Carol Ann Duffy: Monologue as Dialogue

Abstract

At one level, Carol Ann Duffy’s use of the dramatic monologue allows mostly marginalised social types a voice. Her experience as a dramatist (she has written two plays, for example, that were staged at the Liverpool Playhouse) has helped her in her mimicry of contemporary speech rhythms and idioms and she is clearly concerned to introduce shockingly “unpoetic” material into poetry. The juxtapositions, for example, in “Psychopath”¹ — sex, gratuitous cruelty, excrement — suggest that what is being evoked is well beyond the literary pale, the articulation of the inarticulate, a naturalistic exploration of a low life normally unheeded by those who read poetry, the authentic voice of the eponymous psychopath.