Environmental Studies - Maureen Duffy

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Résumé :
Published to celebrate Maureen Duffy's 80th year. Centred 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 childhood, and beyond that in her imagination to cultural figures of the past - John Donne, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, bringing them lucidly and vividly to life. There is a strong sense of compassion and fair play in her poems, reflecting Duffy's lifelong support for progressive social and political movements, and a beautiful lyricism and technical skill dervied from her love of the classical world and Old and Mediaeval English. As so often in her work, London 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.

Biographie:
Maureen Duffy is a poet, novelist and playwright, author of some 30 books. Her work has often used Freudian ideas and Greek myth as a framework. Heavily involved in LGBTQ and human rights issues since the 1960s, her poetry has often challenged these issues head-on (in particular her 1977 work The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a broadside against the trial of Gay News a decade before).