Search results for ""Author Maureen Duffy""
Orion Publishing Co First Born
1981. A different Britain. When Norman Forrester of the Defence Ministry''s Experimental Institute effects a successful fertilisation of a female gorilla with human sperm, an infant is born. Gordon, known as Gor, is his son in two senses. But Gor''s parentage must remain a secret. He has no legal existence as an individual because his existence has never been divulged to the government data bank. In more than one way, Gor is a ''non-person''.Operated on so that he is capable of speech, Gor grows through boyhood and adolescence into a strong, intelligent youth. When he discovers his true identity, he is devastated by his outcast destiny. But is there the possibility of a home amongst some of the exiles from a computer-dominated class-oriented society? And if Gor can find them, will they accept him?Maureen Duffy''s novel offers both an enthralling, fast-moving narrative and a vivid parable of the individual''s struggle to win acceptance from his fellows and to overc
£10.99
Enitharmon Press Family Values
These are tough poems, full of love and harm, good and damage, rage and compassion. They show us dealing well and also very badly with our kind and with the rest of the living planet. They are made of the rough substance of real lives. Their hallmark is loyalty: a steadfast, clear-sighted, unsentimental loyalty. Their truth is a 'being true to'. And they are a beautiful answering back against the worst. Maureen Duffy reminds us how funny people are, how vulnerable, lovable, bizarre and heroic. Her own voice is umistakeable in every line. And every poem is a sort of fighting between two lines: 'Mortality's at best a dodgy state' and 'It's not over yet; rejoice.'
£9.89
Enitharmon Press Pictures from an Exhibition
"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters in Everybody's Weekly, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn't at school."For Duffy, pictures were and still are magical creations and recreations of the visible world - of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death - where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet's with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence 'Burdsong'. Above all, Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind's eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship's hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.
£10.64
Enitharmon Press Environmental Studies
Maureen Duffy's new collection centres on environments - human, insect and animal - some experienced personally, some observed, some imagined. Though strictly contemporary in her concerns, she reaches back in her poetry to a vividly remembered childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Toulouse Lautrec, Ralph Vaughan Williams - bringing them lucidly and memorably to life. With their hallmark of compassion and fair play, Duffy's poems reflect her lifelong support for progressive social and political movements; they also display a beautiful lyricism and technical skill that grows out of her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, the city past and present provides the backdrop to her real and imagined life-stories: of love and loss, forebears and friends, the humorous and sometimes painful experiences of old age.
£10.64