Politics

As you may know, Carol Ann Duffy is England’s first woman Poet Laureate. Here, at The Guardian, is her first official poem, “Politics.”

How it makes of your right hand
a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh
a dry leaf blowing in the wind, . . .

Read it all.

An article accompanies the posting:

She could have chosen to write on Prince Philip’s 88th birthday or the sombre commemorations for the D-Day landings in Normandy. Instead Carol Ann Duffy has chosen a far more meaty subject for her first poem as poet laureate: politics. And she’s angry �more Duffy Furiosa in the words of one expert.

Duffy’s poem Politics is today published for the first time by the Guardian. It is a powerful, passionate commentary on the corrosiveness of politics on politicians and the ruinous effect on idealism.

. . .

John Sutherland, professor emeritus of modern English literature at University College London, called it an angry poem. “The motive force here is disgust. Disgust at the great machine and its dishonest mechanics who run our society. Duffy Furiosa. The poem’s technique is that of someone almost speechless with rage – a great tumbling catalogue. No time for structure.”

He said he rather regretted the fact that Duffy had given the poem a title “because it’s not until close to the end that this great heap-of-crap which has so got Duffy’s goat is identified.”

Sutherland thinks it may be a jab at Gordon Brown. I thought of the kerfluffle over the Oxford professorship.

But given the results of yesterday’s election in Iran, well, the poem seems to me to have a sort of universal relevance.

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