The Christmas Truce

Product Information

The writing is gorgeous, musical, spellbinding. Each poem is illustrated by a different illustrator, which reinforces the impression of stepping into a different universe every time we move from one story to the next. I fell in love with the pictures in the poem Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday, but I have one big regret: I looked everywhere but no illustrator is credited anywhere in the book. That's a shame, and I hope the publisher will remedy to that next time the book goes to print. Duffy’s skilful use of alliteration and listing is shown to full effect in the poem, which powerfully conjures the moods of alienation or sudden interaction.

PLOEGSTEERT SECTOR BATTLEFIELD Experience Tours Prices 2013/2014 ANZAC Somme Tour Day Tour € 170,00 Each from 3 Persons 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 […]’. Little Women, Big Boys (one-act), first produced in London, England, at Almeida Theatre, August 8, 1986. Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. However, in 2009, she justified her acceptance of the role on feminist grounds, telling listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, “I think my decision was purely because there has not been a woman. I see this as recognition of the great women poets we now have...and I decided to accept it for that reason.”

Sign Up to the Newsletter

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester. She is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches on the Poetry route of the MFA and MA in Creative Writing and is creative director ofcity-wide, national and international literary projects. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She wasPoet Laureate of the United Kingdom 2009-2019. Her collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. Words of wisdom Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1994, Betsy Hearne, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, pp. 184-185; September, 1996, Betsy Hearne, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, pp. 9-10.

The poem goes on to describe the horror of war through its evocative imagery of the damage it inflicted on the soldiers:Mosaic (Winnipeg, Canada), September, 1998, Danette DiMarco, "Exposing Nude Art: Carol Ann Duffy's Response to Robert Browning," pp. 25-39. Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic,is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economistreviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.” Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time,and 1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love. Anthologise, which saw schools selecting their favourite poetry, the winning anthology published by Picador with a foreword by the Duchess of Cornwall; Day Five - Bethlehem: the illustrations of this one are absolutely stunning. I enjoyed the focus on the culture of the city rather than the retelling of the story! I feel it's quite often white washed, so this was a refreshing change. Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize.