Poems
Poem 1: 'Before You Were Mine'
Extract
I'm ten years away from the corner you laugh on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.
Location
Carol Ann Duffy reads the poem from fellow poet Liz Lochhead's flat in Glasgow. The poem is illustrated with various sequences filmed in Glasgow: Barrowlands concert hall, George Square. After the reading Liz Lochhead and Carol Anne discuss the poem and May Duffy, the poet's mother and subject of the poem, explains how the poem makes her feel.
Summary
In 'Before You Were Mine', the poet imagines the world her mother lived in before she herself was born. In the poem she is able to do in her imagination what she could never do in reality: travel back in time. It is a sort of poetic Back to the Future.
The poem starts from a real photograph of her mother as a teenager with three friends. In her memory the poet associates the photograph with two other famous photographs from the 1950s: Bert Hardy's 'Seaside Chat' and the famous image of Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up. In the real photograph of the three friends seen in the programme, the three friends do not 'bend from the waist' or 'shriek at the pavement'; those images are taken from the other more famous photographs. Duffy is creating a 'photograph' of her mother through an act of memory and imagination.
The poem continues with other memories of real objects and and events - 'those high-heeled red shoes' , 'stamping stars from the wrong pavement' (a reference to the family's move to England) - and conversations with her mother - 'your Ma stands at the close / with a hiding for the late one' (a 'close' is the entrance hall to a Glasgow tenement flat).
Transforming all these things in her imagination, Duffy makes a gift for her mother in words, recreating her mother's glamorous adolescence from clues and memories, and at the same time examining her own feelings of jealous possessive love towards her mother - 'I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello'.
What Carol Ann Duffy Said
'I'm making it up - I'm even making up the woman in the poem because it isn't my mother. How can it be? But it's still a living presence... somewhere between my mother and my idea of her.
'I like to use that childhood jumble as an adult writer.
'It's the equivalent of having that photograph blown up and framed and giving it to her as a present, but I'm doing it with words.'
Carol Ann Duffy - Passwords 1998
© 2000 Channel Four Television Corporation
