Carol Ann Duffy



Carol Ann Duffy, CBE (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish poet, playwright, freelance writer and current Poet Laureate, the first woman to hold that title.

Quotes

 * Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
 * Words, Wide Night, from The Other Country (1990).


 * Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love... I am trying to be truthful.
 * Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).


 * Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.
 * Valentine, from Mean Time (1993).


 * Light gatherer. You fell from a star into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside mirrored in you, and now you shine like a snowgirl, a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder you squeal at and fly in.
 * The Light Gatherer, from Feminine Gospels (2002).


 * I cannot say where you are. Unreachable by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable in the air, even if souls are stars.
 * Death and the Moon, from Feminine Gospels (2002).


 * As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.
 * Interviewed in The Guardian, August 31, 2002.


 * What do I have to help me, without spell or prayer, endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous, the death of love?
 * Over, from Rapture (2005).


 * When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.
 * Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005.


 * There'll be what you might call a moment of inspiration – a way of seeing or feeling or remembering, an instance or a person that's made a large impression. Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning
 * Interviewed in The Guardian, December 4, 2005.

Standing Female Nude (1985)

 * Six hours like this for a few francs. Belly nipple arse in the window light, he drains the colour from me. Further to the right, Madame. And do try to be still. I shall be represented analytically and hung in great museums. The bourgeoisie will coo at such an image of a river-whore. They call it Art.
 * Standing Female Nude.


 * This is the word tightrope. Now imagine a man, inching across it in the space between our thoughts. He holds our breath. There is no word net.  You want him to fall, don't you? I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds. The word applause is written all over him.
 * Talent.


 * One saw I was alive. Loosened his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear. Between the gap of corpses I could see a child. The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye.
 * Shooting Stars.