Title: Mean Time
Genre: Poetry
Year: 1993
Pages: 50
Origin: a tried and trusted library book
Nod Rating: 4 nods out of 5
The Worm was first turned onto to the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy in a classroom in a time long ago in a classroom far away. The poem was ‘Valentine’. And it blew the Worm away. It begins:
‘Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises lightly
Like the careful undressing of love’
Before finishing:
‘I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
Possessive and faithful
As we are,
For as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
If you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
Cling to your knife.’
The poem’s refusal to play ball with the usual “roses are red” lie sold by poets from previous centuries earned immediate respect. Clearly, this was a writer who played their own game by their own set of rules.
Since that time, Duffy’s career has continued to soar (the Worm, in comparison, has gone into stagnation of writing book review after book review, in a self-imposed critical hell with no end in sight); winning the T.S. Eliot prize and being appointed poet laureate in 2009, becoming the first woman to hold the position (as well as the first openly LGBT person)). Such a role has been used to write about topical and hard-hitting subjects ranging from MPs expenses, climate change, and Afghanistan. Our paths converged once more recently in the form of Duffy’s collection of poems from the mid-1990s, Mean Time, in which ‘Valentine’ is homed.
Mean Time covers a range of issues, all related to one larger theme of the memory of things past. Love is large factor in this, as well as its many associations: the thrill of first kiss, of becoming closely knit with another, alongside lies and deceit, as well as the ultimate death of a union. There is a loose narrative, from youth and innocence right through to an older, wiser cynicism.
Alongside ‘Valentine’, particular favourites are ‘Litany’, ‘The Cliché Kid’, ‘Moments of Grace’, ‘Close’. Most spectacular of all is ‘Beachcomber’, with the narrator thinking back – as hard as possible – to earlier memories when a child on a beach:
‘this child,The memories, no matter how sparse, form; but as Duffy writes: ‘But this is a close as you get’, before concluding the poem:
And not in sepia,
Lives,
You can see her;
Comes up the beach,
Alone;
Bucket and spade,
In her bucket, a starfish, seaweed,
A dozen alarming crabs
Caught with string and a mussel.
Don’t move.
Trow.’
‘Nearly there.The failure of memory is a theme that is repeatedly returned to throughout the collection, including that of the earlier stated ‘Moments of Grace’ (‘Memory’s caged bird won’t fly. These days / are we adjectives, nouns. In moments of grace / we were verbs, the secret of poems, talented.’). Furthermore, in ‘The Biographer’ Duffy writes of a person’s occupation looking at past memories of past lives that have long gone: ‘…an early daguerreotype shows you / excitedly staring out / from behind your face / the thing that made you yourself / still visibly there, / like a hood and a cloak of light.’
Open your eyes.
Those older, those shaking, hands cannot touch the child
Or the spade
Or the sand
Or the seashell on the shore;
And what
What would you have to say,
Of all people,
To her
Given the chance?
Exactly?’
The first flush of love has died, to be replaced by a sceptical look of realism. This is detailed in the poem ‘Valentine’, as well as many others. Duffy comments on the lies lovers tell one another - a topic regularly used by the plethora of soap operas year after year – but depicted in a reflective, realistic light by the poet. For example, read the final verse of ‘Close’:
‘Put out the light. Years stand outside on the streetWhilst the titular poem, ‘Mean Time’, ends in a similar verse:
Looking up to an open window, black as our mouth
Which utters its tuneless song. The ghosts of ourselves,
Behind and before us, throng in a mirror, blind,
Laughing and weeping. They know who we are.’
‘But we will be dead, as we know,Duffy’s voice is a needed one in today’s society. She is proving herself the right choice as our poet laureate, as she as shown time and again in previous collections of her poetry. Take the time to check out Mean Time and to flavour ‘Valentine’ and those lethal, scented onions.
Beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
And the endless nights’
Further Info:
Buy Mean Time right here
Find out more about Carol Ann Duffy
