjects are inextricably tied to the production of amorous poems in Duffy’s first collection, whereas the later book The Other Country offers universalist accounts of sexual encounters in which love is primarily depicted as a linguistic phenomenon. The World’s Wife marks a critical departure from the earlier poetry in that men and masculinity are attacked constantly by more abrasive female narrators. This tendency is augmented by the more overtly homoerotic relationships between women in the collection, a sisterly bonding that, in poems such as ‘from Mrs Tiresias’, is complemented by a celebration of lesbian sexuality. Duffy has often been pigeonholed as a ‘lesbian’ poet, particularly by the media in the furore over the identity of the new Poet Laureate. Such a label might create a particular expectation for the love poetry: an engagement with relationships between women might be anticipated in the tradition of Adrienne Rich and Daphne Marlatt, whereas Duffy’s early amorous lyrics depict the agonies of errant, or neglectful, male partners; even The World’s Wife demonstrates that men and masculinity remain a site of (albeit critical) negotiation for the amorous subject. By following the development of Duffy’s amorous poetics across the various collections since Standing Female Nude, a discursive trend can be detected in which men are, at first, desirable, but equally dangerous or pathetic, then negated, and paradoxically perpetuated, in the universal love poems of The Other Country, and then rejected as irritating presences in the later poetry. By tracing this narrative, it becomes clear that Duffy is