Elegies

By Carol Ann Duffy

In Elegies Carol Ann Duffy, one of the English language’s best-loved living poets arrays from her own archives, in chronological order, her favourites among her poems on death, grief and loss, drawing on work written over four decades, and adds to her selection one wholly new poem. It makes for a sequence that is warm, vibrant, alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781529096897

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

Whoever She Was

They see me always as a flickering figure

on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,

still wet, sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples

burning as I hang the washing out.

Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts

of children on the telephone. Mummy.

A row of paper dollies, cleaning wounds

or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant

of magic words repeatedly. I do not know.

Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good.

The film is on a loop. Six silly ladies

torn in half by baby fists. When they

think of me, I’m bending over them at night,

to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight.

Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings

to the bramble bush. My maiden name

sounds wrong. This was the playroom.

I turn it over on a clumsy tongue. Again.

These are the photographs. Making masks

from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come.

Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her

as she shapes a church and steeple in the air.

She cannot be myself and yet I have a box

of dusty presents to confirm that she was here.

You remember the little things. Telling stories

or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong.

You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror

which they are holding to your mouth.

1985

Liverpool Echo

Pat Hodges kissed you once, although quite shy,

in sixty-two. Small crowds in Mathew Street

endure rain for the echo of a beat,

as if nostalgia means you did not die.

Inside phone-booths loveless ladies cry

on Merseyside. Their faces show defeat.

An ancient jukebox blares out Ain’t She Sweet

in Liverpool, which cannot say goodbye.

Here everybody has