Sincerity

By Carol Ann Duffy

Her final collection as Poet Laureate, a frank, disarming and deeply moving exploration of loss and remembrance in their many forms. Presented in a beautiful, foiled package, this will be the poetry book of the year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781509893430

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her achievements in poetry.

Book preview

Florence

Clerk Of Hearts

As they step from the path onto the boats,

I am there at my place under the trees,

listing the Categories. Humility. Shame.

My dealings with life have been so long ago,

I imagine I resemble shadow or watermark.

I am unanswered prayer, like poetry. Dread.

Whatever I did – it might have been that – now,

I watch each one depart, perceive their hearts;

old diaries I read at a glance. Acceptance. Disdain.

They will forget, but I take Time, devoted,

clerk of hearts. Sometimes I stand on the bridge

as they drift away, being more and more dead . . .

a kingfisher arrowing upriver, joy as colour;

then thunder above, a boiling of last words,

and their crafts vanishing into the heavy rain.

The Rain

That time will come

                              when it starts to rain

in your quiet room,

grief researching you;

its curious, small thumbs on your closed eyes,

on your pulse;

or smudging the ink of this,

or dipping into that glass of wine.

The moment stammers.

Too intimate,

                   relentless biographer

poring over your ruined books,

persistent, till every surface is soaked

as though you lamented, night and day,

for a lifetime;

or were penned, invented.

Leave the room to the rain . . .

the clock’s hands float

                                on its drowned face

and photographs swim from their frames

and hours are sorrow, rain, rain, sorrow . . .

why climb the stairs to lie down there,

be drenched, tasted, known

by the pitiless rain?

You have dead parents.

Dark School

It is late when you enter the classroom,

the last of the Latin words going out on the board.

You take your place at the back,

dip your first real pen into blue-black ink.

Your jotter is dusty pink.

You rule a margin, one inch wide,

then write what you must not do,

but did, in a careful, legible list.

You memorise this, stand up,

recite it word-for-word to the shadowy desks.

The tall windows, guilt-ridden, fill with night.

But you can see in this blurred air,

your carved initials soft scars on the wood,

and when you open the lid of your desk

there are your books, condition fair,

your difficult lessons.

Dark school. You learn now – the black paintings

in their charred frames; the old wars;

the voiceless speeches in the library,

the fixed equations – ab invito.

Above the glass roof of the chemistry lab,

insolent, truant stars squander their light.

Elephants

When I was small, I saw the circus elephants

on Blackpool sands;

a slow line of

Reviews for Sincerity

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection demonstrates that Duffy is a current master of all that she writes, there are poems in here that are very personal and others that are contemporary and political. The common thread that links them though is that they are all written with passion. Duffy is not angry in these but furious, seething with the injustice and unfairness of the world and the vested interests that seek to keep it that way.

My hand on what I take from time and this world
And the stone's shadow there on the grass with mine

This bold and political book can be summed up in the poem, Swearing In. In this, she does not pull any punches at all as she welcomes the tangerine terror to his new job… I liked the fact that the poems varied in style and length, each written to suit the story she wanted to tell in those few words. Really enjoyable collection.

Three favourite poems
Stone Love
Wood
Once