Mrs. Scrooge: A Christmas Poem - Hardcover

CAROL ANN DUFFY is a poet, playwright, and freelance writer, and was made Britain's poet laureate in May 2009. She is the author of numerous volumes of poems, including Standing Female Nude, Feminine Gospels, Rapture, and Answering Back. She won the TS Eliot prize in 2005 (for Rapture), as well as the Dylan Thomas award, the Whitbread poetry prize, the Somerset Maugham award and the Forward prize. Duffy is a Professor of Contemporary Poetry as well as the Director of Creative Writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in England.

Britain’s new poet laureate is not only a Scot and a woman but a bisexual, which probably scandalizes many. A fine verse technician, arguably the wittiest laureate since the great satirist John Dryden (1631–1700), she is also highly politically and socially conscious. Her first official poem scored members of Parliament for their bloated expense accounts. Her first book as laureate features a heroine who is the epitome of the little old lady in tennis shoes, seen wherever radicals demonstrate for a cause. She is also the widow of the post–Christmas Carol Scrooge, who seems to have gone so far over to the Light Side, as it were, that he married Bob Cratchit’s mom. In the poem, smartly written around rather than in blank verse, with at least one rhymed couplet lurking within three unrhymed lines (watch for it!), and illustrated by Beth Adams as charmingly and naively as Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline stories, she, too, is visited by the Christmas ghosts and wakes to a happy ending—unreformed, of course. That’s why the ending’s happy. --Ray Olson