10 and why should he now savour the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin, as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?
He looked about. He remembered her palaver on how both earth and sky would darken? 15 'You could barely tell one from the other'?
while the Monarch butterflies passed over in their milkweed-hunger: 'A wing-beat, some reckon, may trigger off the mother and father
of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher 20 with the force of a hurricane.' Then: 'Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other.'
He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.1 He'd mistaken his mother's name, 'Regan', for 'Anger': as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
25 he could barely tell one from the other.
1994
The Grand Conversation
She. My people came from Korelitz1 where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud.2 He. Mine pored over the mud
5 of mangold-0 and potato-pits a beet or flicked through kale plants from Comber3 as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking through deckle-mold.4
She. Mine would lie low in the shtetl'
io when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks.6 He. It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle0 long wooden bed or bench
1. Russian tea urn. 'Bibliomancers': people wh o predicted the future 1. Town, now in Belarus, once famous for its from the text in a book opened at random. cucumbers. During World Wa r II the Nazis largely 5. Former Jewish village-communities of Eastern massacred its population. Europe. 2. Collection of writings that constitutes the Jew-6. A Polish people known for their horsemanship, ish civil and religious law. they massacred perhaps a hundred thousand 3. Village in Northern Ireland. Polish Jews in 1648^19. 4. Rough edges of pages before they are trimmed.
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CAROL ANN DUFFY / 2873
mine found themselves lying under, 15 the Peep O'Day Boys from Loughgall making Defenders7 of us all. She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans8 and were granted the deed 20 to Charlottesville.' He. Indeed? city in Virginia My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse? merchant guild of pike- and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels. 25 She. Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst. He. Between fearsad and verst9 we may yet construct our future 30 as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach.1 She. Each from his stand of mountain ash will cry out over valley farms 35 spotlit with pear blossom. He. There some young Absalom2 picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nag 40 tugs at a rein caught on a snag. 2002
7. Eighteenth-century Catholic group in Ireland mile. 'Fearsad': sandbank (Irish). that fought Protestants who called themselves the 1. 'Queach': dense growth of bushes. Cf. T. S. Peep O'Day Boys. 'Loughgall': village where Prot-Eliot's 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': 'Doestants formed a larger coalition, the Orange dare to eat a peach? /.. . I have heard the mer- Order, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. maids singing, each to each.' 8. The groups of cells in the pancreas that pro-2. King David's son, killed leading a rebellion duce the hormone insulin, which regulates the against his father (2 Samuel). Riding his mule, he sugar level in the bloodstream. was accidentally hung up on a low branch and was 9. Russian land measure, roughly two-thirds of a thus made vulnerable to enemy spears. CAROL ANN DUFFY
b. 1955 Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father in a working-class Catholic family. After moving as a child to Stafford, England, she was educated there at St. Joseph's Convent and at Stafford Girls' High School, before studying philosophy at the University of Liverpool. She worked in television, edited a poetry magazine, and taught creative writing in London's schools, and since 1996 she has lectured at Manchester Metropolitan University.
A playwright as well as poet, Duffy is especially skillful in her use of dramatic
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monologue, fashioning and assuming the voices of mythological, historical, and Active characters, such as Medusa or Lazarus's imaginary wife. Such poetic ventriloquism is well suited to her feminist revisions of myth and history: it enables her to dramatize a silenced or marginalized female perspective, wittily playing on the ironic contrast between the traditional version of a narrative and her own. The biblical story of Lazarus's resurrection, for example, looks different from the perspective of his wife, who upon his miraculous return from the dead scoffs: 'I breathed / his stench.'
The author of love poetry and political satire as well as dramatic monologues, Duffy has a sharp eye for detail and uses it deftly in poems characterized by their sensuality, economy, and exuberance. Working in well- constructed stanzas, carefully pacing her rhythms, playing on half-rhymes, effectively conjuring the senses of touch, smell, and sight, she mobilizes the resources of traditional lyric and turns them to contemporary ends?the remaking of master narratives, the celebration of lesbian desire.
Warming Her Pearls
for Judith Radstone1
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, until evening when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
5 resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She's beautiful. I dream about her
