Clocks in the UK jump forward by one hour at 1 am this Sunday (don’t forget!) as they do every spring, shifting us from Greenwich Mean Time into British Summer Time. With that in mind, it seemed a good time to read Mean Time by Carol Ann Duffy.
I don’t read much poetry – and the little I do read is generally written by poets who are long-dead – but I enjoyed Duffy’s satirical, feminist poetry collection, The World’s Wife, and have seen her perform at the Edinburgh Fringe alongside musician John Sampson.
There’s something about a poet reading their own poetry – who better to communicate their intended meaning? – and the juxtaposition of words and music added an extra dimension. Duffy was Poet Laureate (at the time), the first female, the first Scottish-born, and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the position; and she’d been adjudged one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by BBC R4 Woman’s Hour programme (possibly at least partly due to The World’s Wife). Carol Ann Duffy was – still is – poetry royalty.
Yet until now only The World’s Wife had made it onto my bookshelf. Despite popular and critical acclaim that collection did not win any awards. Mean Time on the other hand won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1993.
Mean Time’s title poem opens with the autumn time-shift from BST to GMT. “The clocks slid back an hour / and stole light from my life.” The “I” in the poem is “mourning our love” and wishing she could turn back time in another way so as to erase “words I would never have said / nor have heard you say”. This adds an extra layer of meaning to the title (of the poem, of the book): as well as being the literal time-shift, “mean” can be something unkind or unpleasant – like the “words”.
A lot of the poems are dramatisations of scenes and feel very personal, even more so if you know something of Duffy’s private life (she had a 10-year relationship with poet/artist Adrian Henri, beginning when she was 16 and he was 39, and later had a 15-year relationship with poet/novelist Jackie Kay, during which she gave birth to a daughter, Ella).
I’d come across two of the poems before: Valentine (“Not a red rose or a satin heart. / I give you an onion…. / It will blind you with tears/ like a lover.”); and Prayer (“Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth / enters our hearts…. / Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer – / Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”).
There are also scenes from childhood (“Touch, said the long-haired man / who stood, legs apart, by a silver birch / with a living, purple root in his hand” in Stafford Afternoons) and adolescence (“the rain is hilarious…. / Give me a double, a kiss” in Drunk).
The blurb on the book cover says these are “poignant, authentic, striking poems”. I’d go along with that. Relationships can be complicated and love can be painful but time is a potential source of consolation. This too will pass.
Rating: 2 (Worth reading)
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