Birmingham Book Festival well versed with Carol Ann Duffy

May 28 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Lorne Jackson talks to Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy ahead of Birmingham Book Festival’s Spring Thing.

Carol Ann Duffy is one of the best poets in the country. She is highly skilled at making words do her bidding.

In that respect, she’s very much like an X-Factor judge. Only Duffy doesn’t work with warbling teenage wannabes. Instead, it’s the English language that she orders off to Boot Camp, where it is hammered and honed into prime condition, before being tasked with performing a star turn in her vital and vibrant verse.

For the last year she has been the nation’s Poet Laureate, a prestigious post held by many of the country’s greatest wordsmiths, including William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and, in more recent years, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes.

The job traditionally entails writing poems to celebrate occasions of national import. In other words – Royal knees-ups.

In the past, this meant verse was crafted to commemorate blue-blood weddings and christenings.

Though I’m sure the first time Prince Harry staggered out of a boozer would have done at a pinch.

With all this reporting of regal splendour, it’s not surprising that the role of Poet Laureate tended to be an establishment position, which warped radical rhymers into craven cap-doffers.

But Carol Ann Duffy has changed all that by writing dazzling ditties about David Beckham’s recent injury, as well as a furious yet fiendishly funny diatribe against the British political system.

Her work is clever, polished, yet always accessible, which means she will be a welcome star guest at Birmingham Book Festival’s Spring Thing, a one day book bash, taking place on Friday.

I wonder if it was always Duffy’s intention to push the limits of the Laureateship?

“That isn’t what I’ve been trying to do,” she says. “It’s not as though I choose to write about certain subjects. It’s more a case of the poetry choosing me. I don’t have much of a deciding vote in what I’m going to write about. Ideas just arrive. The poems that I’ve written as Poet Laureate were poems that I would have written anyway.”

That includes her ode to David Beckham, where she compares him to the Greek god Achilles, whose final downfall was also due to a vulnerable heel.

Duffy says: “David Beckham, along with other prominent celebrities, are like the ancient Greek myths, or the stories from Shakespeare, and fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm.

“In the same way that people once absorbed such stories, and learned lessons from them, we now learn from the lives of footballers and pop stars.