Carol Ann Duffy has been appointed Britain’s new Poet Laureate, a position she will hold for the next ten years. Throughout her career, she has achieved notable successes with two very distinct kinds of poem: oblique, tender personal lyrics, the poet speaking in a voice subtly charged with erotic or elegiac emotion; and brief dramatic monologues or “persona” pieces, full of anger and caustic irony directed at social injustice or casually misogynist assumptions. “Fraud”, published in the TLS in August 1992, is one of her most audacious and compelling performances of the latter kind. In it Duffy adopts the voice of a man – the name of Robert Maxwell does not once appear, but the single, brilliantly varied rhyme on “m”, occasional details of this brutal “confession”, and its final lines all point to the man who had disappeared from his yacht, believed drowned, in November the previous year. Here, a name – or the single letter M – really is destiny, as from the buttonholing (and cunningly incorrect or un-English) first line, a remorseless amorality, rammed home by the remorselessness of the rhymes, drives towards the inevitable final word. Brusque, demotic, masculine self-assertion and much more expansive, almost trippingly musical effects: “learn to lie in the mother-tongue” etc, or “in my puce and prosperous prime” – are accommodated by the poem’s fluid rhythms, emphatically those of idiomatic speech. The poem is a tour-de-force, a superbly controlled turning-to-account of anger and loathing. One of the most interesting aspects of Duffy’s new public role, for admirers of this very talented, intelligent and risk-taking poet, will be how she modulates the compassion and indignation of her best work to the Laureate’s essential duty to celebrate. We wish her well.

Fraud

Firstly, I changed my name
to that of a youth I knew for sure had bought it in 1940. Rotterrdam.
Private M.
I was my own poem,
pseudonym,
rule of thumb.
What was my aim?
To change from a bum
to a billionaire. I spoke the English. Mine was a scam
involving pensions, papers politicians in-and-out of their pram.
And I was to blame.

For what? There's a gnome
in Zurich knows more than people assume.
There's a military man, Jerusalem
way, keeping shtum.
Then there's Him -
for whom
I paid for a butch and femme
to make him come.
And all of the crème
de la crème
considered me scum.

Poverty's dumb.
Take it from me, Sunny Jim,
learn to lie in the mother-tongue of the motherfucker you want to charm.
They're all the same,
turning their wide blind eyes to crime.
And who gives a damn
when the keys to a second home
are pressed in his palm,
or Polaroids of a Night of Shame
with a Boy on the Game
are passed his way at the A.G.M.?

So read my lips. Mo-ney. Pow-er. Fame.
And had I been asked, in my time,
in my puce and prosperous prime,
if I recalled the crumbling slum
of my Daddy's home,
if I was a shit, a sham,
if I'd done immeasurable harm,
I could have replied with a dream:
the water that night was calm
and with my enormous mouth, in bubbles and blood and phlegm,
I gargled my name.

CAROL ANN DUFFY (1992)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "The Mower" by Andrew Motion, click here.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now