Feminine Gospels

For centuries, literature has been positively overflowing with heroic men embarking upon magnificent adventures, conquering kingdoms, wrestling with destiny and generally making an enormous fuss about themselves. Women, meanwhile, were frequently expected to remain somewhere in the background, looking decorative, behaving sensibly and occasionally dying tragically to provide the hero with a suitable motivation. Carol Ann Duffy, unsurprisingly, has other ideas.

Feminine Gospels (2002), published by Picador, is a wonderfully inventive, provocative and frequently hilarious collection of poetry that places women firmly at the centre of the story, whether history, mythology or conventional good manners particularly approve of the arrangement.

Duffy, one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary poets and later Poet Laureate, explores the extraordinary possibilities of female identity through a series of imaginative transformations, exaggerated situations and gloriously unconventional narratives. Her women become giants, legends, extraordinary figures and occasionally something considerably more alarming than society had originally intended.

In these poems, the familiar world is turned upside down with an almost mischievous enthusiasm. Bodies expand, identities shift, ordinary experiences acquire mythical proportions, and the assumptions surrounding femininity are stretched until they begin to make some extremely revealing noises.

Duffy examines love, motherhood, ageing, ambition, sexuality, power and the complicated business of being a woman in a world that has historically been rather enthusiastic about providing instructions on the subject. She approaches these themes with humour, tenderness, anger and a remarkable ability to make the bizarre seem entirely reasonable.

Her language is vivid, musical and deceptively accessible, moving effortlessly between the comic and the unsettling. One moment the reader encounters an outrageous image worthy of a particularly eccentric fairy tale; the next, an observation so sharply recognisable that laughter becomes an unexpectedly serious business.

There is something delightfully subversive about Duffy’s method. Rather than delivering solemn lectures about the inequalities of the human condition, she frequently allows imagination to do the heavy lifting, creating strange and memorable situations in which familiar prejudices suddenly look every bit as ridiculous as they deserve.

The result is a collection that celebrates female experience without pretending it is simple, uniform or particularly interested in behaving itself. These are poems filled with contradictions, possibilities and emotional complexity, written by a poet who understands that the most effective way to challenge conventional thinking is sometimes to make it look thoroughly absurd.

Condition: As New. This 2002 Picador edition is in exceptionally well-preserved condition, with little or no apparent evidence of previous reading or handling. Unlike many of the characters within its pages, the book itself appears to have led a remarkably sheltered existence.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where we are perfectly happy to sell literature that questions established authority, challenges social conventions and overturns centuries of cultural expectations, provided nobody expects us to reorganise the bookshelves into an entirely new philosophical order.

A witty, imaginative and wonderfully unpredictable collection for anyone who appreciates poetry with intelligence, personality and absolutely no intention of quietly knowing its place.

Keep browsing: See more Poetry books Other books by Carol Ann Duffy