The other country

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955, of an Irish mother and a Scottish father, himself a third-generation scion of the Irish diaspora on Clydeside. When she was four the family moved to Stafford in the English north-west Midlands, after her father got a job as a fitter with the English Electric Company. She attended school there, and then read philosophy from 1974 to 1977 at Liverpool University. After a time with Granada Television in the north-west, she went to work in London from 1981, returning north, to a university post in Manchester, in 1995. In its casual displacements, dictated by the accidents of employment opportunities, Duffy's life can be seen as both exemplary and unexceptional in registering the pattern of living in the mobile and expanding economy of postwar and contemporary Britain. In her poetry, however, she has forged a remarkable mythos of displacement, sharpened in particular by the in-sights into the nature of language of the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work she first encountered at university.

The true location of Duffy's 1990 collection The Other Country is an intercalated ‘otherwhere’, not simply the Scotland which she had to leave as a child to live in an alien England, but an existential space in the interstices of many places. ‘Words, Wide Night’ (p. 47) establishes both an approximation and a distance between the two concepts juxtaposed in its title, to make in its closing two lines a similar play with the fraught relation between similitude and identity. It is a poem specifically concerned with the simultaneous inadequacy and ineluctability of language, its inability to grasp the world. The gratuitousness of language allows the writer in the poem to cross out the word ‘pleasurable’ and replace it with the word ‘sad’ without in any way falsifying the experience she is attempting to define, ‘For I am in love with you and this // is what it is like or what it is like in words’. The three-way play between ‘is’, ‘is like’, and ‘is like in words’ points towards Duffy's reflections on the mother tongue, exemplified by the similarity and difference of her mother's Irish idiom, in the penultimate poem of the volume, ‘The Way My Mother Speaks’ (p. 54).