The World's Wife: Poems. By Carol Ann Duffy. Picador. 76pp. £10 in UK
Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Carol Ann Duffy. Anvil Press. 151pp. £7.95 in UK
Six poems from The World's Wife concluded Carol Ann Duffy's 1994 Selected Poems. Now the complete sequence appears, together with related first-person pieces spoken by legendary women such as `Demeter', `Salome' and `Penelope'. This long gestation period (all right, I know that most poets publish too much) may reflect the difficulties and pitfalls of writing according to formula. The World's Wife grew from the inspired conceit that wives of actual or fictional male celebrities might have their own slant on the patriarchy of fame: hence `Mrs Midas', `Mrs Tiresias', `Mrs Darwin', `Mrs Aesop' etc. `Queen Kong' does change the formula by transposing King Kong's passion into female terms. Nonetheless, there comes a point at which Duffy runs out of variations on women's anger, scorn and sadness.
`Mrs Midas' itself stems from the rich compilation After Ovid (1994), edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun. After Ovid sent many poets down metamorphic trails perhaps never to return in their original artistic shapes. Partly owing to its Ovidian stimulus, `Mrs Midas' remains the best poem in the sequence:
Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way
the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,
but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from a branch - we grew Fondante d'Automne
- and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On.
I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree?
Duffy takes her chance to set up a dialectic whose terms are organic and inorganic images, human warmth and cold ambition, women's and men's needs, life and artefact. The poem's inventive metamorphoses include "a hare [hanging] from a larch,/ a beautiful lemon mistake" and Midas, banished from the conjugal bed, "turning the spare room/ into the tomb of Tutankhamun". Yet `Mrs Midas' is also flawed in characteristic ways. Some of the six-line stanzas seem little more than neatish containers for a narrative which they cannot prevent from going on too long. The poem ends with a brilliant allusion to the Midas touch. His wife misses "most,/ even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch". Yet this follows a too-declarative preamble about "lack of thought for me", and the cluttered build-up to the last two crucial words similarly labours what should be latent.
Duffy's erratic formal instinct dilutes the intensity of what she achieves at her best. The World's Wife veers between "monologue" in the sense of clever, jokey characterisation that will go down well at readings, and "monologue" in the sense of concentrated lyric persona. Some of her monologues in the former sense are indeed lively performances. `Frau Freud' almost too graphically proves the impossibility of penis envy. `Mrs Aesop' amusingly counterpoints the voice of male sententiousness with the bored voice of a woman who manages to "laugh last, longest". The enormous `Queen Kong' pursuing her "small, but perfectly formed" little man, and putting "the tip of [her] tongue to the grape of his flesh" is a deliciously disturbing creation. Other poems too - `Circe' and `Mrs Beast' - introduce animals grotesquely and satirically into the psycho-sexual drama of men and women.
But sometimes the narrative or psychological twist seems too glib: `Pilate's Wife' calling Jesus's eyes "eyes to die for"; `Mrs Quasimodo' jealously taking revenge on the bells; the upwardly mobile Mr and `Mrs Faust'. And either some feminist motifs have become staler or Duffy does not press them beyond the obvious: `Queen Herod' concerned for her daughter's survival; the `Kray Sisters', in another transposition, "dressed to kill"; `Pope Joan' only knowing "the power of God" when she gives birth to a "miracle" child. Yet Duffy sets up a subtler argument about poetry, sex and gender when she contrasts `Eurydice', who refuses to be the Muse, with `Anne Hathaway' relishing the creative world of the second-best bed.
If Duffy over-extends her "Mrs" sequence, one reason may be that audience expectations constrain her talent. Duffy's broader poetic horizons are suggested by the millennial anthology she has devised: Times Tidings. She invited 50 contemporary poets to contribute a poem on a temporal theme, and to select one such from the past. The team from times that took mortality seriously - Dunbar, Shakespeare, Herrick, Dickinson - easily outplays the present. Nonetheless, Douglas Dunn meditates seductively on taking time out from modern work: "Delicate kisses of time, thought kisses,/Touches which have come out of hiding shyly". And Dorothy Nimmo, in `Before and After', contrives a precise parable about the relative advantages of "getting there early", when the world is pristine, and arriving "When everything has gone wrong that is going to go wrong".
Perhaps Time is finally too comprehensive a theme for an anthology. All poetry enters a race against time, whether explicitly or not, and hopes for a compensatory survival by impressing posterity. Good poems know this (it helps to make them good); The World's Wife tends to forget. Despite its several successes, the sequence does not measure up to its rather large mythic if comic propositions. Nonetheless, I hope that Carol Ann Duffy will write `Mrs Poet Laureate' - soon.
Edna Longley is a professor of English at Queen's University. Her new collection of essays, Poetry & Posterity, will be published next year by Bloodaxe