What the exam asks
Whether you use Duffy’s poems for Paper 2 (a closed-book comparative essay marked out of 25), the individual oral (a 40-line extract linked to the wider work) or the HL essay (a 1,200–1,500-word investigation of a line of inquiry), you must treat the poems as one unified work rather than isolated texts.
- Paper 2 tests how two works use both small-scale features and broader authorial choices (Criterion B1, 5 marks) and how comparing them deepens your reading of each (Criterion B2, 5 marks). Discussing two or three poems by Duffy—and showing how they share or vary a choice like the dramatic monologue or the double-edged ending—demonstrates knowledge of the whole work (Criterion A).
- The individual oral requires you to zoom in on one poem as your extract (up to 40 lines) for roughly half of your 10-minute presentation (the other half goes to a non-literary extract), while connecting its treatment of your global issue to the wider body of poems you studied.
- The HL essay asks for a broad line of inquiry traced across several poems (for instance, how Duffy uses regular stanza containers to hold fractured speech).
Core ideas
The arc of the nine poems (1985–1999)
The nine poems studied span five collections over fourteen years, showing a clear thematic development while keeping her core technical signature intact:
| Collection and year | Poems studied | Core focus and thematic arc |
|---|---|---|
| Standing Female Nude (Anvil Press, 1985) | ‘Standing Female Nude’, ‘War Photographer’ | Art, representation, labour and the gaze: who looks, who is looked at, who gets paid and who consumes the image. |
| Selling Manhattan (Anvil Press, 1987) | ‘Warming Her Pearls’ | Desire and class: unspoken longing across the divide between servant and mistress. |
| The Other Country (Anvil Press, 1990) | ‘Originally’ | Identity and migration: childhood displacement, language loss and the hesitation over where one belongs. |
| Mean Time (Anvil Press, 1993) | ‘Havisham’, ‘Valentine’ | Love’s doubleness: tenderness fused with violence, grief and obsession. |
| The World’s Wife (Picador / Anvil Press Poetry, 1999) | ‘Mrs Midas’, ‘Medusa’, ‘Little Red-Cap’ | Gender, power and intertextual retelling: inherited myths and fairy tales rewritten from the woman’s side. |
What stays constant across the arc: Regardless of the year, Duffy relies on the given voice of an outsider, the everyday object turned into a symbol of feeling, and a sting in the final line.