Duffy Furiosa

I’m behind the times again. (Being sick for a week will do that to you.) Carol Ann Duffy has offered her first official poem as UK Poet Laureate, called “Politics”, and it’s a cracker – read it here. (In case you’re wondering where the title of this post comes from, it’s from Prof. John Sutherland’s commentary on it in the Guardian. It seems apt. She does anger well, and there’s a lot for us all to be angry about.)

Personally I’m not convinced that it is just about the expenses scandal. With everything we see around us at the moment, why limit it to that? How it makes of your right hand/ a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left … Is it just me that sees Tony Blair and John Howard as the puppets, and Dubbya the self-righteous gauntlet? Or hears the voices of PyongYang and Tehran in of your tongue/ an iron latch with no door? Duffy herself has only said that “the poem was about the effect of politics on idealism”…

There’s a lot in it. I’ll do a proper unpicking of it over the next few days and add it to the Commentaries page. Of course, I’ll have to finish formatting the Commentaries page first…