Here’s the thing. I bought this book from Apple’s iBooks store and read it on my iPhone. It was an experiment. I certainly don’t see myself making many purchases from iBooks – not least because it’s the same price as a “real” book, and if I’m going to pay £8.99 I really want the physical object – but I thought that a short book of poems might be the sort of thing that reading-on-iPhone would suit. Short things, perfect for standing in queues, or filling the odd couple of minutes. And I do think that it works for that. The text is clear (you can change both size and font) and in short bursts reading on that screen is in no way uncomfortable. I can’t imagine myself ever reading a full-length novel from start to finish on it, but poetry and perhaps short stories, it’s not too bad at all.

But on to the poems themselves. Some of them I already knew, in particular the selections from The World’s Wife (my favourite Duffy book) and Feminine Gospels. I was pleased that one of my favourite World’s Wife poems was included, ‘Delilah’:

Teach me, he said -
We were lying in bed -
how to care.

I have now discovered new favourites as well. The opening poem, ‘Correspondants’, is from Selling Manhattan (a collection I’m not familiar with) and is a real stand-out poem from the whole collection.

When you come on Thursday, bring
me a letter. We have
the language of stuffed birds, teacups.
We don’t have
the language of bodies. My husband
will be here.

I just adore that image of letters being ’stuffed birds’, carrier pigeons, full of messages of love and passion.

Virtually every type of romantic love is covered in these poems. There are passionate poems (‘Close’), funny poems (‘Text’), poems full of longing (‘The Darling Letters’), and poems that capture the sheer heady joy of being in love, like ‘Drunk’ (“Suddenly the rain is hilarious”). There are also incredibly sad poems, like ‘Deportation’, which is told from the point of view of someone having come to Britain to try and find a better life for their family, but being sent home to them with nothing.

In some ways, Duffy’s way of writing about love very much reminds me of Ali Smith’s short stories about love. I have always thought Smith’s love stories were her strength, and there is something in style of Duffy’s poems – her tone, and her way of thinking about and describing love – that brings Smith’s writing to mind. Perhaps because Smith’s writing can be very poetic, I don’t know.

If you’re new to Duffy’s work, then I think this collection would be an excellent way in, taking in as it does poems from the breadth of her career. I’m now really looking forward to her next collection, The Bees, on the basis of the poems contained her. It publishes, apparently, in 2011.

Also: gorgeous cover.

From The Guardian:

William Hill, which had made the multiple award-winning Duffy its 5/4 joint favourite with Simon Armitage to take the role, said yesterday that it had closed its books on the laureateship race.

 

“Carol Ann has been the heaviest backed contender for the job, and would already cost us a five-figure payout, so we’ve decided to close the book as the decision appears to have been taken,” said spokesman Graham Sharpe. William Hill had also been offering odds on Roger McGough (5/1), James Fenton (10/1), Jackie Kay (10/1), Jo Shapcott (12/1), Wendy Cope (14/1) – not particularly generous odds given that she ruled herself out of the running earlier this year – and Benjamin Zephaniah (20/1).

From The Bookseller:

Carol Ann Duffy has been put forward for the Queen’s approval to assume the role of Poet Laureate, from Andrew Motion, reports the Independent. “If all goes as planned, the Glasgow-born poet will become not only the first woman to hold the post but the first openly gay one.”

From The Independent:

It is understood she has been chosen after a new selection process, introduced by Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, in which the public was invited to offer their views on the search for the successor to a position whose previous incumbents included Lord Tennyson, Sir John Betjeman and Ted Hughes.

I really can’t recommend her writing to you highly enough, particularly her collections The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels.