Family Values by Maureen Duffy

Family Values by Maureen Duffy

Inspired by and devoted to absent friends, this selection of poems from 1989 onwards shows Duffy at her bravest and most colourful, a consummate performer who transits without a jolt from Venice to the Underworld, from war-torn elegy to aesthetics. Though the grand theme is that of memorial and resignation, the verse is full of Gaelic wit and linguistic trickery. Amongst many highlights, Lament for the Scribblers is a clarion call to failing poets, while the concluding four-part masterpiece, In Novia Scotia, delicately negotiates the mingled threat and fertility of the ocean.

Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 in Worthing, Sussex. As well as being a poet, playwright and novelist, she has also published biographies of Aphra Behn and Henry Purcell, and The Erotic World of Faery a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature. After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King s College London. She went on to be a teacher from 1956 to 1961, and edited three editions of a poetry magazine called The Sixties. She then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television. In 1960 her play, Pearson, won the City of London Young Playwrights Award. She made her debut as a novelist with That s How It Was, published to wide acclaim in 1962. Her first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous Gateways Club in London. Among her later novels, Gor Saga was televised in 1988 in a three-part mini-series called First Born, starring Charles Dance. She is also the author of 16 plays for stage, television and radio, the most recent being Sappho Singing in 2010. Duffy took an active part during the debates around homosexual law reform, which culminated in the Act of 1967. In 1977 she published The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a broadside against the trial of the Gay News newspaper for blasphemous libel . She has also been active in a variety of groups representing the interest of writers, and is currently the President of the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society, and a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She is deeply interested in issues around enforcing traditional forms of intellectual property law, and is President of the British Copyright Council, and a Fellow of King s College London. She was made a D.Litt. by Loughborough University in 2011 for services to literature and equality law.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781904634607
ISBN 10	1904634605
Title	Family Values
Author	Maureen Duffy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Enitharmon Press
Year published	2008-07-10
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.