I asked: “what of December, Twenty-Twelve?”,

My mind peering through that literal crowd,

All those thoughts, all those words, in there, on the shelf,

Of the world wide web of Write Out Loud.

 

An article about Carol Ann Duffy (I make no claim to be a fan) caught my eye.

https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=26736

She was under fire from the Torygraph (how predictable) for her poem about the murder of Stephen Lawrence, titled: Stephen Lawrence.

 

Duffy’s poem in the LRB, London Review of Books, was described, amongst other things, as:

 “…poorly lyricised newspaper headlines, hyped up with hollow rhymes, a weak conceit (the sew/sow idea)”.

 

The spelling mistake: “sewed” ,was later corrected to “sowed”; so the criticism of “…patronising use of motherhood (‘your mother sewed’) by the LRB is entirely unjustified and should be amended.

 

Ian Paterson’s description of the poem as: “…a feel-good consolatory poem that ends up being poetically dishonest”, is to my mind, arrant nonsense: There is nothing feel-good about the cold, stark pain of a mother’s loss, which Duffy evokes in simple non-grandiose terms-and there is certainly no consolation.