Lesley Bankes-Hughes reviews The Hat by Carol Ann Duffy

The anthology as a literary entity is a very curious thing. Its intentions can be quite straightforward and transparent: here is a collection of poems on, perhaps, a specific theme or for a particular readership selected by someone who is quite possibly a poet, or at least someone who we trust to be able to choose ‘good’ poetry for our consumption. When it works well such sifting and ‘filtering’ of poetry can constantly engage and surprise a new or an experienced reader; this democracy of words can revivify a long-forgotten poem and allow it to sit alongside a newly-minted work and each will counterpoint each other in fresh, creative ways. Collections such as The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, or more recently, Jo Shapcott’s and Matthew Sweeney’s Emergency Kit, are very models of what an anthology should and can achieve.

However, before we allow the poetry anthology to achieve some sort of literary utopian status, we must bear in mind that the action of choosing individual poems and poets to create a ‘new’ collection carries with it all the contentious baggage of impartiality, political or cultural agendas, didacticism, or any other forms of literary subversion you care to mention. When all these unpleasant possibilities are considered in the context of a collection of poems specifically written for children then the world of poetry could become something far, far darker than any wild wood encountered by a latter-day Red Riding Hood.

In Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection for children, The Hat, we are, as might be expected, in a very safe pair of hands. Childhood is her territory and, for the poet who has worked her alchemy on myths and  the world of gossiping schoolgirls, as well as the lives of people living on the margins or the unspoken secrets held tightly within families, writing poetry for children who are just beginning to relish the possibilities of language is a natural crossover. Her enthusiasm for the way words work and interact with each other, and her skill at manipulating form and rhyme are qualities which infuse her adult poetry, and it is precisely those qualities which will fire the imagination of a child encountering her new book. In her poem ‘Dear Norman’ (from Standing Female Nude), Duffy begins: ‘I have turned the newspaper boy into a diver for pearls./I can do this.’ It is this ability to transmogrify the ordinary, humdrum stuff of life which is pure Duffy; it is also what a child’s imagination does to his world every day.

The Hat is at first sight a collection for young children, but there are enough poems and the occasional ‘adult’ literary reference to hook the older reader. In fact, repeated readings of the book make it less and less age-specific – which is as it should be. The inescapable fact with any work of children’s literature is that it is written by an adult for a construct of what that adult thinks a child should be like at any given age. The adult has to make an assumption that the child sees the world around him in a particular way, but there is no true way back to childhood for the writer, everything can only be an informed guess, an approximation. Duffy knows this well. In ‘Originally’ (from The Other Country), she describes childhood as an ‘emigration’,

 ‘But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change.’

In The Hat, therefore, many of the poems work on different levels so that their layers of meaning can be peeled back as the reader becomes more confident with the way language and poetry work. This is one of the great strengths of the book, and poems such as ‘Song’, which will beguile any child with its simplicity, rhymes and refrains, would easily sit in an adult anthology, carrying as effortlessly as it does all the cadences and echoes of medieval poetry and the language of Blake or Wordsworth.

 As I walked in a garden green
I heard a singing girl,
her song a sure and silver line
which pulled me from the world
to where she sat, the flowers wild,
crooning to a little child –

Lull, lully, lully, lulla lay.
All words are living flesh today,
Lull, lully, lalla lay.

In this collection (whose title, I dare to presume, makes a wry allusion to the cat of the legendary Dr Seuss), Duffy includes all the staples of a traditional anthology for children. There are songs, rhymes, ‘The-House-that-Jack-Built’ types of poems which work through accretion, laments, and poems which grow out of the sheer silliness and elasticity of word- and sound-play:

She wouldn’t say Boo! to a goose.
But she danced all night with a moose
by the light of the moon.

Yes, the image of the moon so often appropriated by Duffy in her other poems again finds a place in this book. The cow, that pantomime stalwart, also wanders through the lines. In the witty poem‘The Manchester Cow’, we find

Six silly cows
on a hen night
at a zebra crossing.

While Duffy also conjures up some delicious Great Cow Artists such as Edvard Moonch (‘his most famous painting is The Cream’), El Grecow, and my own favourite, Frida Cowlo.

This is exuberant poetry to be enjoyed, spoken aloud, read alone or chanted in unison. Its language is rich and vibrant, it is for children but not simplistic or patronizing. There is a strand of contemporary poetry written for children which seems relentless in its reliance on playground or ‘cool’ jargon, innuendo, slapstick, and words and images which court and induce childish sniggers. Of course, this kind of poetry has a place alongside more traditional forms such as nursery rhymes and limericks (children enjoy risque jokes just as much as the rhymes found in the anthologies of Walter de la Mare, the Opies, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and many traditional verses have less than politically correct variations). But so often this kind of poetry seems to be stuck in a rut of its own making using a piecemeal kind of language which an author thinks is close to the speech of the street or the tough inner city school, and so often such poetry sounds hollow and inauthentic – it is pastiche rather than exciting invention.

Duffy stays very firmly on the traditionalist side of the fence in The Hat, and in doing so introduces metre, rhyme, form, metaphor and simile through good poetry, rather than in any heavy-handed didactic way. This is a collection of collections – of bees, sailors, songs, dresses, and alphabets. In ‘The Laugh of Your Class’ similes tumble over each other,  while in many poems acute observation is transformed into beautifully crafted metaphor:

A river, buckled
With bright, pewtery fish for a belt.

In the ‘ The Fruits, the Vegetable, the Flowers, and the Trees’, with its implied homage to the meaning of ‘anthology’ as a collection of flowers, Duffy quite brilliantly shows the power of the  adjective – how it can illuminate and deepen the meaning of a noun, introduce wit or irony,  or, if wrongly chosen, can confuse and obfuscate. Thus we have the ‘effete’ rocket, the ‘bohemian’ fennel, the ‘naïve’ lemon, and the wonderful ‘feudal’ mandarin.

There is, of course, also Duffy’s trademark dry sense of humour which in this collection often shows itself through off-the-cuff literary allusions, which will catch the attention of the older or adult reader: the ‘literary’ daffodil, the sailor who is the ‘one with an albatross/ to put in a poem’, or, after a breathless (and fruitless) search for a cup of sugar,

 ‘We were back
at mine. Still no sugar. Ran out of wine.

The poem ‘The Hat, which is found at the very end of the book, seems somehow to sit a little uncomfortably with what has gone before. It is a fairly sophisticated romp through literary history as we follow the progress of a hat as it alights on the heads of the great and the good in poetry. In doing so, the reader encounters some of the most memorable lines in poetry, so the poem can perhaps be seen as a bridge from Duffy’s collection to the treasures to be found by children in the wider literary canon. It is elegantly and lightly written, perhaps rather a self-indulgent poetic doodle by a poet who must be very sure of her own place in literary history. Interestingly, when it comes to the hat’s final resting place it is on the head of Ted Hughes.

Whose head, whose head, whose will I settle on next?

asks the hat. So Carol Ann Duffy plays it safe on this one, and it is with the issue of ‘safety’ that I have a quibble with The Hat as a children’s anthology. The poems in this collection are very much part of a British poetic tradition and this certainly gives Duffy a creative platform to introduce well-crafted poetry to new readers. However, there is a sense in which this book could have been written in the 1950s or early 1960s. There is a certain British ‘cosiness’ about it. True, Sharvari and Juanaya vie with Grace, Georgina, and Polly for a place on ‘Mrs Hamilton’s Register’, but the children of a 21st century, post 9/11 Britain seem strangely absent in this book. Perhaps that is Duffy’s point: poetry for children should be timeless, not caught up in some present-day political, cultural, and social ferment, but in her adult poetry she has always been such a risk taker, willing to see society through the eyes of the immigrant or the pariah, and willing to lift up the stone and see what hides beneath. Marvellous as it is in many ways, The Hat seems perhaps to reach out most to those children who are already primed to hear about poetry and language. Children can perhaps bear a little more reality than Duffy wants or is prepared to give them in this anthology. Nobody, however, can argue that she does ‘timeless’ very well indeed:

Pay me in light,
a candle’s tongue in the dark’s cheek,
sapphire lightning as we run for home,
your hand in mine, warm
as a small flame,
through lucky jackpot hail.

The Hat, Faber and Faber, £9.99 (hardback)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.