Feminine Gospels

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Sometimes erotic and personal, sometimes historical and grand, sometimes witty and full of surprises, the poems here are all beautifully crafted works that are as varied in style as the poems in Duffy's earlier acclaimed volume The World's Wife. In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions – and revisions – of female identity. Feminine Gospels then culminates in the longest poem titled “The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High,” which truly takes everything that Duffy has put forth in the first half of the book in a true to life story in poem form. The dubious gift of beauty passes to Princess Diana, who obediently widens her eyes for the flashbulbs of the press. There is much importance here, too; she weaves together the stories of women with history, conflicts, and the family, and all has been masterfully interconnected.

From the sadness of Elizabeth I, looking back on her long and powerful but lonely life, to the travails of a woman whose work is literally never done as she continues to trawl the seas to feed her billion offspring, to a movingly lyrical reflection on the beauty of a growing child, Carol Ann Duffy explores in this volume the myriad components of women's lives and loves through the crystallizing prism of poetry.It is not merely a desire to encapsulate women, but a desire to press the issue of better understanding women. Some said/ she turned into a cloud/ and floated home,/ falling there like rain, or tears,/ upon her husband’s face. the quality never once slips and remains impressive throughout, but instead, it is personal connection that wavers.

This is a problem as I intend to collect all the anthologies published by Duffy in the advertised style. Overall, though, it must be said that Carol Ann Duffy's lyricism flows beautifully across the pages like water and it is a pure joy to read every single line of text. These are great as individual poems (mostly) but, as an anthology, the same themes endlessly repeated become tedious. As a way of coupling this poem, Duffy follows it up with “The Diet”a poem that examines how women are pressured into a certain body image through these idolizations.There are some extremely empowering and dazzling poems in this collection, such as The Map Woman, Beautiful or The Diet, but also some less stunning ones, such as The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High, which spans near 20 pages and is just tedious to read. 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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.