Mean Time

by Carol Ann Duffy

Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award 1993 In her fourth collection, Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy dramatizes scenes from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, finding moments of grace or consolation in memory, love and language amid the complexities of life. These are powerful poems of loss, betrayal and desire. Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection Mean Time. On May 1, 2009 she was named the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. 

Genres: Poetry, School, College, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Classics

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favorite of the three Duffy collections I’ve read thus far. I’d encountered “Valentine” before. Like “Stuffed,” about a sadistic taxidermist, it’s gently creepy; an offbeat love poem turns into something almost disturbing, with vocabulary like “blind,” “fierce,” “Lethal” and “knife.” There’s a subtle chronological progression in the collection: nostalgia for childhood leads into faltering relationships, with a late hint of happy grown-up life in “The Windows.” I especially liked “Caul,” “Havisham,” and “The Biographer.” My two favorites were “Small Female Skull,” about having compassion for one’s self, and the title poem, about a winter night closing in early on the heartbroken narrator.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The older she gets,
the more she awakes
with somebody's face strewn in her head
like petals which once made a flower.

What everyone does
is sit by a desk
and stare at the view, till the time
where they live reappears. Mostly in words.

Imagine a girl
turning to see
love stand by a window, taller,
clever, anointed with sudden light.

Yes, like an angle then,
to be truthful now.
At first a secret, erotic, mute;
today a language she cannot recall.

And we're all owed joy,
sooner or later.
The trick's to remember whenever
it was, or to see it coming.

[george ☽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It seems we live in those staggering years
Only to haunt them"

i'm currently studying this for school- and duffy just has such a wonderful way with words. i think taking each poem apart and highlighting key themes and ideas has only served to make me appreciate it even more.

"The way the shy stars go stuttering on".

i don't absolutely love every poem in this collection- but the ones i do love more than make up for the not-so-great ones.

a few of my favourites: adultery, the grammar of light, confession, never go back, fraud.

[eve · Rating 2 out of 5]

studied for english. depressing.

[Alma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Duffy is such a diva and she is so cool and I love her!! despite her use of cliches within poetry, she creates such vivid, personal imagery. “Before you were mine” certainly struck a chord within me. Cheers to the first ever female and gay poet laureate!!

[J.S. Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carol ann Duffy's 1993 fourth collection is classic Duffy. These poems are mini tales of memory and the complexities of life from childhood to adulthood. Tightly coiled images and precision wording make for some excellent poetry

[Elliott Cousins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Ann Duffy’s Mean Time is a gorgeous poetry collection. Duffy explores a range of human experience, yet neatly ties it together through a consistent poetic style, incorporating wit, free verse, enjambment and more, to craft a powerful exploration of the cruelty of time - hence the double entendre of the titular poem, the first two lines of which brilliantly capture the tone of the collection: ‘The clocks slid back an hour / and stole light from my life’.

This collection covers the entire temporal spectrum of human life, from childhood (i.e. ‘Stafford Afternoons’) to old age (i.e. ‘Beachcomber,’ which explores the painful frustration of losing memory). Duffy explores human relationships, in poems such as ‘Valentine’ and ‘Close’, with fierce honesty, capturing the intoxicating power of intimacy in its most beautiful and violent forms, infusing this with the fluidity of time to emphasise the temporal potency of passionate love.

Duffy also, perhaps more subtly, explores womanhood and sexuality through this collection. Poems such as ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’ and ‘The Cliché Kid’ potentially subtly explores how homosexual identity adults can re-colour childhood memories to craft a greater understanding of self. Additionally, ‘Litany’ and ‘Small Female Skull’ indicate a frustration at the restrictions placed on women’s language and ideas; the former interrogates how women are taught from a young age to censor themselves, while the latter highlights how males are provided greater appreciation as intellectuals by expressing a firm ideology of rationalism throughout history. In both poems, and across the anthology, the narrative voice expresses a desire to disrupt these restrictions. Even when Duffy explores more morally complex matters, such as infidelity (most particularly in the poem ‘Adultery’), she expresses its superiority, as a mark of freedom, to conformism. The intersection of memory and repression is particularly apparent in the poem ‘Before You Were Mine’. Whilst the title initially seems to portray a romantic relationship, the poem reveals that the personal the narrator possesses is her own mother, thus demonstrating how, particularly in the mid-20th-century, women undoubtedly lost their freedom when they became mothers. The narrator thus seemingly presents guilt at possessively stealing her mother’s freedom simply by being born.

It is impossible to explore the immense nuances of this collection in a short review. Nonetheless, I would argue that the greatest strength of this collection is in the way it interrogates how Time, powerful and terrible as it can be, reverberates through every aspect of our lives.

[lisa.]

havisham, cafe royale, stuffed and adultery!

[sof · Rating 4 out of 5]

queen she saved AS level poetry

my faves are beachcomber and havisham

[eveline williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good!!!! I'm not really that big into poetry however this collection was really enjoyable and has definitely inspired me to read more. I especially liked Café Royal and Valentine.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

On a few occasions towards the end of Mean Time ("Close", "Havisham", "The Suicide"), I found myself uncomfortably reminded of some poems I tried to write in my teens, and which are mercifully lost to posterity. Of course, you don't get to be Poet Laureate by writing like me, and there are plenty of poems in this collection that I appreciated ("enjoyed" would not be the right word) while reading them, but few that stayed with me once they were done. I found Duffy's language to be strangely inert, and her themes mostly depressing, with glimpses of warmth. I don't need poems to speak to me, but these didn't.

[Moushumi Ghosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant collection from Duffy. Some poems stay with you long after you have closed the book. Personal favourites include 'Valentine' and 'Away and See'. These are timeless poems. Duffy is a national treasure.

[Aaliah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Studied this for A-Level but it was SO good. Duffy is such a good poet and I always enjoy reading her poems. This particular collection is deep and meaningful as well as being universal in its concepts.
My favourite poems were: Cafè Royal, Adultery & Mean Time itself.

[Jess · Rating 1 out of 5]

I find Duffy bleak and depressing. Her poetry is dull and bland.

[Thella Passiflore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Les béguins ça a du bon parfois. S’il ne m’avait pas reparlé de Carol Ann Duffy, dans ce bar où nous étions bien alcoolisés, j’aurais peut-être mis plus de temps pour sauter le pas et plonger dans sa poésie. Et quelle poésie ! Ce recueil est beau parce qu’il est intime, parce que l’on entend la voix du poète qui a besoin de mettre en mot un fragment de sa réalité. Les poèmes-histoires, l’invention d’un Moi tout autre ne me touchent pas autant.
Carol Ann Duffy écrit selon moi les plus beau poèmes amoureux (voir Valentine, que je trouve d’une clarté incroyable) mais c’est le poème The Suicide qui m’a plus parlé. En le découvrant pour la première fois, j’ai eu la surprise de découvrir un poème que j’aurais pu écrire l’hiver dernier, que j’aurais voulu écrire moi-même. J’aime mes autrices quand elles sont un peu zinzins.

[kenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

made me sick with nostalgia. a collection shaped by the physical & intangible impact of our childhood into adolescence and finally adulthood. the poem ‘never go back’ sent me into a bit of a spiral - “what you owe to this place is unpayable in the only currency you have.” encapsulated what going back to my hometown at christmas feels like,, in the most bittersweet way “never return to the place where you left time pining til it died”. some very contemplative writing & in my penultimate term of uni i think it couldn’t have hit harder rn.

[Danielle Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The collection had some amazing poems and then some that, for me at least, fell a bit flat. This is the third collection from Duffy that I read, and I found myself losing interest towards the end. However, all were still crafted well and were talented, just not my cup of tea.

[Maud · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually really liked these poems, especially after we discussed them in class so they made more sense.

[Kyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars!

[Remy · Rating 2 out of 5]

read this to find "Valentine". "The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team" was another standout.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains THE Valentine
Also hit: Close, Oslo, Never Go Back

[Isabel McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny and heartbreaking all at once , Duffy’s unique poetry style is wonderful and so interesting to analyse!

[Amber Sparks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faves: Adultery; Caul; Havisham

[Sarah Paps · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book for the technical skill Duffy displays. She's very precise with her words and the structures are very intentional, which I appreciate. At times, I found myself somewhat detached from the material. A lot of the pieces felt like poetic streams of consciousness, and though it is done well, I couldn't fully connect emotionally. The book intensifies halfway through until the end, and I found some poems very dark and eerie in this second half. I enjoy a good dark poem so those I found interesting and worth reading over. Nevertheless, I love Duffy as a poet. I think she is a master of the craft and there is a lot to learn from her as a poetry writer myself.

[cam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faves: "Nostalgia," "Away and See," "Small Female Skull," "Valentine," "Havisham," "Disgrace," and "Mean Time"

[Kiera Thompson]

my blood boils thinking about your silly little gcse/alevel poetry

[Andy Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too removed, too misjudging in assumption, poetryist trappings of self-reference, form and succinct-as-garble, it said little to me about my life. There's cruelty abounding, in 'The Grammar of Light', 'Havisham', 'Never Go Back', 'Adultery'. Yes, many pieces have a choice phrases like 'dustjacket smile', but this was lacking familiarity, intimacy, humour and relevance. Yes there are stellar poems: the hopefully whispering 'Prayer'; the easy yet intimate 'Beachcomber'; the beautiful 'Oslo' and 'Mean Time', playing with social reality to grasp mortality.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my English work - I do like them it’s my favourite thing to analyse

[Lola Mai · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5