The use of line breaks and capitalization (or lack of) allows the reader see emphasis on the important ideas of the poem. 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.

With that though, the relief is quickly destroyed by shame at the modern world’s pressures for even the everyday woman to look a certain way; much like “Beauty” dealt with famous figures.In Feminine Gospels, the focus is women, but Duffy does not desire to pigeon whole women into normal societal roles; or even to allow her characters comfort in any of the situations. 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. Not everything is this dark, but there’s this underlying sense of vulnerability echoing throughout the collection. Feminine Gospels is very much an indictment on the modern world, and how women are still very much controlled. Her Christmas books are an absolute delight, and she has even introduced one of my favourite novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in the Vintage Classics edition.

This is a dark book, for all the jokes, exposing equally the trash of our aspirations and the crumbling urban landscape around us.

What makes this work important is its dealings with normalcy in such a way as the reader is made to better understand the deeper intricacies of life through form and subject. Part of Duffy's talent - besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety - is her ventriloquism . in stripping women bare of their layers, carol ann duffy centres her anthology feminine gospels on expanding upon the historical, the archetypal, the biblical, and the fantastical visions of female identity, often rewriting them as she sees fit. I can’t really describe the collection as much other than an ordinary white feminist poetry collection, which makes sense because Duffy is a white woman talking about her personal issues in the collection which the majority of other women can relate to.

As the book moves forward the focus of the poems begin to shift from how women are viewed, to how women view themselves or even how they portray themselves. All in all, pretty good, took a while to warm up to, and I'm unsure that I would have understood a lot of the poems if I hadn't been studying it in class. Her subjects encompass all female trials, tribulations and sufferings and indeed the human condition. I have read anything I can get my hands on since I was a small child, but have never really been able to get into poetry. Some good poems that I felt I could identify with, but most of the collection I struggled to find any real interest in.This is all done through subject and form as a way of enlightening the reader into very current issues in the modern world. uk will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing. So much emphasis has been placed upon all of the senses, and the generational scope too is nothing short of masterful. I sat down in the library to read some of the books I'd already chosen, but this one caught my eye and attention somehow, sitting on a shelf just to my right. Duffy explores the female: from history (Elizabeth I to Marilyn Monroe) to the beauty of birth and raising a growing child, to some more erotic and sometimes personal poetry.

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. In this beautiful poetry collection, Carol Ann Duffy takes us on an educational journey on what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society and the burdens it brings with it.Duffy is causing the reader to begin to question these very hard and true facts of everyday life in extraordinary circumstances and representations as a way of allowing the reader to become uncomfortable with themselves. These are great as individual poems (mostly) but, as an anthology, the same themes endlessly repeated become tedious. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation. At the same time it is hard to keep out of mind Searle's St Trinian's, or even the hearty attachments of Angela Brazil's captains and head girls. 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.