Duffy - Context, Themes, and Tropes

Duffy is a contemporary female poet.

Many of Duffy’s poems are concerned with post-feminist issues of gender and sexual politics. Some of these poems are inspired by feminism and are possibly influenced by Duffy’s bi-sexuality. Cultural representations of love are sometimes reassessed and found to be inadequate in a society that has come to question patriarchal values and gender stereotypes.

Duffy’s poems explore the sense of alienation, isolation, and loneliness that she believes to be prevalent in a 21st century society that has, in part, rejected community values and social and religious traditions and institutions such as the family, church, and marriage. Some of her poems are imbued with a sense of nostalgia for childhood and are, in some respects, elegies for a loss of the qualities that define childhood such as innocence, certainty, security (within a family), and expectation.

She explores the quest for spiritual fulfilment and consolation in a secular age. Duffy was raised catholic, but later rejected the patriarchal values that she believed the church enshrined. She also explores an urban society’s alienation from the natural world.

Duffy is a provincial and urban poet who explores the nature of everyday existence within intermediate contexts and liminal states - ‘dusk’ in the ‘midlands’ town - the ‘meantime’ that exists between childhood/youth and often look back to the past where, she suggests, the sense of community that was embodied in institutions such as schools or the family or the church offered both comfort and a sense of security that she now finds evasive. Many of her poems have an urban / pastoral setting and explore liminal locations such as ‘the edge of town’.

Contemporary culture is sometimes conveyed as commercial, materialistic, and spiritually and emotionally unsatisfying. The 21st century is, in some poems, defined as consumerist and superficial.

A number of Duffy’s poems explore relationships often with a sense of regret. Love is explored in terms of complexity, paradox, and ambiguity. Passion is sometimes presented in terms both intense affection and violence. A number of poems explore the failure of romantic love and the breakdown of relationships.

Time is a significant theme throughout the collection. Duffy frequently conveys time in terms of diminishment. Many of her poems reflect upon the past with a sense of nostalgia and / or regret.

The title of the collection Mean Time is deliberately ambiguous. It could be suggestive of time as being a malign force - ‘mean’ it could also suggest an indeterminate state as in ‘in the meantime’; ‘mean’ could also be interpreted in the sense of alienation and liminality as a middle-aged woman - she was neither young nor old when she wrote the collection.

Duffy makes frequent use of reference to popular culture throughout the collection which gives the poem a realistic quality.

Many of Duffy’s poems take the form of a dramatic monologue which express the desires; the emotional turmoil; the memories; the regrets and the hopes of the poetic voice. Most poems are in free verse which neither rhymes nor follows a regular meter; such a form is effective in conveying the sense of a stream of consciousness through which intense personal emotions and thoughts are expressed. She sometimes adopts personas through which she speaks. Some poems take the form a direct address to a lover and, by extension, the reader.

Her language is often simple, colloquial and prosaic which conveys an authentic sense of realism and the everyday commonality of the human condition. Duffy makes use of quotidian imagery which reflects or inspires the poet’s reflective thoughts.