Context Valentine 6f396k

Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) is a Scottish poet, and is currently the UK’s first female (and first Scottish) Poet Laureate Born in Glasgow, she moved with her family to Stafford when she was 7, where she was educated. She wrote poetry from an early age, and was first published at the age of 15. She has since written plays, critical works, and several volumes of poetry. Duffy often tackles difficult subjects, encouraging the reader to explore alternative points of view. First published in Duffy’s 1993 collection Mean Time, and also collected in Love Poems from 2009, “Valentine” cuts quietly and sharply through the clichés associated with the holiday. Its curious gift is slowly revealed to be more in tune with human love than cards and fabricated hearts, and the reader’s perception of gift-giving, and, indeed, love, is nudged a little in the right direction.

Carol Ann Duffy on her collection Love Poems – Guardian book club February 2013: 'A poem is like a pearl...' Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate. The love poem has formed a considerable part of my own work, like that of any number of poets before me. My collection Rapture (Picador 2005) consisted of 52 poems which followed the course of a love affair from its beginnings to its end; but in 2010 Picador published Love Poems, a selection of more varied poems written by me between 1987 and 2011. Re-reading this selection for the purposes of the Guardian Book Club has been very much a case of emotion totally forgotten in tranquility. Unlike the poems in Rapture, not all the poems in Love Poems are wholly autobiographical – some of them, as though at the Venice Carnival, are wearing a mask. The first poem, "Correspondents", is written in the voice of a respectable Victorian wife who is having an affair ("I read your dark words. and do to myself things / you can only imagine"). It appears alongside "Warming Her Pearls", a lesbian love poem in the voice of a lady's maid who fancies not the mistress's pearls but the mistress herself. I think what I was interested in at the time of writing these poems was in finding a language and imagery for the erotic and the hidden or secret. The pearls warmed by the pining servant's skin are, of course, a metaphor for her desire; but a poem is also like a pearl – a language-jewel provoked into existence by the grit of feeling or revelation. "My" Anne Hathaway had a happy relationship, but in the poems "Adultery" and "Disgrace", which are taken from Mean Time (Picador 1993) I was exploring the end of love, of love gone wrong. This fracturing, or wreckage, is mirrored in the language and syntax of these poems. Adultery itself gains a voice and threatens to overpower its own poem ("You did it. / What. Didn't you. Fuck. Fuck. No. That was / the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun.") And in "Disgrace", both home and language are trashed by betrayal and resentment ("Cherished italics / suddenly sour on our tongues, obscenities / spraying themselves on the wall in my head.") In this collection, there is a movement towards healing by poetry, towards language as grace, and I composed the title poem as a kind of prayer, which both seeks and bestows forgiveness.

Elsewhere in this selection, "White Writing" (a reference to Montherlant's aphorism "Happiness writes white") is an epithalamium for a wedding between women which is haunted by its own (under current law) impossibility ("no vows written to wed you, / I write them white") and "New Vows" searches for words to "unhold", "unhave", "unlove", in a kind of reverse wedding-poem. The poems are all concerned with love, yes, in its various stages, but equally so with language as love's stammering, inarticulate messenger. "For I am in love with you and this / is what it is like or what it is like in words."