Football Remembers. Christmas Truce 1914. By DeFacto — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48650239 Duffy’s recent collections include her Collected Poems (2015), The Bees (2011), winner of the Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Rapture (2005) , winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. Duffy has also written verses for children. Her several collections of children’s poetry include The Gift (2010), New and Collected Poems for Children (2009), and The Hat (2007). Independent (London, England) October 2, 1999, Christina Patterson, "Street-wise Heroines at Home," p. WR9. During World War One, 97 years ago, on December 24 and 25, 1914, along the western front, an unofficial ceasefire involving some 100,000 British and German troops took place. Just four months after the conflict started, the German and Allied armies had reached a stalemate bogged down in a vast network of flooded, freezing trenches undermining the pre-war patriotic fervour and claims it would all be over in a year.

Duffy’s poetry has always been strong and feminist. This position is especially well captured in herfirst collection, Standing Female Nude,in which the title poem consists of an interior monologue comprising a female model’s response to the male artist who is painting her image in a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model’s acceptance of conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet expresses that “the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her,” explained DiMarco. “And here the way the poem ends with the model’s final comment on the painting ‘It does not look like me’—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand, however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist’s representation of her in the nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to be or her lifestyle.”

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New Statesman, November 29, 1999, review of Time's Tidings: Greeting the Twenty-first Century, p. 83.

Richard Schirrmann (founder of the German Youth Hostel Association) as, “Strewn with shattered trees, the ground ploughed up by shellfire, a wilderness of earth, tree-roots and tattered uniforms.” This was the area known as “No Man’s Land” which became temporarily transformed by soldiers who allowed themselves to “Make of a battleground, a football pitch.” Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1994, Betsy Hearne, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, pp. 184-185; September, 1996, Betsy Hearne, review of Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, pp. 9-10. Carol Ann Duffy makes the use of German and English in her poem to show the likeness of coming together regardless of side. Not even language can distract us from the idea that we are essentially human. Even though both said poems are written much after the world war to the point where even the authors did not experience the war first hand, they keep this very eventful incident in memory. These incidents are never going to be forgotten that easily. They do not shy away from making a sincere attempt at trying to capture what the Christmas of 1914 felt like in some sort of post memory essence. Essentially these poems high light Christmas of 1914 as a reminder that we can always be better people.She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess's Blankets (2009). Anthologise, which saw schools selecting their favourite poetry, the winning anthology published by Picador with a foreword by the Duchess of Cornwall; Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester. She is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches on the Poetry route of the MFA and MA in Creative Writing and is creative director ofcity-wide, national and international literary projects. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She wasPoet Laureate of the United Kingdom 2009-2019. Her collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. Words of wisdom Times Educational Supplement, January 22, 1999, review of The Pamphlet, p. 13; April 23, 1999, review of Five Finger-Piglets, p. 27; December 17, 1999, review of The World's Wife, p. 22; January 19, 2001, John Mole, review of The Oldest Girl in the World, p. F20. Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

urn:lcp:christmastruce0000duff:epub:75b8ae52-bca4-415d-ba0d-f6ac55810955 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier christmastruce0000duff Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s27wfd5q5m1 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781447218449 I present a series of evenings at our partner venue, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, under the heading "Carol Ann Duffy and Friends". These evenings featuring guest appearances from poets of national stature reading alongside the best students and graduates from our MFA and MA Creative Writing: Poetry programme. This gives our students the experience of taking part in a professionally-staged literary event, and helps them to develop their skills in presenting their work to a public audience. In 2018I started the People's Poetry Lectures: today’s leading writers talking about their favourite poets at Manchester's iconic Principal Hotel. Little Women, Big Boys (one-act), first produced in London, England, at Almeida Theatre, August 8, 1986. Duffy’s more disturbing poems also include those such as ‘Education for Leisure’ ( Standing Female Nude) and ‘Psychopath’ ( Selling Manhattan) which are written in the voices of society’s dropouts, outsiders and villains. She gives us insight into such disturbed minds, and into the society that has let them down, without in any way condoning their wrongdoings: ‘Today I am going to kill something. Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored […]’ (‘Education for Leisure’). Editor) Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss, illustrated by Trisha Rafferty, Holt (New York, NY), 1996.School Librarian, November, 1992, Doris Telford, review of I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, p. 154; May, 1996, Vida Conway, review of Grimm Tales, p. 70; summer, 1999, review of Five Finger-Piglets, p. 96. Duffy’s themes include language and the representation of reality; the construction of the self; gender issues; contemporary culture; and many different forms of alienation, oppression and social inequality. She writes in everyday, conversational language, making her poems appear deceptively simple. With this demotic style she creates contemporary versions of traditional poetic forms - she makes frequent use of the dramatic monologue in her exploration of different voices and different identities, and she also uses the sonnet form. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. In this, her work has been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism, but this is a thematic influence rather than a stylistic one: consequently, there is an interesting contrast between the postmodern content and the conservative forms.

The Game: Christmas Day, 1914’. McMillan, Ian. http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/the-game-christmas-day-1914/However, in 2009, she justified her acceptance of the role on feminist grounds, telling listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, “I think my decision was purely because there has not been a woman. I see this as recognition of the great women poets we now have...and I decided to accept it for that reason.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-03-29 00:08:22 Associated-names Roberts, David, 1970- illustrator Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA40833415 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Duffy’s new poem The Christmas Truce continues in this anti-war vein, making sense of war and condemning its atrocities. Her attempts to bring the ceasefires and fraternisations to life for children are welcome. Times Literary Supplement, March 3, 1995, p. 24; July 7, 1995, p. 32; December 3, 1999, Alan Brownjohn, review of The World's Wife, p. 24. Editor and contributor) I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Anthology of Women's Poetry, illustrated by Trisha Rafferty, Viking (New York, NY), 1992, published as I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, Holt (New York, NY), 1993.