CONTEMPORARY POETRY

The last three decades of the 20th century saw a number of short-lived poetic groupings such as the Martians. There was a growth in interest in women's writing and in poetry from England's ethnic groupings, especially the West Indian community. Poets who emerged include Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, Blake Morrison, Liz Lochhead, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. There was also a growth in performance poetry fuelled by the Poetry Slam movement. A new generation of innovative poets has also sprung up in the wake of the Revival grouping. Further activity focussed around poets in Bloodaxe Books The New Poetry including Simon Armitage, Kathleen Jamie, Glyn Maxwell, Selima Hill, Maggie Hannan, and Michael Hofmann. The New Generation movement flowered in the 1990s and early twenty first century producing poets such as Don Paterson, Julia Copus, John Stammers, Jacob Polley, David Morley and Alice Oswald.

Despite all of this activity, major publishers dropped their poetry lists and both young and established writers became increasingly reliant on small and medium sized presses, generally dependent on State funding. As of 2004, it appears that a still thriving literature is faced with an ever-decreasing audience.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry#English_poetry_now)

CAROL ANN DUFFY

Poet, playwright and freelance writer Carol Ann Duffy was born on 23 December 1955 in Glasgow and read philosophy at Liverpool University. She is a former editor of the poetry magazine Ambit and is a regular reviewer and broadcaster. She moved from London to Manchester in 1996 and began to lecture in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her papers were acquired by the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University in 1999, and in October 2000 she was awarded a grant of £75,000 over a five-year period by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Her poetry collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); and The World's Wife (1999). Feminine Gospels (2002) is a celebration of the female condition. The Good Child's Guide to Rock N Roll (2003) is her latest collection for children. In Out of Fashion (2004) she creates a vital dialogue between classic and contemporary poets over the two arts of poetry and fashion. 

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth104

Characterized by social critique channelled through dramatic monologue, Carol Ann Duffy's poems provide voices for an extraordinary number of contemporary characters, including a fairground psychopath, a literary biographer, a newborn baby, disinherited American Indians, and even a ventriloquist's dummy. Many of the poems reflect on time, change, and loss. In dramatizing scenes of childhood, adolescence, and adult life, whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, she discovers moments of consolation through love, memory, and language. She explores not only everyday experience, but also the rich fantasy life of herself and others.

She is perhaps one of the few poets in the UK to combine academic integrity with accessibility and popularity. In particular, many British students read her work as she became part of the English Literature syllabus in England and Wales in 1994. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy)

VALENTINE

Not a red rose or a satin heart.
 
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
 
Here.
 
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
 
I am trying to be truthful.
 
Not a cute card or kissogram.
 
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. (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/865.html)

ANALYSIS

We are going to analize a poem written by Carol Ann Duffy. This poem is called ‘Valentine’and it was published by in 1993, in the collection Mean Time. (www.knittingcircle.org.uk/carolannduffy.html.)

Carol Ann Duffy uses a suggestive title in order to attract attention. If we see this title, we can imagine a love poem, a really love poem, but this is not the case. The poet tries to give us another face of the love.

The poem uses conventional gifts, then she shows the most important element, an onion; she shows that this element is much more true to the nature of love. When we see the estrange element, we think that it is a joke, but we are wrong, she can do a deep analysis of love.

This poem is written in seven stanzas.

The first part consists only in one line, this line is very important because she is showing that she rejects normal romantic stuff. The word ‘not’ has an important role: ‘Not a red rose or a satin heart’.

In the second stanza she uses her first metaphor and gives her lover an onion. The brown skin of the onion is the wrapping paper of the gift. So, she is saying that the onion is a gift.

In the third stanza, Carol Ann Duffy explains that the love is really complex. The love can make you cry, and the onion make it. Tears are another aspect of the love. Not only will the onion make your eyes water, the pain caused by a love brings tears.

The fourth stanza says ‘I am trying to be truthful’. Here we can see that her tone is direc

In the fifth stanza, Duffy rejects, as in the first line, a cute card and a kissogram. She rejects this gifts because are typically symbols of Valentine ’s Day.

In the sixth stanza, Duffy shows that the onion is a symbol of passion, because its flavour remains in your mouth. This is the second metaphor because the memory of a kiss can stay with one forever.

In the last stanza Duffy starts with: ‘Take it’. He find here the third metaphor, she is comparing the onion with a wedding ring. So, she starts to compare the marriage with a ‘knife’. Then, she explains that the love could be ‘lethal’. The final word is ‘knife’; so, she is remembering the power of love to hurt.

So, the onion is an extended metaphor for love.

Duffy uses single isolated lines to show why she rejects the conventional Valentines: ‘Not a red rose or a satin heart’, ‘Not a cute card or a kissogram’. These gifts are often overlooked, so she thinks in an onion.

What I see is that she starts the stanzas giving an order: ‘I give you an onion’, ‘take it’…

The poet is saying that the onion is like a lover because it makes you cry, because its flavour remains…

The poem’s basic structure is based on the presentation of a gift: ‘I give…’, ‘take it’…

This poem is written in person, it expresses love in a pessimistic way: ‘lethal’, ‘cling to your knife’… She uses an onion to explain love, going from the idea that it’s really romantic.

The poem also focus on the thoughts and emotions of the speaker, you could imagine the reactions of the person they’re talking to. The poet also never reveals the sex or identity of either person.

I want to finish with the title: Valentine. It is related to the love, the romantic love, but this poem uses an onion (a symbol of representation of love) to show the hardness of the love, it can make you cry.

CONCLUSION

I find this poem really realistic. When we see the title, we imagine that we are going to read a love poem, but Duffy wants to show that the love is not only happiness, it can be painful. I admire the comparisons between the onion and the love when it makes you cry.

I think that it is a deep poem. If the poet can write this aspect of the love is why she had suffered the pain of the love.