Carol Ann Duffy is impossible to ignore as one of the most significant lesbian poets of the last century, particularly within British literature. Many of her poems are influenced by her lesbian identity, and this is most true in her earlier poems. For example, her poem “Warming Her Pearls,” which appeared in her 1987 collection Selling Manhattan, considers a lesbian relationship through the framework of a mistress/servant relationship from the Victorian era. Liz Yorke, a professor, academic, and psychotherapist, discusses the poem in her essay “British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration.” Yorke describes the lesbian poetic voice “as always transgressive of established systems; as marked by its celebration of desire (what- or whoever it gestures towards!) as exploring what may be considered ‘taboo’…” Certainly some of Duffy’s poetry, especially her earlier poetry, focused on a lesbian-specific narrative that played with what would or would not be considered acceptable to an audience of readers. However, her later poetry shifted to amplifying marginalized voices and confronting the “other,” allowing Duffy to move away from being pigeonholed into a very rote definition of what lesbian poetry looked like.
In a poem as early as “Warming Her Pearls,” Duffy began to focus on narrating from the point of view of an “other.” Later she moved even further in this direction, featuring ventriloquized voices that blurred the authorial voice and thus the identity of both poet and speaker. Duffy never lost her proclivity for writing about gender, but her later poems dealt with balances of power in relationships and how some voices, even fictional ones, are disenfranchised. Male characters in her poems are relegated to the space of the muse, a space formerly taken by the female characters, who Duffy ushers into the forefront of her poems.
Duffy's early interest in French surrealism also plays a part in her poems. Surrealism in the context of Duffy's poetry is less aligned with aesthetic absurdity or juxtaposition than it is with "disrupting the tyranny of the rational," as Antony Rowland puts it in his essay "Love and Masculinity in the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy." Surrealism in its nascent form also placed great emphasis on finding love and beauty through spontaneity rather than logical channels; the beauty found, according to principles set forth by surrealist André Breton in his work Mad Love, should exist outside the influence of human intervention and should be governed by some sort of internal logic. These principles appear to influence Duffy's poetry; in her poem "Havisham," love appears to rise reflexively, half spurred by hatred, outside of the realm of logic. Yet Duffy, to an extent, seems to reject the notion of mad, spontaneous love because it is so closely related to violence. As Rowland says about Duffy's poem "You Jane," which describes a heterosexual relationship where the man is crude and crass, "It is as if Duffy cannot equate the French surrealists’ desire to encourage ‘mad’ love and working-class emancipation with her sense of tangible gender inequalities." A movement like surrealism, like other anticapitalist movements, seems inadequate to address the gender inequalities that permeate domestic life.
