Some good poems that I felt I could identify with, but most of the collection I struggled to find any real interest in. I found the poetry lay mainly in the asides: a teacher on a cold night, watching her own breath, a moment of loving abandon, an evocation of "The world like Quink outside". Even if, in this particular poem, the character is hardly given Duffy's approval, that readiness to move on is intoxicating. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. duffy is an exquisite poet but even the best of them, as she is, produce anthologies that mix on responses garnered.

Not everything is this dark, but there’s this underlying sense of vulnerability echoing throughout the collection. She has become literally that thin woman notoriously found inside every fat one, except in this version, she has no wish to get out .When these two poems are considered together, it allows the reader to begin to connect to the poetry. With each poem, the reader must relearn how to read, or at least take time to look at formatting not to miss the greater artistry present. A mysterious giggle grows ineluctably into an all-consuming merriment that destroys the whole structure of grammar school propriety. Sometimes erotic and personal, sometimes historical and grand, sometimes witty and full of surprises, the poems here are all beautifully crafted works that are as varied in style as the poems in Duffy's earlier acclaimed volume The World's Wife. Duffy deserves to outsell most of the novelists on your shelf' Observer 'One of the most important, and rightly loved, poets of our time' Independent 'In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar' Guardian 'Witty, penetrating and lucid.

How a person deals with the ever day situations in life helps to better understand a person as a whole. Feminine Gospels is very much an indictment on the modern world, and how women are still very much controlled. She really is a storyteller/chronicler of women of today and I can't believe I haven't discovered her before. She praises difference and diversity – for Duffy, all women matter (as, of course, they should in the real world too).The poems describe aspects of female identity, the differences between women and the similarities that unite them. There is much importance here, too; she weaves together the stories of women with history, conflicts, and the family, and all has been masterfully interconnected. In Feminine Gospels, the focus is women, but Duffy does not desire to pigeon whole women into normal societal roles; or even to allow her characters comfort in any of the situations.

Apart from the little amount I did at school with my only remembered poem,"I wandered lonely as a cloud" by Wordsworth, I only recently decided to try poetry, hence Carol Ann Duffy as one bit of blurb I read, said "non-poetry readers should read her". There are poems here that warrant a 5* rating to me (like "Loud" which I thought was amazing) and then there were others that I felt lukewarm about. Wherever she goes, and whatever she becomes, that geography remains an indelible pattern she cannot escape; until, that is, almost accidentally, she hits on the remedy.As a way of understanding just how these women were viewed in their respective periods, and this examination of historic figures may not become evident until the reader’s knowledge corresponds with the writing. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief .