The World's Wife (York Notes Advanced) [Paperback]

Carol Ann Duffy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1405861851 | ISBN-13: 978-1405861854 | Publication Date: October 31, 2007

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In her fifth volume of poetry, British poet Duffy presents to us the world of the liminal wife. Here we do not find annals of Victoria or Medea or Eleanor Roosevelt, but rather catch an imaginative glimpse into the lives of real and mythic women whose stories were not exactly their own: Mrs. Faust, Queen Herod, and Frau Freud, to name a few. Each of the 30 or so women featured in Duffys collection regales us with her side of her famous partners story, and the result is often insightful and always entertaining. Duffys verse is at once tight and resonant, her language colloquial and engaging, her rhymes refreshing. While a great strength of the volume is its thematic unity, these poems are better swallowed in short snatches, for the tone of the wifes lament is often so consistent that the uniqueness of each womans plight gets debased. For instance, Mrs. Tiresiass dilemma (All I know is this: / he went out for his walk a man / and came home female) differs quite a bit from Eurydices discomfort in hell (the one place youd think a girl would be safe / from the kind of a man who follows her round / writing poems), yet they come to us in a strikingly similar voice. Reminiscent of Sextons Transformations (1971), these works take the plots of some classic tales and give them a wry, mod twist.For lovers of myth, or just a good tell, this dark and darkly comic volume has much to offer. (Kirkus Reviews) --na

"[Duffy] offers us the past as it could have been. . . . [Her] project recalls the poems of the Americans Ai and Pamela White Hadas, but the élan of this volume sets it apart, the characters (and poems) triumphant."--The New Yorker"Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry--any poetry--for years."--Eavan Boland, The Independent on Sunday (London)"These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness, and cheek. . . . They leap off the page even in a silent reading. . . . The best are inventive, subversive, and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash." --Anthony Thwaite, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

About the Author

Carol Ann Duffy has published four highly praised collections of poetry. Her last, Mean Time, won the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She lives in Manchester, England.

Product Details

• Paperback: 135 pages
• Publisher: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc. (October 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1405861851
• ISBN-13: 978-1405861854
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #905,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Beware, this book contains no poems!, August 13, 2009

By 

John Stuart Mill - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World's Wife (York Notes Advanced) (Paperback)

Beware, this book does not contain any poems. The reviews that you see on Amazon's website refer to an actual book of poetry: The World's Wife. This book, however is a literary commentary by Mary Green in a series called York Notes Advanced, which is useless unless you are graduate student in English. This book should be under that author's name which is Mary Green, as it does not contain any poetry by Carol Ann Duffy. I am returning my copy to Amazon, something that I have never had to do before.