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Armour
Christy Ducker
£5
978-1-906613-36-5
2010 Book & Pamphlet Competition winner
PBS Pamphlet Choice for Autumn 2011
Christy Ducker lives in Northumberland. She has received the Andrew Waterhouse award and her work has been widely published in magazines. She has run writing workshops for English Heritage, Tyne & Wear Museums and the Open University. She is now working on a collection of poems about Grace Darling, as part of her PhD research at Newcastle University.
‘Unsettling and edgy, these poems have the strangeness of myth and the zany logic of nursery rhymes, but for adult ears. A real zest for language and startling imagery.’ — Simon Armitage
‘Christy Ducker’s poems are intriguing, skilful and musically alert. With a light touch she performs the difficult feat of writing convincingly and unsentimentally about happiness. After this collection so rich in pleasures, we should be hearing more of Christy Ducker.’ — Sean O’Brien
Christy Ducker’s poems celebrate and surprise with their precise and vivid imagery, whether speaking in the voice of a mother describing her newborn —
your self-startled arms flung wide
proclaiming your tiny chimp gums
— or in altogether stranger pieces, such as the title poem ‘Armour’ with its arresting
I’d rather be a lobster
in pre-op, not knowing
whether I’ll fail
on the surgeon’s table.
Clearly someone who likes to experiment with form and subject, she also gives herself free reign to write seriously or humorously as the mood takes her, deftly changing register to suit. The tender poems of memory and motherhood are offset by a more playful sequence which hops and gallops over the page, using dance as inspiration. ‘Skeletons’ contemplates the point at which we might leave historical grudges behind, and concludes poignantly “perhaps it’s the point at which I might learn / to love the present flesh that softens bone”, while the monologue on the facing page – irresistibly titled ‘The Working Woman’s Right Breast is Not Amused’ – has very different concerns.
What connects the seemingly disparate subject matter is the confidence and clarity of the writing, and this collection of twenty-five poems showcases an intriguing and extremely readable new voice. The jacket copy tells us that Ducker is working on a collection of poems about the Northumbrian heroine Grace Darling, and if Armour is anything to go by, there’ll be plenty to enjoy.
— Poetry Book Society
'Christy Ducker’s Armour is formally adept, musically attuned. There are some lovely loose sonnets here, especially ‘One Who Adds’. And it is worth buying this pamphlet just for the brilliant pantoum, ‘Journey’.' — Andy Croft, Morning Star
'Reading her pamphlet was process of a continuous astonishment and delight. Her control is expert, her balance is superb, her tonal range is radical, her form and line is varied and interesting, her bold understatement is second to none' — Helena Nelson [read more]
ARMOUR
I’d rather be a lobster,
in pre-op, not knowing
whether I’ll fail
on the surgeon’s table.
The lobster has plans:
he can tear away
a limb in battle,
scrinch off home
and await new growth.
I’ve no such armour
only this ape’s design
that frees my arms
to hold onto people
who’ll shield my heart.
Madness, to a lobster
who keeps his head down
the shape of him claiming
that meat appears
that fight happens
miles from the ape
with her brain a fruit
in the treetops seeding
chatter and quips
while her fingers crack lice.
I wake up later
stitched into myself,
embracing the nurses
embracing you
making light
