Carol Ann Duffy and Owen Sheers

Carol Ann Duffy's Feminine Gospels (2002) and Owen Sheers's Skirrid Hill (2005) are two of the most commonly studied contemporary poetry collections for AQA A-Level English Literature. Both poets explore questions of identity, the body, landscape, and memory — but they do so in strikingly different ways. This lesson provides detailed analysis of key poems from each collection and examines the thematic and formal connections between them.

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Carol Ann Duffy: Feminine Gospels (2002)

Context

Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009 — the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the position. Feminine Gospels is a collection that reimagines women's lives, histories, and bodies through a mixture of myth, fairy tale, realism, and surrealism. The title itself is provocative: "gospels" are sacred texts, authoritative truths. Duffy's "feminine gospels" claim the same authority for women's experience.

Key Themes

Theme	Detail
The body	Women's bodies are central — they are sites of power, vulnerability, transformation, and control. Duffy challenges the male gaze by reclaiming the female body as a subject, not an object
History and myth	Duffy rewrites history from a female perspective, recovering lost stories and challenging male-dominated narratives
Language and naming	The power to name — to tell stories, to define experience — is itself a feminist act. Duffy's poems claim linguistic authority for women
Transformation	Bodies change, identities shift, boundaries dissolve. Transformation is both liberating and terrifying

Key Poems

"The Long Queen"

The poem imagines a queen who has reigned for so long that she has become part of the landscape — "the length of her reign / was the length of a love, the length of a life." The queen is simultaneously historical and mythical, personal and political. Her longevity suggests the endurance of female power and the weight of female experience.

Techniques: Extended metaphor, cataloguing, accumulation of historical detail, the blurring of individual identity into collective female experience.

"Tall"

A girl who grows taller and taller — literally — until she can see over the heads of crowds, beyond horizons, into other countries. The poem uses physical growth as a metaphor for female ambition, visibility, and the anxiety of standing out:

"She grew. She grew."

The simple, repeated syntax mirrors the relentless, unstoppable nature of growth. The poem is both celebratory and anxious — visibility brings vulnerability.

Techniques: Surrealism, physical metaphor for social experience, progressive narrative, the body as a site of meaning.

"The Diet"

A woman diets so obsessively that she shrinks to the size of a bird, then a crumb, then disappears entirely. The poem is a devastating critique of the cultural pressure on women to reduce themselves — physically, socially, psychologically:

"She was a slip of a thing."

The cliche is made literal. Duffy shows how language ("a slip," "thin as a rake") participates in the cultural imperative for women to diminish themselves.

Techniques: Literalised metaphor (the central technique of the poem), surrealist narrative, social critique through fantasy, the relationship between language and the body.

"The Laughter of Stafford Girls' High"

The longest poem in the collection — a narrative in which the girls and staff of a school are overcome by uncontrollable laughter that spreads, disrupts, and ultimately liberates. The laughter is anarchic, joyful, and destructive of order:

"The teachers stared. The girls / streamed out of school. The caretaker / unlocked every door."

The poem celebrates female solidarity, the subversive power of laughter, and the possibility of collective liberation. It is also, crucially, about the liberation of language — the girls leave behind "a major poem" chalked on the blackboard.

Techniques: Extended narrative, accumulation, catalogue of detail, the movement from order to chaos to liberation, metafiction (the poem within the poem).

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Owen Sheers: Skirrid Hill (2005)

Context

Sheers is a Welsh poet, novelist, and playwright. Skirrid Hill takes its title from Ysgyryd Fawr, a mountain in the Black Mountains of Wales. The Welsh name derives from "ysgariad" — meaning divorce, separation, or parting. This etymology is central to the collection: every poem explores some form of separation — between lovers, between past and present, between self and landscape, between the living and the dead.

Key Themes