Carol Ann Duffy is the current British Poet Laureate, she was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow in 1953. Her mother is Irish which is good enough for me.
Whoever She Was
Carol Ann Duffy
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, clean 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.
There 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.
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12 comments:
That was one I had to read through a couple of times to understand. Very haunting. I didn't know what a shilling screen was so I tried to look it up and though I still don't know I see that the poem has been widely written about.
Quite a trajectory from the Gorbals to Poet Laureate, I'd say. It's funny because I'm just now reading the Patty Smith memoir, and there is something similar in their paths to me.
Seana
Maybe it's a cheap Chinese screen that only cost a shilling?
Yes its quite the journey for Duffy and for Smith. That Patti Smith book is still one of my favourites of the last year or so.
Great story in today's Melbourne Age about a town/suburb of Melbourne of 150,000 people that doesn't have a single bookshop:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/dandenong-140000-people-no-book-shop-its-not-alone-20110918-1kg1g.html
It's a glimpse of the future.
I don't think that bookstore thing is the future for a lot of people. I think it is now. At least I'm hearing it from a lot of visitors from out of town. Borders came and went in a lot of places here, and killed the competition before they died off themselves.
It is sad, not to mention frustrating for people, but I have to admit that when I was a kid, it was the library that was really the book source for the most part. I think most of the books we actually bought were through the Scholastic book drive that came through school a couple of times a year.
Libraries and schools are in a bit of trouble here too, though.
When I was back in Carrickfergus last month I discovered that the local bookshop had closed. In Belfast the number of bookshops was down to three or four and this is a city of half a million people.
My local library in Carrickfergus was still pretty good: full of people, although most of them were doing the internet. One thing I did notice about Carrick library was that the number of actual books on shelves was about half of what it used to be - I suppose because they need space for the computers and the play areas and the like.
In a way I can understand the whole shift to computers in libraries, but I don't really understand how they will be able to justify their existence as physical buildings in the long run unless they can make a case for keeping physical books around. It's of course the same problem a bookstore has, but a bookstore can at least sell other kinds of things to help with the cash flow.
Yes, in my childhood, the library was the place to go for books. We didn't have money to buy a lot of books, but went to the library every week.
My library system now is barely buying any new books, certainly not much in the way of global fiction, including mysteries. I keep putting books on reserve, which the system includes, but there are ZERO copies.
I got into my branch and the mysteries, which used to take up an entire bookshelf, got whittled down to two half shelves. Now they're incorporated into the fiction section, which is tiny because dvd's are taking up most of the shelves.
I see no copies of many books in the system, yet 300 copies of a current dvd. Can't they buy 200 copies and then buy 100 books, even 2 of each -- I'm willing to wait to read a decent book.
I ask "What is happening to reading books, the source of education, distraction, enjoyment, learning empathy and to understand other people and cultures?"
Is this just another dinosaur, to be relegated to the past? Has the Internet replaced books altogether?
This can't be good.
Well, as to the internet replacing books, it certainly hasn't happened yet, Kathy. I don't know what the future holds, though.
Really interestng poem, and haunting and Seana mentioned. I like the line "Six silly ladies torn in half by baby fists". Shocking and consuming and a great word picture of the confusion of parenting and growing as an individual (at least that's how I took it). Thanks for sharing the poetry.
Seana, Kathy
I appreciate getting the computers to get the punters in but it would be really nice if one or two of them discovered books while they were in there!
DJD
Yeah I really like this one.
I think its imagery a man couldnt have come up with. I do try to get as many female poets as possible on the blog and fortunately Ireland has quite a few gifted women poets.
As far as luring people towards literacy, instead of computers we do our part by having some of the only halfway decent publically available restrooms downtown. You have to walk pretty far into the store to get to them, so there's a chance something will hook your eye before you leave.
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