In her contemporary collection of poetry 'Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy's focuses on the three main themes of dysfunctional and warped relationships, people and memories. She uses many techniques to portray the different aspects of these themes, and uses modern references to crease a feeling of recognition between herself and the reader, one of the reasons why she has been called 'the representative poet of the present day'.
Duffy commonly uses the subject of memories in her poems, with a strong focus within this being the idea of feeling regret or dissatisfaction of life.One poem which has a clear feeling of this dissatisfaction is 'The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team'. In this poem Duffy portrays a man who has long since reached the peak of his life - that being when he was 'Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team'. Duffy uses language here to expose the man's hidden feelings about his childhood and his life now. Phrases such as 'fizzing hope' and 'so brainy' turn into negative expressions at the end of the poem, as he refers to his 'stale wife' and 'thick kids'.
Fizzing' and 'brainy' represents his hopes and desires; at this stage he is enthusiastic about his future. However, things did not turn out as planned and using the words 'stale' and 'thick' show his disappointment with what his life has turned out like, as does the fact he has a 'boss'. Despite his intelligence, he has ended up in an everyday ordinary job, not as his own boss, or manager of a company, but as an employee and someone who doesn't earn their wage packet themselves but just gets it paid into his bank account every month.Another poem which looks at memories is 'Never Go Back'.
This poem does not show dissatisfaction with the character's current life, but the disappointment they feel when they return back to where they once lived. The poem is separated into three sections using stars, with each section referring to a different place from the character's past. The first of these is situated in a bar, most likely the old local of the person. Duffy describes the place pessimistically, giving the bar an unpleasant atmosphere. This is notable in phrases such as 'living dead' and 'never return'.
Duffy refers to the people in the bar as the 'living dead', not something more friendly such as 'old friends'. Not only does this refer to how the person feels about meeting their old friends, but it is also a clever use of words referring to the idea that when you know longer talk to someone, or see them, they cease to exist. These people were all dead and gone in the person's mind, yet here they are now, living and breathing. The middle section focuses on a house where the character once lives. Duffy describes how the house has deteriorated over time, saying it 'has cancer'.Here Duffy uses this technique to describe the incurable condition the house has slipped into, as it obviously does not really have cancer.
The memories related to the house are given the character of bees or wasps. They 'sudden swarm' and then 'string you'. This shows negativity as bees and wasps are not popular animals and many people are afraid of their sting. The idea that the memories sting her demonstrates it is not a pleasant sensation she feels. This can also be seen through words such as 'shadow', 'pain' and the fact that when she leaves, slamming the door shut, she has to shake 'plaster confetti from your hair'.Lastly, we see the character on the journey home.
Here the focus is on the negative side too, referring the how the places she once knew 'have changed their name by neon'. Even the weather is downbeat, demonstrated by the 'cold sweat' on the glass. Duffy demonstrates how the town has changed from a quite place into a town full of commercialised things. This is shown through the 'neon' names which can give out the impression of some sleazy town, especially with the reference to a 'drenched whore'. Duffy also uses irony here, through the term 'red light'.
The reader is left unsure whether this is referring to a red light on the traffic lights, as the car stops, or red light in reference to a prostitute. We see dysfunctional people in the poem 'Havisham'. The title 'Havisham' is a reference to the Dickens character 'Miss Havisham' from 'Great Expectations'. In the novel, Miss Havisham is jilted on her wedding day and from the moment on her life seems to pause, like on a hiatus. She does not touch anything from the wedding reception, leaving the cake and food to rot in the room.
She becomes embittered against all men and raises her young, beautiful niece to be disrespectful to men, using them and breaking their hearts. This is obviously unusual behaviour for a person. She refers to her ex-fianci?? as 'beloved sweetheart bastard' and 'stabs at a wedding cake'. She is clearly not stable as a person, and although any person who is jilted at the altar is obviously upset, this kind of reaction is extreme and considered abnormal. Another poem focusing on a dysfunctional person is 'Stuffed'.
The poem is about stuffed animals and the character is going through a period of emotional darkness.Knitting stuffed toys is her only way of getting a 'baby', i. e. her only babies are the stuffed toys she knits. This represents her dysfunctional personality, that she sees stuffed animals as a replacement for her not having her own child. Dysfunctional relationships play a major part in Duffy's collection.
'Never Go Back' and 'The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team' both represent dysfunctional relationships with the past, demonstrating that a relationship does not have to be with a person. Another poem which focuses on a relationship with the past is 'Mean Time'.Again, this is a negative poem, and the subject is the end of a relationship. Words such as 'bleak', 'darkening' and 'endless' refer to the distress the character feels as a result of the end of the relationship.
The last poem is 'Disgrace' which about a dysfunctional relationship. Similarly to 'Mean Time', it is about the breakdown of a relationship. The title, 'Disgrace', refers to divorce but the difference here is that the character does not long for the past. The character describes herself as 'unpenitent' which shows her lack of regret, she is not sorry.
The relationship was once dysfunctional; they 'had not been home in our hearts for months'. This intentional pun on the phrase 'home is where the heart is' demonstrates how the relationship had been over for ages, and 'how our words changed' refers to the fact they no longer spoke romantically to each other but in 'obscenities'. Death is a strong theme throughout the poems. In 'Never Go Back; there are references to the 'living dead', 'bereaved' and 'hearse' and Duffy describes the driver as looking like 'death'.Even the house has 'cancer', and she says it is 'nursing' itself.
'Havisham' uses words relating to death to portray the characters anger. She wishes her ex 'dead', 'stabbed' at a wedding cake, and asks for a male 'corpse'. The idea of death is extremely strong in 'Disgrace' as there are constant references to it. The words 'nursing' and 'corpse' are mentioned again, and Duffy even describes the humming noise made by a nearly expired light bulb as 'small deaths'.
Even the kitchen is 'sullen' and the apples are 'rotten to the core'.In 'Mean Time', there are the words 'mourning', 'unmendable' and 'dead', all references to death. All these poems have at least one focus on a dysfunctional memory, relationship and place, as do the other poems which can be found in the collection 'Mean Time'. Although it is hard to determine whether Duffy is interested in warped, dysfunctional relationships, memories and people alone, it is easy to resolve that this is indeed the case in at least in her collection of poems 'Mean Time'.
