The longest poem in the book is "The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High" and Duffy clearly enjoyed writing it. At one level the poem is a tour de force of sparkle and fizz. A mysterious giggle grows ineluctably into an all-consuming merriment that destroys the whole structure of grammar school propriety. Those who went to such a grammar school, as I did, will recognise the discipline and the drudgery, and recall the passionate longing to escape shared by teachers and students alike. At the same time it is hard to keep out of mind Searle's St Trinian's, or even the hearty attachments of Angela Brazil's captains and head girls. I found the poetry lay mainly in the asides: a teacher on a cold night, watching her own breath, a moment of loving abandon, an evocation of "The world like Quink outside". For all its accomplishment, this was not my favourite poem in the collection.

The short, stunted ‘Beauty is fame’ is followed by a caesura. Duffy emphasizes the brutality of this line. Helen did not ask for beauty, yet she is made into an icon that must be pursued due to the male gaze. They look upon her and whisper her name, spreading her name across the globe. The perusers kill her husband, ‘sliced a last grin in his throat’, male rage and jealousy destroying Helen’s life. Duffy here is showing how consumerism is destroying women's morals and women prostitute their bodies and souls to gain worldly goods. Carol Ann Duffy, one of the most significant names in contemporary British poetry, has achieved that rare feat of both critical and commercial success. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses. Some critics have accused Duffy of being too populist, but on the whole her work is highly acclaimed for being both literary and accessible, and she is regarded as one of Britain’s most well-loved and successful contemporary poets. Observer (London, England), August 15, 1999, review of The World's Wife (audio version), p. 14; October 24, 1999, Kate Kellaway, review of Meeting Midnight, p. 13.The one word title is a loaded adjective, which carries different associations in the mind of each reader. The irony is that the lives of the beautiful women, explored in the poem, were difficult, contrasting tragically to their physical loveliness.

Now the poet has the child; the house, prefigured in 'Mean Time', with 'windows tender with light'; even the Moon seems nearby, but the dead are still 'unreachable... forever further than that'. What's more, if they rose again, you'd run from them. Diverse as Feminine Gospels is, its poems are linked by two themes - fulfilled dreams and an adult's awareness of the consequences. This book is not bound by a theme like The World's Wife, which trained an idiosyncratic eye on the women at the side of historical or legendary men. Yet, rather as the Long Queen - in the poem that opens this collection - rules over a female population of "wetnurses/witches, widows, wives, mothers of all these", Duffy too knows her constituency. There is an Alice in Wonderland quality about the story in which the protagonist shrinks in size and embarks on journeys through tunnels and on the wind. These are metaphors for her physical and spiritual sufferings.

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The poem moves chronologically through their lives, exploring their rise to fame and subsequent downfall. Each one is brutal, ending in a death caused by the exploitation of a patriarchal world. Although some of these women gained power within their lives, they could never truly flourish in a society that placed masculine identities as more influential. Duffy uses this poem to expose the horrors of society, women exploited until they come to a tragic end. Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana all died horrifically. Cleopatra died to a self-inflicted snake bite, Munroe to an overdose, and Diana to a car crash after being pursued by the ravenous press of England. The exploitation of women is rife throughout history, not stopping even as we move into the 21st century.

Feminine Gospels marks the first time in which I have read any of Duffy’s longer poems; some of those collected here are almost of Tennyson length. Her style lends itself incredibly well to these longer works. Throughout, Duffy makes some shrewd observations, and poses some fascinating thoughts and questions; in ‘The Long Queen’, for instance, she asks: ‘What was she queen of? Women, girls, / spinsters and hags, matrons, wet nurses, / witches, widows, wives, mothers of all those’. She praises difference and diversity – for Duffy, all women matter (as, of course, they should in the real world too). Following this, these stanzas reveal how invasive the media was in pursuit of Diana. Although loved by many, ‘The whole town came’, she was still constantly followed by the media. The repetition of ‘stare’, combined with polysyndeton represents the invasive media. The constant, repeated, invasion followed Diana until her death.The poem comprises eight free-verse stanzas of seven lines each. There is no rhyme scheme or regular metre. The lines are uneven in length, with the final short sentence or phrase providing a sharp, pithy conclusion to each stanza that represents a stage of the story. Sentences are of varying length. Nonetheless, Feminine Gospels (2002), as the title suggests, is a concentration on the female point of view. It is a celebration of female experience, and it has a strong sense of magic and fairytale discourse. However, as in traditional fairytales, there is sometimes a sense of darkness as well as joy. Birth, death and the cycles and stages of life feature strongly, including menstruation, motherhood and aging. Duffy’s beloved daughter Ella was born in 1995, and her experience of motherhood has deeply influenced her poetry (as well as inspiring her to write other works for children). Poems such as 'The Cord' and 'The Light Gatherer' rejoice in new life, while ‘Death and the Moon’ mourns those who have passed on: ‘[…] I cannot say where you are. Unreachable / by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable / in the air, even if souls are stars […]’. In The World's Wife, her exhilarating collection of flights of fantasy, Duffy sex-changed the heroes of high and pop culture and made old stories shiver with life. On first glance, Feminine Gospels echoes its predecessor, retelling the world through women's eyes: 'The light music of girls... the faint strings/ of the old.' These tall tales, however, subvert life rather than literature, running miles with myths that don't exist but should. They are 'what if?' poems, from a world in which outrage, memory, a desire for babies or white goods can transform one utterly, like a secret Guinness Book of Records for womankind.

Yet, Cleopatra is able to leverage her beauty to get what she wants, Duffy presents the woman’s power. The fact she reduces ‘Caesar’ to ‘gibbering’ displays the control she has. We know this is a sexual power by the location, ‘in bed’. Duffy suggests that Cleopatra gains power by accepting her beauty and using it to manipulate and control men.

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New Statesman, November 29, 1999, review of Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-first Century, p. 83. Firstly, I must say that I absolutely love what Feminine Gospels has set out to do: ‘Exploring issues of sexuality, beauty and biology, Carol Ann Duffy’s poems tell tall stories as though they are unconditional truths, spinning modern myths from images of women as bodies – blood, bones and skin – and corpses, as writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, as fairytale royals or girls next door’. Its style and focus was reminiscent of The World’s Wife for me.