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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.
Paper 2, Texts in Shared Contexts: Modern Times (1945–present). These two contemporary collections represent the most recent end of the option, and they are studied — like all the poetry here — comparatively, within the shared context of writing since 1945. The assessment objectives weight as follows:
⚠️ These are in-copyright contemporary poems and carry the highest misquotation risk on the option. Popular study sites circulate garbled and invented "quotations" of both poets. Quote only the very short phrases you have personally verified; for everything else, analyse the moment precisely in your own words. A confident paraphrase of how a poem works always beats a fabricated line. The handful of micro-quotations retained in this lesson have been checked against the texts.
Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009 — the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the position. Feminine Gospels (2002) 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, traditionally written by men about a male God. Duffy's "feminine gospels" appropriate that authority for women's experience, implying that the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women deserve the scope, gravity and canonical status that the word "gospel" carries.
The collection belongs to a precise contextual moment. By the turn of the millennium, second-wave feminism's gains (legal, educational, professional) were a generation old, and a younger feminism was increasingly attentive to the body, to representation, and to the recovery of women's hidden histories — concerns that map exactly onto Duffy's subjects. At the same time the culture's pressures on women's bodies — the imperatives of thinness, beauty and self-effacement that "The Diet" and "Tall" anatomise — were intensifying through advertising and mass media. Duffy's strategy is to take these pressures and these histories and run them through the machinery of myth, fairy tale and surreal exaggeration, so that what is ordinarily naturalised (a woman dieting, a girl told not to stand out) is estranged and exposed. The fairy-tale and mythic registers are not decoration; they are a feminist method, claiming for women's experience the archetypal resonance that culture usually reserves for male heroes.
| 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 |
The collection's opening poem imagines a queen who has reigned so long that she has, in effect, become coextensive with the lives of all women — her dominion is not a territory but the shared experience of womanhood itself, catalogued across the poem in its seasons, its laws, its sorrows and its small daily realities. Duffy declines to marry; instead the Long Queen takes "all women" as her subjects, so that the poem reads as a kind of mythologised history of female experience under a sovereign who is herself female. The queen is simultaneously historical and mythical, personal and political; her longevity suggests the endurance and the accumulated weight of women's lives. The poem sets the collection's programme: to claim for women's experience the authority and scope of a "gospel".
Techniques: Extended metaphor, cataloguing and accumulation, the mythologising of history, the blurring of an individual figure into collective female experience. (Analyse Duffy's list-making and her elevation of the ordinary into the regal; quote only very short, certain phrases.)
A woman grows taller and taller — literally, impossibly — until she towers over crowds, over buildings, over horizons, and finally over the whole earth, looking down on continents and weather. Duffy uses the surreal, escalating conceit of physical growth as a metaphor for female aspiration, visibility and power, but the poem is double-edged: as the woman rises she also grows lonelier and more removed, until she is too large for ordinary human connection. Growth is therefore both liberation and isolation — to be visible and powerful is also to be set apart and exposed. The poem's accumulating, escalating structure enacts the very expansion it describes, each stanza lifting the woman higher.
Techniques: Surrealism and the literalised conceit, escalating/progressive structure mirroring content, the body as the site of social meaning, the doubleness of power as both triumph and isolation. (The poem's most analysable feature is its escalation; describe the movement in your own words rather than risking a misremembered line.)
A woman diets so obsessively that she shrinks — to the size of a bird, then smaller, until she can slip inside other things and finally all but vanish, before (in the poem's grotesque comic reversal) being swallowed back into a fat woman's body and re-emerging. The poem literalises the cultural imperative for women to make themselves smaller, taking the metaphors of slimming culture at their word and following them to a surreal, disturbing extreme. The cliches of dieting — the language that urges women to disappear — are made horribly concrete, so that the social pressure to diminish becomes a literal shrinking out of existence.
Techniques: The literalised metaphor (the collection's signature device), surreal narrative, social critique conducted through fantasy and dark comedy, the relationship between cultural language and the female body. (The mechanism to analyse is the literalising of dead metaphor; paraphrase the narrative rather than risk a misquotation.)
The longest poem in the collection is a sustained narrative in which the pupils and staff of a girls' school are overtaken by an uncontrollable, contagious laughter that spreads from a single classroom until it disrupts the school's entire ordered routine and, ultimately, liberates. The laughter is anarchic, joyful and subversive of institutional discipline; Duffy makes it an image of female solidarity and of the comic, collective refusal of constraint. The poem is also, importantly, about language and imagination as the trigger and the prize of this liberation — it is set in motion by a line of poetry, and the disruption it unleashes is finally creative rather than merely destructive.
Techniques: Extended narrative, accumulation and catalogue, the structural movement from rigid order through chaos to release, and a self-conscious interest in language and poetry as liberating forces. (Describe the arc and the catalogue technique in your own words; do not rely on remembered lines, which are easy to garble.)
Two further poems extend the collection's central concerns and are worth carrying for comparison. "The Map-Woman" imagines a woman with a living map of her home town printed on her skin — her past literally inscribed on her body, inescapable until she finally sheds it. The conceit makes vivid the collection's preoccupation with the way women carry their histories physically, and with the longing to be free of them. "Beautiful" traces the destructive power and the cost of female beauty across four legendary and historical women — moving from Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to Marilyn Monroe and a Diana-like modern princess — and argues that beauty has repeatedly been both a source of power and a cause of ruin for the women who possess it, who are watched, desired, exploited and finally destroyed by the very gaze their beauty attracts. The four-part historical sweep is itself the argument: across millennia, the structure that turns beautiful women into objects to be consumed has barely changed. Both poems, like "Tall" and "The Diet", treat the female body as the surface on which culture writes its demands — and both insist, characteristically, that this writing is as dangerous as it is glamorous.
Techniques (shared): The literalised or mythologised conceit; the catalogue of women across history; the doubleness of the body as both power and trap. (Analyse the conceits; quote only the short phrases you have verified.)
Sheers is a Welsh poet, novelist, and playwright. Skirrid Hill (2005) takes its title from Ysgyryd Fawr, a mountain in the Black Mountains of Wales. Sheers connects the Welsh name to "ysgariad" — separation, divorce, parting — and this etymology is the collection's organising principle: nearly every poem turns on some form of separation, whether between lovers, between past and present, between self and landscape, or between the living and the dead. The mountain itself, with its distinctive cleft profile (local legend attributes the cleaving to a father's grief, or to the earthquake at Christ's crucifixion), becomes the collection's controlling emblem — a landform that is a parting, made permanent in stone.
The contextual frame for Sheers is Welsh identity and the marks of history in a particular terrain. Writing within the Anglophone literary mainstream but out of a specifically Welsh landscape and inheritance, Sheers belongs to a generation of British poets for whom regional and national identity is neither folkloric nostalgia nor a settled given but something actively negotiated — close to what Stuart Hall describes as identity-as-becoming. His landscapes are saturated with history: field boundaries, hill forts, the bone-bearing battlefields of the First World War, the deep geological time recorded in rock. War is a recurrent presence — most powerfully in "Mametz Wood", where the Welsh dead of the Somme surface in the fields decades later — so that the personal lyric (love, family, the death of grandparents) is repeatedly set against the longer durations of national and military history. This braiding of the intimate and the historical, both read out of the physical world, is Sheers's signature.
| Theme | Detail |
|---|---|
| Landscape and identity | The Welsh landscape is not merely setting but an active presence — shaping identity, storing memory, witnessing human experience |
| The body | Physical experience — touch, sex, injury, ageing — is the primary medium through which Sheers explores relationship and identity |
| Separation and loss | The collection is structured around partings: the end of love, the death of grandparents, the separation of past from present |
| History in the landscape | The land bears the marks of history — ancient field boundaries, the shapes left by absent bodies, the geology that records deep time |
| Masculinity | Sheers explores masculinity through farming, sport, war, and physical labour — questioning what it means to be a man in contemporary Wales |
The collection's opening poem treats the end of a relationship through the controlling metaphor of theatre that the title announces — a "last act", a performance reaching its close. The lovers' final intimacy is rendered with quiet, exact physical observation and a pervasive sense of an ending watched as much as lived, the relationship dismantled like a set being struck after the final curtain. The poem captures the paradox at the heart of the collection: physical closeness coinciding with emotional separation, presence shadowed by imminent loss.
Techniques: The extended theatrical metaphor (the relationship as a play reaching its last act), close physical and visual detail, the tension between presence and imminent absence. (Because the exact wording is easy to misremember, analyse the theatrical conceit and the mood of ending in your own words rather than quoting.)
One of the most powerful poems in the collection, "Mametz Wood" describes how, over the years following the First World War, farmers ploughing the fields near Mametz Wood on the Somme (the site of a battle in July 1916 that devastated the 38th Welsh Division) kept turning up the bones of the dead. The land slowly, reluctantly gives back what it has held. Sheers renders the remains through a sequence of startlingly delicate, domestic metaphors: the soldiers become, among other images, "a broken mosaic of bone, / linked arm in arm", and a single shoulder blade is seen as "the china plate of a shoulder blade" — fragile, household objects that measure both the vulnerability of the bodies and the tenderness of the poet's gaze. The poem connects landscape, history and the body: the earth has become an unwilling archive, preserving across decades what the war tried to bury.
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