Duffy critics

Question 1

An Economist reviewer

Answer 1

Duffy’s verses are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.”

Question 2

Michael Woods (1)

Answer 2

“At the heart of Carol Anne Duffy’s poetry is a continual acknowledgement and exploration of the limits of language.”
Poems: Disgrace, Havisham

Question 3

Michael Woods (2)

Answer 3

Duffy’s poems are “concerned with with capturing and renovating experience from mean time, the inexorable process that seems internet on robbing is of our being”
Poems: Captain, Pluto, Havisham

Question 4

Duffy (1)

Answer 4

“Poets are ultimately celebrators , of life and of poetry itself”

Question 5

Rees- Jones

Answer 5

Litany explores “anxieties about the idea of the unsayable”

Question 6

Elizabeth O’Riley

Answer 6

Away and See “is convincingly an exploration of the deepest recess of human emotion, both joy and pain”

Question 7

Duffy (2)

Answer 7

‘I’m aware of the limits of language how it barely stretches to hold whatever one wants to say unless it’s “pass the salt”’

Question 8

David Kennedy

Answer 8

“Her poetry emerges as an interrogation of contemporary culture”

Question 9

Jane Thomas

Answer 9

“Duffy’s poetry suggests the potential for disruption and destabilisation of the dominant norms”
Poems:Havisham, Valentine

Question 10

Deryn Rees Jones

Answer 10

“Duffy addresses complex philosophical issues about the function of language and the construction of the self”

Question 11

Duffy (3)

Answer 11

“I like to use simple words but in a complicated way so that you can see the lies and truths within the poem”

Question 12

Jody Allen

Answer 12

“Duffy shares Larkin’s tragic views of life”