It was a good day for reading today - one of those wintry wet days so I spent my rainy Saturday afternoon snuggled up with a book. That book was the most recent collection of poems by one of Britain’s most acclaimed female poets, Carol Ann Duffy. The recent volume is entitled The World’s Wife and each poem focusses on an imagined woman attached to a famous man either in history or in myth - Pilate, Midas, Darwin, Pope Joan - even Elvis’ twin sister.
One of my favourites in the collection (which I devoured fully in the space of a few hours) is ‘Mrs Icarus’:
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock
Fantastic poetry, but I’ve been a fan ever since reading her early one ‘Warming Her Pearls’ - it’s available in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited and chosen by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.
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