Critical Quotations

Question 1

Jones (Language)

Answer 1

‘Her use of demotic, everyday language can be traced back to Wordsworth, while her interests in the dramatic monologue links her to Browning and Elliot. Her work also shows the influence of Phillip Larkin.’

Question 2

Jones (Memory and Nostalgia)

Answer 2

‘Duffy began to explore memory and nostalgia, resulting in comparisons with Phillip Larkin, continuing to address political, social and philosophical issues.’

Question 3

Tomkins (Artist)

Answer 3

‘With a lot of artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership. She never does. Her aim is to communicate’

Question 4

Boland (Recovery of Memory)

Answer 4

Mean Time is a book concerned with recovery and memory, much as Selling Manhattan was taken up with a sort of sparkling ventriloquism. It is darker and more ambitious than its predecessor.’

Question 5

Boland (Erotic)

Answer 5

‘She is a poet with a sophisticated private lyric agenda, able to canvas dangerous elements of erotic identity.’

Question 6

Boland (Comedy)

Answer 6

‘She explores edges of comedy which position her in an almost bardic way, ready to recover and articulate lost details of the tribe.’

Question 7

O’Brien (Representative)

Answer 7

‘The representative poet of the day’

Question 8

O’Reilly (Post Modernism)

Answer 8

‘Her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one.’

Question 9

O’Reilly (Language Creating Meaning)

Answer 9

‘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.’

Question 10

Duffy (Memories)

Answer 10

‘I do think memory is very important thing for writers and for poets. There’s a sense that the poet part of you is a haunter, a ghost perhaps.’

Question 11

Rowland (Relationships and Time)

Answer 11

‘Many of the poems collected in Mean Time reflect on this complex relationship between time and signification, in particular when focusing on memory, and how time in its particularisation of past, present, future impacts on identity and our sense of being in the world.’

Question 12

Duffy (Time)

Answer 12

The poems in Mean Time are about the different ways in which time brings about change or loss. In the collection, I mean to write about time. The effects of time can be mean. Mean can mean average. The events in the poem can happen to the average man or women. The dwindling of childhood. Ageing. The distance of history. The tricks of memory and the renewal of language. The end of love’.

Question 13

Jones (Limits of Language)

Answer 13

At the heart of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry is the continual acknowledgment and exploration of the limits of language.’

Question 14

Jones (Language and Meaning)

Answer 14

‘Duffy is concerned here with reflecting upon language in general and specifically on the morphology or structure of words and their meanings.’

Question 15

Rowland (Relationships)

Answer 15

‘Mean Time as a whole seems to signal the end of relationship so joyously celebrated in the previous collection.’

Question 16

Jones (Voices)

Answer 16

‘In her poems, Duffy experiments with both gendered and engendered voices in order to renegotiate the boundary between self and other, lover and beloved

Question 17

Jones (Distrust for Language)

Answer 17

Duffy has a ‘distrust for language as mediator between idea and object.’

Question 18

Jones (Dramatic Monologue)

Answer 18

‘Duffy’s use of the dramatic monologue allows a socialization of the self, enabled by the projected fantastic self who carries utterance without fear of censorship.’

Question 19

Rowland (Plight)

Answer 19

‘Mean Time focuses on the plight of the self’

Question 20

Rowland (Relationship and Time)

Answer 20

‘Many of the poems collected in Mean Time reflect on this complex relationship between time and signification, in particular when focusing on memory, and how time in its particularisation of past, present, future impacts on identity and our sense of being in the world.’

Question 21

Rowland (Social Empowerment)

Answer 21

‘Duffy has always been recognised, of course, for poetry that shows a sharp awareness of how the social power dynamic between empowered and disempowered groups of people developed in Britain during and after the Thatcher regime.

Question 22

Rowland (Construction of Language)

Answer 22

‘Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry is concerned with the nature of human identity and its construction in, by language.’

Question 23

Thompson (Power of Words)

Answer 23

Duffy’s poetry examines the ‘magic’ power of words.

Question 24

O’Brien (Litany)

Answer 24

‘The poem is a bleakly comic examination of women’s tribal fear of invoking something by naming it.’

Question 25

Roberts (Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team)

Answer 25

‘Captain is another persona whose discourse is largely made up of a time bound cultural references.’