Feminine Gospels

In Feminine Gospels, Carol Ann Duffy draws on the historical, the archetypal, the biblical and the fantastical to create various visions and revisions of female identity. Simultaneously stripping women bare and revealing them in all their guises and disguises, these poems tell tall stories as though they were true confessions, and spin modern myths from real women seen in every aspect as bodies and corpses, writers and workers, shoppers and slimmers, fairytale royals or girls-next-door.

Part of Duffys talent besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety is her ventriloquism . . . From verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets that is, she makes it look easy Charlotte Mendelson, Observer