Duffy’s themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one: consequently, there is an interesting contrast between the postmodern content and the conservative forms.

Randolph, Jody. "Remembering Life before Thatcher: Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy." Women's Review of Books 12.8, May 1995. There was a danger, he said, in using a writer's personal life as a way of evaluating their work. "That's what people did with Larkin. There was this idea that you could find the best of him in his books and the worst of him in his life. I suppose most people are naturally prurient. But it is a complete and utter irrelevance."The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] There's some weaker poems. Tea is is kind of banal despite being on a subject that deeply appeals to me. Duffy's poems are studied in British schools at ISC, GCSE, National 5, A-level, and higher levels. [35] [36] In August 2008, her "Education for Leisure," a poem about violence, was removed from the GCSE AQA Anthology, following a complaint about its references to knife crime and a goldfish being flushed down a toilet. The poem begins: "Today I am going to kill something. Anything./I have had enough of being ignored and today/I am going to play God." The protagonist kills a fly, then a goldfish. The budgie panics and the cat hides. It ends with him, or her, or them, leaving the house with a knife. "The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm." [37] As we celebrate Carol Ann Duffy’s decade as Poet Laureate, Dr Mari Hughes-Edwards offers a response to the themes of love and loss in her work What Will You Do Now with the Gift of Your Life? by Stephen Raw.

If love, as Padel suggests, has always been at the centre of her poetry, this is not only romantic and sexual, it is also both daughterly and intensely maternal. Myth and fairy-tale are vital to her imagining of the world, but they are given contemporary voices in her poems. The combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners. As fellow-poet Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Poetry, like love, depends on a kind of recognition. So often with Duffy does the reader say, “Yes, that’s it exactly,” that she could well become the representative poet of the present day.’ I would love to know who she is so I could fall in love with her. Swim in oceanic waves of desire. Actually, I know her name and I am in love with her: Poetry. Duffy’s more disturbing poems also include those such as ‘Education for Leisure’ ( Standing Female Nude) and ‘Psychopath’ ( Selling Manhattan) which are written in the voices of society’s dropouts, outsiders and villains. She gives us insight into such disturbed minds, and into the society that has let them down, without in any way condoning their wrongdoings: ‘Today I am going to kill something. Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored […]’ (‘Education for Leisure’). About Carol Ann Duffy". The Poetry Foundation. 18 March 2003 . Retrieved 2 June 2020– via poets.org.Honorary Graduates 2009" (PDF). 1.hw.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 August 2009 . Retrieved 17 July 2016. Reynolds, Margaret (7 January 2006). "Review: Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy". The Guardian . Retrieved 27 April 2018. Sexual love is enacted by the moon, stars and clouds, ocean and shore, witnessed by the lush forest floor. A poet as accomplished as Carol Anne Duffy can work on the grandest of scales, and go forth unabashedly, over the top. If Shakespeare is perched on her shoulder,

Duffy has been quoted as saying that she is ‘not interested, as a poet, in words like “plash” – Seamus Heaney words, interesting words. I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way’; and in the same Guardian profile, ‘Childhood is like a long greenhouse where everything is growing, it’s lush and steamy. It’s where poems come from’ (31 August, 2002). Duffy is also a playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) Loss (1986), Casanova (2007). Her radio credits include an adaptation of Rapture. [42] Her children's collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Oldest Girl in the World (2000). She also collaborated with the Manchester composer, Sasha Johnson Manning, on The Manchester Carols, a series of Christmas songs that premiered in Manchester Cathedral in 2007. People come to the work of Carol Ann Duffy via various routes. She rose to public prominence as Poet Laureate in 2009 (or, it could be argued, ten years earlier when she was apparently passed over in favour of ‘safer’ choice Andrew Motion). Her appointment made her the first female Laureate since the position was created in the seventeenth century – she reportedly only accepted the post for this reason – and also the first Scottish-born and openly gay poet in the role. The narrator uses interesting language in the first line of this stanza of the poem. They personify their thoughts and in doing so create a powerful piece of imagery. The fact that it refers to their thoughts as “uninvited” suggests that they are powerless to control how they feel and wouldn’t want to feel that way. This line definitely suggests that the narrator can’t get the object of their affection out of their head.Career Granada TV, Guardian poetry critic 1988-89, poetry lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Plays include Take My Husband (1982) and Cavern of Dreams (1984) Clearly, there is a massive transformation and the tone of the poem has changed dramatically. It is at this point in the poem we start to understand why it is called the rapture. Speaking of which note once again the reference to heaven. BBC Radio 4 – Woman's Hour – The Power List 2013". BBC. Archived from the original on 19 March 2014 . Retrieved 17 July 2016. Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into something extraordinary. Only gameshow hosts are braver in their use of puns, and in "Fall" she rushes headlong through at least five meanings of the word, to end with another pun in "your passionate gravity". This is quite skilfully done as the narrator uses the word assonance to prove their point but also uses assonance in the line. Clever stuff! I think what is trying to be said here is that they try and break with the norm to attain bliss, but up until this point it doesn’t seem to have been working!