I Give You an Onion: The Poetry of Duffy and Hill

In 2000, I began a music degree at Leeds College of Music, studying trumpet performance. I lived in a shared house with five other students—a classical singer, a flautist, and three guitarists. I had two single mattresses that I pushed together to make a giant bed. I fell in love with a trumpet player and told him how much I loved poetry. I showed him my favorite poem, “Valentine” by Carol Ann Duffy, and said I wanted to be in love like that. I read part of the poem to him:

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

For my birthday, he bought me Duffy’s The World’s Wife, published the previous year. He gave it to me, wrapped up, with another gift—an onion.

“Valentine” appeared in Duffy’s previous collection, Mean Time (1993). Mean Time is a perfectly formed jewel of a collection. Whereas most poets might manage to not put a foot wrong in one or two poems, somehow Duffy manages this over a whole book. She excels at what Jonathan Culler calls one of the traditional functions of the lyric poem—allowing the past to be “explicitly pulled into the lyric present.” The first poem in the collection, “The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team,” sets out Duffy’s stall in its intimate rendering of the voice of a teenage girl at a particular time, in a particular place. This continues in other poems, like “Stafford Afternoons,” which seamlessly blends childhood and danger. It was Duffy who showed me that life is art, and art is life. In “Close,” she writes: “In the dark journey of our night/two childhoods stand in the corner of the bedroom/watching the way we take each other to bits/to stare at our heart.” Many of Duffy’s most anthologized poems can be found in this collection—poems like “Small Female Skull,” which manages to be both surreal and hyper-real:

With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.
What is it like? An ocarina? Blow in its eye.
It cannot cry, holds my breath only as long as I exhale,
mildly alarmed now, into the hole where the nose was,
press my ear to its grin. A vanishing sigh.

The final lyrics in the collection, “Mean Time” and “Prayer,” remind me of an orchestral diminuendo—a diminuendo so controlled, so quietly urgent that I’m left straining my ears to hear the final breath, minutes after the poems have finished speaking.

Duffy once said: “A poem can say in so few words something so precious and startling that it almost enters us.” Mean Time entered me—the collection as a whole, but especially the title poem. Walking home late at night from rehearsals, I told the darkening sky that “The clocks slid back an hour/and stole light from my life.” After an argument with the trumpet player, I cried on the bus and whispered to myself: “I felt my heart gnaw at all our mistakes.” And when he left to work as a musician on a cruise ship for six months, I was nothing if not dramatic, writing over and over in my notebook: “These are the shortened days/and the endless nights.”

In 2002, halfway through my music degree, the local Borders bookshop began to stock Selima Hill. Up to this point, their poetry shelves included mostly canonical texts, alongside works by a few contemporary authors—Duffy, Billy Collins, and Charles Bukowski. I wasn’t part of any poetry groups, and didn’t know anyone else who even read poetry, so it was a coincidence that the cover of Portrait of My Lover as a Horse caught my eye—bright orange, with a picture of a horse standing in what looked like a rather grand living room. Most importantly, it had the word lover. I’d led a sheltered enough life for that to feel radical, thrilling—this word on the cover of a book, and a book by a woman, at that.

I read the book cover to cover on the bus on the way home, and then again before I went to sleep. I liked that all the poems had titles that started “Portrait of My Lover as [ ... ].” I loved the transformations that the lover went through in the course of the collection—from a bag of sweets to a goat, from a goat to a bungalow, from a bungalow to a nipple. That the lover was addressed as “O Lord” sometimes confused me. I didn’t know anything about the metaphysical tradition of poetry back then, but I understood that the lover was sometimes worshipped, sometimes despised, ignored, dismissed. I argued with the trumpet player again. I still couldn’t bring myself to call him my lover, but I sent him Hill’s “Portrait of My Lover with a Bag of Sweets” in a text.

Whenever you think
I think I need a lover,
stop yourself.
I don’t.
I need sweets.

I read “Portrait of My Lover as a Nipple” and realized I’d never said the word nipple out loud before. The poem pleads with the lover to transform, at first into an ear or “anything modest like that,/anything mute,/that I can lie down beside,/and whisper to,” and then asks the lover to transform into “the ear of a calf,/or a freckled astronomer,” before suggesting that they might become “a tea-bag or herb-bag or old-fashioned lavender-bag.” The poem ends: “I would like you, Lord, to become,/not an ear, like I said/but a little brown nipple./Can you manage that?”

When I read this collection for the first time, I was young and was used to transforming myself to please others, particularly sexual partners. The transformation of the lover into various objects, bodies, and material states, while the speaker—the “I,”—remained stable, felt radical. The way Hill’s speaker changes her mind, asking the lover to be one thing, and then another, and then another, and, in that asking, creates what she desires, felt incendiary. It still feels incendiary.

The trumpet player, the lover who once gave me a perfectly wrapped onion, did not turn up with a bag of sweets. I’m not sure if that’s how I knew it was ending, or if that is just the story I’ve created about that time.

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I have been tasked with writing about two UK poets, Selima Hill and Carol Ann Duffy. Both poets have been hugely important to my development as a writer, and to British poetry more broadly. Their debut collections—Hill’s Saying Hello at the Station, Duffy’s Standing Female Nude—were published only one year apart, in 1984 and 1985, respectively, yet they are radically different writers. They have both had their brushes with royalty—Duffy served as the UK Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019, Hill was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2023.

Duffy’s debut contained a mixture of lyric poems and dramatic monologues. The title poem is in the voice of an art model and begins: “Six hours like this for a few francs./Belly nipple arse in the window light,/he drains the colour from me.” Another monologue, “Education for Leisure,” is spoken by a disaffected, violent young man. The poem opens: “Today I am going to kill something. Anything./I have had enough of being ignored and today/I am going to play God.” An overzealous examiner, Pat Schofield, complained about the poem, calling it “absolutely horrendous,” and claimed it could glorify violence, leading the exam board to ask schools to destroy the anthology in which the poem had appeared. Duffy responded with “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE,” which was published in a national newspaper, and later in her 2011 collection, The Bees. Her riposte begins “You must prepare your bosom for his knife/said Portia to Antonio in which/of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,/insane with jealousy?” Duffy’s commitment to what Deryn Rees Jones calls the “revisionary strategy of recasting myth” was how I first came to know her work.

Hill’s writing has always been characterized by her original approach to the image. Her images are always three dimensional, like sculptures. We don’t just see them, we feel them, too. Opening Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002) at random, I find “Portrait of My Lover as a Cockroach”—a four-line poem quoted in its entirety here:

You kiss me
like a scratchy little cockroach
scuttling across a concrete floor
in a wedding dress.

In an interview with Julia Copus, Hill said: “I prefer ‘sensory’ to visual. In fact, things like weight, temperature, viscosity, smell, I would say, are also my subjects.” There is nothing linear about Hill’s work, as she puts it: “I am ‘perseverative: I just go on and on. Plot, no; patterns, yes.’” There is a recurrence of objects and animals: The same flamingo will appear in multiple poems. Mosquitoes make their way from collection to collection. Sherbet lemons and cows appear and reappear. One needs to fully immerse oneself in her work in order to experience Hill’s poetry—its fragmentariness, its circling, obsessive nature, its repetitiveness that is not quite straight repetition.

If this were a well-behaved essay, by now I would have outlined some facts about these two poets. Duffy has published eight collections, her most recent being Sincerity (2018). Hill’s latest, her twenty-first collection, is Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), and she has a new pamphlet forthcoming, The Bed (2024). Duffy was the United Kingdom’s first female poet laureate, the first openly gay poet in the post. She grew up in Liverpool and works at Manchester Metropolitan University as a professor in creative writing (where I, too, work). Facts about Hill’s life are more difficult to ascertain. She grew up in a family of painters. She was almost killed in a fire as a child. She was selectively mute for much of her twenties. She has spent time in psychiatric hospitals.

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My copy of Duffy’s The World’s Wife is one of the few hardback poetry collections I own. There are earnest annotations over most of the poems. The first poem, “Little Red-Cap,” has the most markings—phrases underlined and observations written in pencil in the margins. That version of me from twenty years ago underlined “birds are the uttered thoughts of trees,” a line that made the world come alive in a way I hadn’t noticed before. After reading it, I knew the trees were talking when the birds were flying.

“Little Red-Cap” is a rewrite of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood.” In Duffy’s version, Little Red-Cap willingly follows the wolf into the woods to his lair, with its whole wall “crimson, gold, aglow with books.” She stays with him for ten years, until she realizes that “a greying wolf/howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out.” After this epiphany, Little Red-Cap takes an axe to the wolf (after practicing first on a willow and a fish) and finds her grandmother’s bones. Duffy’s Little Red-Cap does more than survive—she resists and escapes. The poem finishes, “Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.”

Reading this poem was perhaps the first time I realized that the world was made up of patterns, of structures, the first time I recognized my world in a poem, a poem in my world. In my world, in our world, the world of the music conservatoire, masters are often male and a master could be a greying wolf, or worse. A master could also be benign. It was all a matter of luck. How to get through all of this, and still be taken seriously as a musician, as a person? How to get through it and still take yourself seriously?

At music college, I auditioned for a dance band. I was ecstatic when I got the gig. I turned up at the venue to be handed a shimmering, snakeskin dress. Worse than the dress was the matching choker. It felt like a collar around my neck. The male musicians were given black tuxedos to wear. None of the other women complained about the outfit. I felt like a prude. I swallowed my shame, pretended I didn’t care, that it was funny. Did I get the gig because I could play, or because of how I looked? Because they needed one more snake-girl with a collar around her neck, or because (as one of my teachers put it) I could sight-read “shit on a page”? I don’t know the answer. How to get through moments like this, nights like this? The dress glittering in my hands. Shame burning my cheeks. Following the wolf to the cave. The riskiness of living, of working like that.

The World’s Wife was the collection that brought Duffy widespread fame, reaching an audience far beyond poetry. Some of the poems give voice to women who are already named in myths and fairy tales, while others tell a different story through the voices of the wives of famous men. I hadn’t read much Greek mythology back in 2000, so I spent time searching out the original stories, and then reading Duffy’s versions. I felt a visceral shock each time I saw how her version pulled out the inherent sexism, the violence, the brutal misogyny, and held it up to the light. The World’s Wife taught me that poetry could change the way we see the world, that it could change me, that it mattered who tells the story. So, it is no exaggeration when I say The World’s Wife changed my life.

The World’s Wife also depicts women who take revenge, who murder, who don’t wait to be rescued. In “Queen Herod,” it is the queen who sends the soldiers out to kill all the baby boys who might break her daughter’s heart one day. In “Mrs. Aesop,” the speaker manages to silence her boring husband by playing him at his own game, twisting his well-worn proverbs to her own sharp-tongued ends:

               I gave him a fable one night
about a little cock that wouldn’t crow, a razor-sharp axe
with a heart blacker than the pot that called the kettle.
I’ll cut off your tail, all right, I said, to save my face.
That shut him up. I laughed last, longest.

_____

What does it mean to be abjected, or shamed, yet to refuse that shame and abjection and move past them? What does it mean to be a self in a world that often tries to objectify the self? How can we truly know ourselves? Hill’s poetry asks these questions over and over again. In “What It Feels Like to Feel Like Me,” from The Sparkling   Jewel of   Naturism (2014), which explores the world of young girls, she writes:

It feels like my body has been trampled on
by herds of knitted cattle with felt ears—
which leaves me feeling curiously elated
for having been mistaken for a field.

Much of Hill’s writing, as Emily Berry points out, is about “roles and the ways in which we inhabit or refuse them.” So much of her work refuses to be pacified, refuses to sit still. She uses simile and metaphor as a mode of discovery, transporting the reader, and herself, into the unknown. I read Hill’s poems and feel delight—for her daring, for the way she pushes past where a lesser poet might stop. Here she is in “Please Can I Have a Man”:

Who, when I come trotting in from the bathroom
like a squealing freshly-scrubbed piglet
that likes nothing better than a binge
of being affectionate and undisciplined and uncomplicated,
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.

It’s difficult to show her mastery of simile and metaphor and the distances she journeys with them, because I would have to quote whole poems. Another favorite of mine is “Ostriches,” from Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), which begins: “They run all night like dreamers in a dream.” By the end of the poem the ostriches are “not only young but beautiful, like me,/staring at myself in the mirror/while everybody else is at the funeral.”

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I’m supervising a student who wants to write neuroqueer poetry. I suggest she looks at poems by Hill to examine how a neurodiverse approach is captured in poetry, and Duffy to explore her love poems addressed to women. I talk to the student about how poetry can map the movement of the mind. I recommend Denise Levertov’s 1975 essay “On the Function of the Line,” in which Levertov writes about using line breaks to catch the minute hesitations and pauses in the way that we think and speak. I show her Levertov’s poem “In Mind,” and have to stop myself from getting too excited when I say, Look, this is the movement of Levertov’s mind, on the page, mapped out by a poem. I ask the student to think about what the neuroqueer mind would look like, what her own mind looks like. Can she map it? We talk about Hill’s use of patterning, about the absence of linear narratives. We talk about obsessions.

The alphabet is the governing structure of Hill’s Portrait of My Lover as a Horse, which tracks ambivalence and passion, disinterest and desire, eschewing a through-narrative in favor of a lover’s ongoing transformations. Duffy’s prize-winning Rapture (2005) also tracks the course of a passionate affair, though we are left to piece the narrative together from mostly short, lyric poems. In both Rapture and Portrait of My Lover as a Horse, the body of the beloved is everything. For Duffy, the beloved and the act of being in love change the world. In “Absence,” she writes: “Then the birds stitching the dawn with their song/have patterned your name./Then the green bowl of the garden filling with light/is your gaze.” For Hill, it is the body of the lover that changes, moves, and reconfigures—not the world, but the space between lovers. In “Portrait of My Lover as an Engineer,” she writes:

You crawl towards me like an engineer
who works all night in dangerous passages
crying out for love
in ancient languages.

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Duffy’s collection Sincerity, written during her tenure as poet laureate, includes many “public-facing” poems that comment on the politics of the time with her trademark wit. “Swearing In” is a kenning-style takedown of Trump that opens: “Combover, thatch-fraud, rug-rogue, laquer-lout”; it finishes with “Mandrake Mymmerkin, welcome to the White House.” British politicians are not let off the hook, either. “Swearing In” is closely followed by “A Formal Complaint,” in which the architects of Brexit are referred to as “Tosser” and “Chancer.”

Much to the dismay of a reporter writing for the Daily Mail, Duffy did not write a poem for the Queen’s anniversary; instead, she wrote a poem called “Stone Love” to celebrate Tracey Emin’s announcement that she had married a stone. The poem starts: “I married a tall, dark, handsome stone/in its lichen suit.” The poem walks the line beautifully between Duffy’s trademark lyricism (“Gulls laughed in a blue marquee of air”) and her irreverent wit (“my vows/my business and the stone’s”).

Hill’s most recent book, Women in Comfortable Shoes, comprises eleven sequences—atypical of the shape of much of her work, which is often made up of many short poems grouped together to form a kind of fragmented narrative. A précis on the back of the collection outlines what each sequence is about. For example, the first sequence, “Fishface,” is about “a disobedient young girl” who “is sent to a Catholic convent school to give her mother a break”; in “Dressed and Sobbing,” “a woman is surprised to find herself getting older and lazier.” These fictionalized narrative frameworks seem to allow Hill the distance to avoid exposure of the self, while also giving her the freedom to explore aspects of the female experience. Her work is often described as surreal, but I don’t think this is quite accurate, and it’s not a label she embraces. She is a poet of interiority, her own and that of other people. She writes about the interior as if it is on display for everyone to see, as if her way of seeing into the heart of things is utterly ordinary.

In “Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf asserts that life can be divided into “cotton-wool, or non-being” moments, and “exceptional moments,” or “moments of being”; the latter are often shocking, sometimes revelatory, even epiphanic. Woolf suggests that most of life is made up of “cotton-wool moments” but that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern.” For me, Hill is the supreme poet of the “moment of being,” a poet who reveals the pattern that Woolf points to. In “Gravel in Our Hair,” a poem in the voice of a young girl, Hill writes: “we never stop perfecting our somersaults/because we know how good perfection feels.” Her poems are never mere anecdotes. This is not just a memory of practicing somersaults, but a true “moment of being” about the search for perfection and how it shapes and damages us.

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I hope you’ve reached this point, which doesn’t really feel like a conclusion, or an ending, and want to read more of both Hill and Duffy. There are collections I’ve not even mentioned here, movements in their respective work I’ve barely touched upon.

I will leave you with an excerpt from “Last Post” by Carol Ann Duffy. The poem starts “If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin/that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud.” And later:

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
 .........................................................
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.