Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Today, I would like to speak about

Carol Ann Doffy, who is a very famous British poet born in Scotland and who was poet laureate,

the first ever woman, poet laureate in the UK, between 2009 and 2019. You will have heard of

Carol Ann Doffy and many of you may well have read a poetry in the context of the school curriculum.

She's been on a few syllabi in a time. I have no idea if that is the plural, but

hi, it's a poetry podcast, you're allowed to invent. I'm going to go straight into it. I think

Carol Ann Doffy is obviously a fab poet and I've picked two of my faves, one that you may well have

heard before, one that you may not. Anyway, the one I want to begin with is called Death of a Teacher

and well, I'm going to go straight into it. The big trees outside are into their poker game again,

shuffling and dealing, turning, folding their leaves, drifting down to the lawn, floating away,

high on a breeze. You died yesterday. Okay, so it begins with an elaborate metaphor,

making a tree or a collection of trees sound like card players and it works. Well, they do shuffle

and deal. Their leaves shuffle around and they are dealt to the ground, turning, folding

their leaves, all the things that card players do with their cards. Trees, I imagine, no one to

hold them and no one to fold them in the words of Kenny Rogers, drifting down to the lawn,

floating away, ice high. They look a bit like, I don't know, ice of spades, some of those leaves,

floating away, ice high on a breeze. So we begin with a very poetic, almost stereotypically

poetic description of trees. And then just when we're thinking, wow, this is what poetry is all

about, isn't it? It's a clever comparisons. And then suddenly, the punch to the stomach,

three words you died yesterday. And then everything changes. I don't know if Carolina Duffy

or the speaker of the poem is saying, yeah, I love all that stuff, but sometimes it's so real

and so raw. Don't forget that stuff as well. Bang, you died yesterday. Okay, next section.

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