The World's Wife: Poems

"Be terrified. "
" It's you I love, "
"perfect man, "
"Greek God, my own; "
"but I know you'll go, "
" betray me, stray"
"from home."
"So better by far for "
"me if you were stone."
--from "Medusa"

Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous -- and infamous -- male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.