Valentine -- Carol Ann Duffy

Guest poem submitted by Bob Cooper, back in
February; we're only getting to run it now:

(Poem #865) Valentine Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or kissogram. I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are. Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring, if you like. Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife. -- Carol Ann Duffy

 From "Mean time"
 Anvil books, 1993.

Some poems stay with you from the moment you read them. This is one of them.
It's direct. Simple. Worth going back to. It's allusive. I hear Cordelia
telling King Lear she loves him like salt. I hear Peer Gynt peeling his
onion. Then I just hear the poet, again, telling it how it is for her and
her lover with the uncomfortable frankness and absurdity we sometimes need
when we start using the language of love. I guess it's as simply complicated
as any or all relationships that mean so much to each of us. I think its
strength is partly because of its juxtaposition of positive and negative
features, and because we are never left with anything that's clearly good or
distinctly bad.

I hope it isn't just a poem of the 1990s.

Bob Cooper.

[About the poet]

Originally she's from Glasgow, but she learnt a lot about poetry in
Liverpool (where she was a pal of Adrian Henri). Now she knocks around in
London with Jackie Kay (another poet from Glasgow). Dated details of her
poetry are in the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Literature.