It was not until she was 27 that her second pamphlet, Fifth Last Song, was published by Headland with accompanying artwork by, among others, Jeff Nuttall, Adrian Henri and Henry Graham. What trying to place Duffy in these categories achieves, however, is that it gives us a way of understanding how she might be positioned, while at the same time highlighting an elusive quality that haunts her work and often translates into anxieties about the idea of the unsayable, and the unplaceable.ĭuffy's first pamphlet of adolescent poems, Fleshweathercock, was published in 1973 by Howard Sergeant's Outposts Press when she was just 18. Do we read her as a Scottish poet? A Scottish woman poet? A feminist poet? A working-class poet? Is she a political poet, a dramatic poet, or a lyric poet? Of course, she is all of these things and none of them, testimony to the fact that the value of the neat pigeonhole is undoubtedly suspect. Perhaps not surprisingly, placing Duffy into some neat compart- ment as a poet is an impossible task. I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first spaceĪnd the right place? Now, Where do you come from? Ranging across topics from sexual expression to thought-provoking examination of the cultures that refuse to recognise homosexual love, it’s a moving, ground-breaking work that challenges the status quo and writes a roadmap for a different kind of future.In the classroom sounding just like the rest. Intensely political yet devastatingly intimate, Rich’s words are a veritable manifesto for deep-rooted change.Ī landmark work of LBGT+ literature, The Dream of a Common Language was poet Adrienne Rich’s first published collection after she came out as a lesbian in 1976.ĭivided into three parts – Power, Twenty-One Love Poems and Not Somewhere Else, But Here – it explores the need for a shared understanding across barriers of gender and sexuality that recognises feminist ideals and women’s right to a voice. A seminal collection in the annals of LGBT+ literature, The Dream of a Common Langauge gave poetic voice to queer communities throughout the 1970s and continues to resonate on a deeply personal level to this day.
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