As a veteran attendee of poetry readings—and a baby boomer male, and a cynic to boot—I admit that if sat down in a coffee-house, and overheard phrases As a veteran attendee of poetry readings—and a baby boomer male, and a cynic to boot—I admit that if sat down in a coffee-house, and overheard phrases like “feminist dialogue” “radical re-imagining,” and “mythic history,” I might begin to look round apprehensively, plotting the best route for an exit.
In the case of Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, however, the urge to flee would be premature. All the above phrases could properly be used to describe this volume of verse, but so could the phrases “playful,” “surprisingly rhymed,” “bawdy,” “clever,” and “funny.” And so could a lot of other interesting phrases, but there’s enough right there to keep me seated in the coffee house. Isn’t that enough to keep you sitting in the coffee house too?
The World’s Wife (2000) is a collection of dramatic monologue featuring either the wives of famous mythic and historical heroes or female versions of the heroes themselves: Queen Herod, Mrs. Faust, The Kray Sisters, Elvis’ Twin Sister, etc. You get the idea. And the results are often dark, hilarious, inventive, disturbing, and memorable.
Here are three poems taken from the book. They are not representative, and not necessarily the best. Many of Duffy’s monologues extend to three or four pages (without being boring, I hasten to add). I, however, decided to pick three of the poems that are shorter.
MRS. SISYPHUS
That's him pushing the stone up the hill, the jerk. I call it a stone – it's nearer the size of a kirk. When he first started out, it just used to irk, but now it incenses me, and him, the absolute berk. I could do something vicious to him with a dirk.
Think of the perks he says. What use is a perk, I shriek. when you haven't the time to pop open a cork or go for so much as a walk in the park? He's a dork. Folk flock from miles around just to gawk. They think it's a quirk, a bit of a lark. A load of bollocks nearer the mark He might as well bark at the moon that feckin’ stone’s no sooner up than it's rolling back all the way down. And what does he say? Musn’t shirk—keen as a hawk lean as a shark Musn’t shirk!
But I lie alone in the dark, feeling like Noah’s wife did when he hammered away at the Ark; like Frau Johann Sebastian Bach Her voice reduced to a squawk, my smile to a twisted smirk; while, up on the deepening murk of the hill he is giving one hundred per cent and more to his work.
FRAU FREUD
Ladies, for argument’s sake, let us say that I’ve seen my fair share of ding-a-ling, member and jock, of todger and nudger and percy and cock, of tackle, of three-for-a-bob, of willy and winky; in fact, you could say, I’m as au fait with Hunt-the-Salami as Ms. M. Lewinsky - equally sick up to here with the beef bayonet, the pork sword, the saveloy, love-muscle, night-crawler, dong, the dick, prick, dipstick and wick, the rammer, the slammer, the rupert, the shlong. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no axe to grind with the snake in the trousers, the wife’s best friend, the weapon, the python - I suppose what I mean is, ladies, dear ladies, the average penis - not pretty… the squint of its envious solitary eye … one’s feeling of pity …
MEDUSA
A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes, as though my thoughts hissed and spat on my scalp.
My bride’s breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged. There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified?
Be terrified. It’s you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone.
I glanced at a buzzing bee, a dull grey pebble fell to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down.
I looked at a ginger cat, a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit.
I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain.
And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn’t I beautiful? Wasn’t I fragrant and young?
I have never been quite what to make of this book. Reimaginings of the classic fairy tales by one of the brightest intellects and darkest souls of Ame I have never been quite what to make of this book. Reimaginings of the classic fairy tales by one of the brightest intellects and darkest souls of American poetry would seem like an almost guaranteed classic, a marriage of genius and subject matter made in heaven … hell … or both. But the poems themselves have never quite convinced me. The metaphors, though occasionally illuminating and shocking, are often slapdash and cutesy; the verse line is slack, lacking the grace and force that should shape the narrative. This is far from the formalist classics of To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), or from the looser, daring confessional experiments of Live or Die (1966).
Still, the dark narratives of Transformations (1972) continue to speak to me. Sexton’s voice, though necessarily less confessional here, is still God-ridden and Holocaust-haunted, and—for perhaps the first time—consciously feminist. The old tales retold gain new resonance here, if not quite a new shape—as they do, for example, in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber--and to hear them articulated by a great poet, a woman who perpetually awakened beauty from its spell, who continually released her captive soul from its dark tower (always—alas!—temporarily), is an illuminating and unsettling experience. I shall return to these poems again.
These narratives are a little too long—and frankly, a little too uneven—for me to include a complete tale for a sample. Instead, I’ll pick three excerpts:
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
The dwarfs, those little hot dogs, walked three times around Snow White, the sleeping virgin. They were wise and wattled like small czars. Yes, it’s a good omen, they said, and will bring us luck. They stood on tiptoes to watch Snow White wake up. She told them about the mirror and the killer-queen and they asked her to stay and keep house.
RUMPLESTILTSKIN
Inside many of us Is a small old man who wants to get out. No bigger than a two-year-old whom you’d call lamp chop yet this one is old and malformed. His head is okay but the rest of him wasn’t Sanforized. He is a monster of despair. He is all decay. He speaks up as tiny as an earphone with Truman’s asexual voice: I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. No. I am not the law in your mind, the grandfather of watchfulness. I am the law of your members, the kindred of blackness and impulse. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware … beware
CINDERELLA
At the wedding ceremony the two sisters came to curry favo and the white dove pecked their eyes out. Two hollow spots were left like soup spoons.
Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story.
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