Carol Ann Duffy's Frost Fair Reviewed at The Guardian

Kate Kellaway of The Guardian reviews Carol Ann Duffy's Frost Fair (Pan MacMillan, 2019), a "small, icy, perfectly formed book – a ballad, a winter’s tale." More:

The image of the frozen ink beguiles. The cold means the suspending of normal services for the imagined poet. Duffy’s own ability to take us into a place of the past – London in the “Great Winter” of 1683 – with minimum fuss is masterly and the detail of the tongue stuck to a spoon shows we are on no ordinary path. What a pity Heras’s hare does not qualify as lifeless – he looks hale, furrily kempt, ready to run.

Duffy is a curator of cold, and her penetrating transformations continue as if in a winter exhibition: “Men’s tears were jewels in their beards for wives to pluck.” The poem is rooted in London and involves a walk from Spitalfields in which our “poet-spy” is disguised as a boy – the gentle cross-dressing further enlivening the atmosphere. The poet spies St Paul’s Cathedral.

I found this line: “London was snow. St Paul’s, a talent of the snow/ to seem more grand” a bit odd – the “talent” top-heavy – but I loved the roll, a line or two later, of: “I saw a clock too cold to tell the time”. It rings out even if the clock doesn’t... 

Read the full review at The Guardian.