Friday, June 8, 2018

Books that made me / Carol Ann Duffy / ‘I wish I’d written Harry Potter, obvs’

Carol Ann Duffy

Books

that

made me

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘I wish I’d written Harry Potter, obvs’

The poet laureate on her deep shame at not having read Don Quixote and always laughing at Cold Comfort Farm

Carol Ann Duffy
Fri 8 Jun 2018

The book I am currently reading

The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre by Don Paterson. Reading it, your estimation of your own IQ incrementally diminishes. There are diagrams. Also Jay Bernard’s Ted Hughes award-winning collection Surge: Side A.

The book that changed my life

Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking – about 30 years ago. Hurrah!

The book I wish I’d written

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, obvs.

The book that influenced my writing

Influences in writing, for me, seem to have splashed in early, in teenage years, and continue to ripple out. All poets, from different times, still making waves.

The book that changed my mind

I was hugely moved and provoked by Jimmy Boyle’s visceral A Sense of Freedom when I read it in my early 20s. A book that not only revealed the (continuing) barbarity of our prison system but also demonstrated the humanising redemption of art and literature.

The last book that made me cry

The one that made me cry when I first read it, and still does, is Elegies by Douglas Dunn; beauty crafted from grief after the death of his wife. Wonderful poems. More recently, Denise Riley’s stunning Say Something Back, which also deals with bereavement, truly moved me. She’s a terrific talent.

The last book that made me laugh

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. The riffs on her fictional marriage to Picasso and her “Christmas Broadcast” are tears down the cheeks hilarious. Still making me laugh, on every rereading, is Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder’s sermon – there’ll be no butter in Hell.

The book I couldn’t finish

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As the poet Paul Muldoon has remarked, a classic example of a typo. I must try again again, again.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Don Quixote by Cervantes. This is a deep shame that I am dealing with next May, when I’m away to write, read and tilt at windmills. He’s widely regarded as as great as Shakespeare, died around the same time, and Shakespeare probably read him. I am a disgrace.

The book I give as a gift

Depends on the recipient. Generally, I give poetry collections. Most recently, to my daughter, Alice Oswald’s The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. I’ve long thought she’s the best UK poet now writing, bar none.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

New and Collected Poems for Children. Joyful years.

My earliest reading memory

The first book I read alone was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I still have the copy, signed by my grandfather in August 1962. So I would have been six. I read it in a tree, eating an apple.

My comfort read

The eternal prose maestro PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories. In fact, I’m suddenly in need of comfort after answering these stressful questions, so I’m off into the garden to read one now. With a glass of sancerre. Toodle-oo.

THE GUARDIAN