The Hat

Carol Ann Duffy is alone in winning both the most important prize for adult poetry (T S Eliot prize) and for children’s poetry (Signal Poetry prize).

Her latest collection of poems, The Hat, along with her other collections of poems for children, puts her firmly in the company of Rossetti, Blake, R L Stevenson and Carroll. Like her predecessors, she has the gift of being able to enter the hidden world of childhood where the senses are most acute and the landscape combines reality and the imagination.

All the ingredients of a traditional collection are here – poems about domestic life, school, the natural world, reality and fantasy. There are songs, rhymes, limericks and even haiku; but as Margaret Meek Spencer has said, it is also ‘acutely contemporary poetry’. At times, the poetry is very close to music as it skips from the intimate and the tender: ‘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’; to the humorous and the playful:

‘Cool, kind buns./Cool kind buns./Very many?/Hardly any/Cool, kind buns.

Carol Ann Duffy’s love of language and her unique sense of timing using unexpected rhythms sings through this collection whether in wordplay and rhyme or simile and metaphor. ‘A ghost touched me. Elizabeth Norris. Don’t laugh./ It’s true; her hand on my cheek, cool as a flannel/ dropped in a drained bath.’ (from ‘Touched’) Deceptively simple, the language creates a tension between the familiar and the unknown, the lighthearted and loss. They leave that important space for the reader’s or the listener’s imagination where questions are unanswered and the imagination can grow. In ‘The Ocean’s Blanket’ which tells of the many layers of life in the sea, we have ‘waltzing octopuses’ and ‘hidden pearls’, but also: ‘sunken ships/ and we are drowned, are drowned./ Beneath the ocean’s blanket we will not be found.’ That toughness and tenderness is a feature of Duffy’s adult poetry, as is time, transience and mortality.

The poems in The Hat, like all the best children’s poems, are not just for children. You will find poems that are challenging and beguiling, lyrical, irreverent; or just shamelessly nonsensical. The last poem in the collection is the title poem ‘The Hat’. We are taken by the hat on a whistlestop tour of the heads and the words of the great and the good in poetry, beginning with Chaucer just as he was saying ‘a verray, parfit gentil knyght’ and ending with the hat on ‘man in black’ Ted Hughes’ head, where ‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox it enters the dark hole of the head.’

All these poems have been crafted carefully and written with relish. They are a wonderful feast which will be enjoyed by all ages and ensure the growth of the next generation of readers.