The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

The prescribed selection of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry gathers seven poems, including "War Photographer", "Stealing", "In Mrs Tilscher's Class", "Little Red-Cap" and "Mrs Midas". Built on the dramatic monologue and the re-voicing of inherited stories, the selection is set for HSC English Standard Module B: Close Study of Literature.

The prescribed selection of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry ranges across her central concerns: the constructed voice and the dramatic monologue, the loss of childhood innocence, the reach and limits of language, the ethics of looking at suffering, and the feminist re-voicing of myth. "War Photographer" is a third-person portrait of a photographer developing his negatives at home in rural England, measuring the gulf between what he has witnessed and the readers who feel a spasm of pity and forget. "Stealing" is Duffy's coldest voice, an anonymous thief confessing motiveless thefts - a stolen snowman among them - to an unseen listener.

Three poems stage childhood and its endings. "In Mrs Tilscher's Class" traces a primary-school year from the safe enchantment of the classroom to the threshold of adolescence, ending as the child runs through the gates into a breaking storm. "We Remember Your Childhood Well" is a chilling monologue spoken by a collective "we" who systematically deny the remembered wounds of the person they address - a study of gaslighting and the abuse of adult authority. "The Good Teachers" holds affection and rebellion side by side, the pupil who loves Miss Pirie later turning truant.

From The World's Wife come two re-voicings of inherited story: "Little Red-Cap", in which the fairy-tale girl chooses the wolf-poet for herself and finally takes the axe to him, and "Mrs Midas", in which the myth of the golden touch becomes a wife's account of a marriage destroyed by "pure selfishness".

Duffy's signature is the dramatic monologue - a mask worn so completely that its collapse feels like genuine confession. "Stealing" opens mid-performance - "The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman." - and gives the thief no justifying backstory, trusting the reader to do the moral work; the closing tag question, "You don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?", punctures the bravado into a plea. In "We Remember Your Childhood Well" the ventriloquised deniers convict themselves, the title's reassurance curdling into threat by nothing more than context.

"War Photographer" is her great study of the ethics of witness. The "spools of suffering set out in ordered rows" hush and organise atrocity into ritual, the flat litany "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass." collapses distinct wars into common mortality, and the readers' pity arrives "between the bath and pre-lunch beers", the half-rhyme making grief sound as cheap as it is. The poem ends on the photographer's contempt: "he earns his living and they do not care."

Childhood, in this selection, is a process rather than a state. "In Mrs Tilscher's Class" remembers a room that "glowed like a sweet shop" and figures growth through the punctuation the child is learning, "the inky tadpoles changed / from commas into exclamation marks", before pathetic fallacy times the rupture exactly: "You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown, / as the sky split open into a thunderstorm."

The World's Wife poems answer inherited stories from the inside. Little Red-Cap chooses her own danger - "You might ask why. Here's why. Poetry." - and seizes the woodcutter's rescuing axe for herself: "I took an axe to the wolf". "Mrs Midas" revives dead cliche into lethal fact - "who, when it comes to the crunch, can live / with a heart of gold?" - and lets real loss surface only once the wit is exhausted: "I miss most, / even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch."