Read the following extracts and see how events in Duffy's could explain or have influenced her poetry...
"When we meet, Duffy wears a linen trouser suit and enjoys the walk up a urine-soaked alleyway from the tube station to the restaurant: "This is great! I love alleyways. I haven't been in an alleyway like this for a long time."
The World's Wife is her most overtly feminist work, and I ask if it was her primary intention to give voice to women denied a say in the past. "I think the poems are looking for the missing truth, rather than accepting the way we've been taught. If you look at King Kong, which is one of my favourite movies, it's not necessarily the way a woman would go about things. I thought that if a woman gorilla had fallen in love with a man, she'd have been much more subtle about it.
She was still at school when she started going out with the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri, 23 years her senior. "Don't worry, I'm not terrified of being in-ed!" she says. "Yes, I did go out with him, and yes, he was a little older than me. I met him at a poetry reading when I was 16. I went to university in Liverpool to be with him. I love him dearly. I saw him only yesterday." That's quite an age difference.
"I think it's because I went to a convent. It makes you wild. I'm joking, of course. I was never really wild." So, is her relationship with Kay her first gay relationship? "No, I had a dress rehearsal." Just one? "One. Yes."
Duffy thus discovered poetry as a teenager, when she was growing up in Stafford. She was born in 1955 in Glasgow; the family moved south when she was five, and she bears no trace of a Scottish accent. (In fact, her voice is rather strange, if powerful: it's as if she's speaking with the bottom row of her teeth.) They moved because her father, Frank, got a job at English Electric (now GEC). "He's always been very involved in politics," she says. "He stood for the Labour Party in one of the terrible Thatcher elections, the one after the Falklands. Didn't get in. He's been a Labour councillor, and worked for his union most of his life. And my grandad was put in prison by Churchill for sedition! He occupied some tenements that were either going to be pulled down or have their tenants evicted. In his old age he became quite respectable and became Deputy Lord Provost of Glasgow."
She recounts this colourful family history with pride, although she says she isn't very political herself. "I think the kind of energy politics would take has gone into poetry." What about her mother? Does Mrs Duffy, Mrs Frank, have an untold story? "She was largely looking after us," she says.
There are four brothers, all younger: one works with children in care, one is managing director of Doc Martens, one is "footloose and fancy-free in Aberdeen", another is a journalist on the Mirror. ("He's very loyal and would never write about me. And, as he says, all the muckraking about me was done by the broadsheets, not the tabloids.") She describes it as a loving, strict, happy Catholic household: holidays in Blackpool every summer "from six to 16"; parents who still live in the house she grew up in. "They're like salt and pepper," she says of them. "The idea of them not being together is funny." How did they feel about her relationship with Adrian Henri? And how do they feel about Jackie Kay? "Oh, fine," she says, breezily. "They're very loving, not judgmental. They treat Jackie just like a daughter-in-law. I mean, we all stay there. They're the kind of parents who, if you murdered someone, their first instinct would be to hide you."
It was at school that she was encouraged to explore poetry, with two "inspirational" teachers, one each at the convent and the comprehensive she attended. Prompted by them, she had an "excruciating pamphlet" published when she was 16, "a mixture of Keats and Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas and the Bible. A sort of teenage mix." She's so embarrassed about this publication that she won't even admit its title. "I was at a signing last year and someone came up to me with it. I actually screamed. There was this anorak in front of me who'd paid £30 for it. I offered him £50, I wanted to destroy it. But he refused."
For years, Duffy's poems have been about pain. Aching, powerful, they have been poems about loss: of love, of childhood, of the past. She describes poetry as "trying to grow a past with words". Now she can write hopeful, happy poems, such as Demeter, a beautiful, optimistic work about how her daughter has changed her life; or poems that show a new kind of emotional confidence, such as Mrs Beast ("Let the less-loving one be me"), or Delilah, in which a man begs "teach me how to care". The World's Wife is simply a happier book than Mean Time, indeed than any of her other collections.
"I wonder why that should be," she says. "I suppose since I've been writing poems I've drawn on my own life from about the age of 16 when I started having, you know, relationships. And because a lot of what I'm writing about is quite far away now, it felt both personal and re-moved. I was able to look at it in a much more objective way than if I was writing about something very recent. But, yes, this is a happier time in my life. Having a child has been like being in a house and finding a whole suite of rooms that you didn't know were in the house." There is a sense of wonderment about this, of surprise. "That's how it feels. Or being a poem instead of writing it." She still courts nostalgia, with visits to Blackpool, holiday destination of her childhood. But these days she takes her daughter, the future, with her, too."
Read the rest here....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/sep/25/costabookaward.features
