It’s almost like Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t want us to read her poems. From the beginning, they’re obscure and discomforting.
Open the book, provocatively titled Standing Female Nude, and you first encounter Pakistan. You may not know that, of course. I didn’t at first. The first two poems allude often to Islam, which doesn’t narrow down the geography much. The clearest references to Pakistan are two villages and a city—Dina, Jhang Chak, Jhelum. I looked them up and found a triad of communities in the northeast of the country, near a volatile and complicated border zone shared with India.
Then suddenly Pakistan and Islam fade into nonexistence, reappearing only in veiled allusions like in “A Healthy Meal,” which wonders about the “secret dreams of cows” and asserts, “The woman chewing suckling pig / must sleep with her husband later.” I’m reminded of the laws against pork in both Jewish and Islamic culture and the ritual impurity of both eating pig and sexual activity. The Semitic allusions reappear in other poems. They are part of the fabric of English life, yet often unwelcome at the haughty feast of Western society.
I see this theme unfolding as attention to folks on the fringe of mainstream Western European society. Besides the Jews and Muslims, there are criminals (“Lizzie, Six”), drug addicts (“Someone Else’s Daughter”), sociopaths (“Education for Leisure”) and murderers (“Human Interest”), foreigners (“Free Will” and “Alliance”). They are voices of the dispossessed, the vagabonds, the outcasts. What about the rest of the collection? Most of it seems to describe a typical modern British life, familiar to most of her audience. But I think she shows us we’re just as much outcasts, no matter who we are. Norms are illusions, impossible measuring sticks. The romantic and family relationships in Duffy’s poems reveal our clumsy attempts to bridge the isolation we all feel. Being human is being abnormal.
Sources:
Duffy, Carol Ann. Standing Female Nude. Anvil Press Poetry, 1985.
Image: Omar Alnahi on Pexels.com.
