Collected Poems

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Standard 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Close study of literature). Carol Ann Duffy's Collected Poems was not on the 2019 to 2026 list; only two of her poems ('Originally' and 'Yes, Officer') appeared then, inside an anthology (Ken Watson (ed), The Round Earth's Imagined Corners, for EAL/D Module A), and neither is set now. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Close study of literature

Duffy is one of the most widely read contemporary British poets. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019, the first woman and the first Scot to hold the post. Her poems are short, accessible on first reading and densely built, which makes them ideal for close study. The collection gives you room to see how a writer uses voice, form and sound to make an argument about people, power and feeling.

Close study of literature asks for detailed attention to how language and form create meaning. With a poet like Duffy, that means looking at the speaker, the situation, the shape of the poem on the page and the way individual word choices carry weight. A strong response treats each poem as a made object and explains its effects, rather than treating it as a puzzle with a hidden message.

The set poems

NESA prescribes Carol Ann Duffy, Collected Poems (Pan Macmillan Paperbacks, 2019, ISBN 9781447231752), and sets seven poems:

1. War Photographer
2. Stealing
3. In Mrs Tilscher's Class
4. We Remember Your Childhood Well
5. The Good Teachers
6. Little Red-Cap
7. Mrs Midas

Use these seven as your evidence and use the sections below as a guide to methods.

How the set poems group: War Photographer and Stealing are built on a strongly drawn speaker or situation; In Mrs Tilscher's Class and The Good Teachers turn on school, and We Remember Your Childhood Well on how an authority narrates a childhood; Little Red-Cap and Mrs Midas rewrite a fairy tale and a myth from a new angle. Check each reading against the poem in your copy.

The seven poems, one by one

• War Photographer. A photographer develops his film in a darkroom after a war zone. Duffy sets the quiet, ritual space of the darkroom against the suffering in the images and the distant comfort of the readers who will glance at them. Look at the regular stanza shape and rhyme as a form of control that the subject strains against, and at the poem's final judgement of its audience.
• Stealing. A dramatic monologue in which a speaker steals, beginning with something small and playful and escalating. The poem is a study of boredom, resentment and loneliness, so ask how the voice invites and then unsettles the reader.
• In Mrs Tilscher's Class. A memory of primary school as a safe, ordered world that gives way, near the end, to the unsettling knowledge of adolescence. Track the shift in tone and imagery that carries the speaker out of childhood.
• We Remember Your Childhood Well. The voices of parents or authorities insist that nothing bad happened. The poem's force is in the gap between that confident denial and what the reader suspects, so ask how repetition and insistence reveal what they try to cover. It is a poem about childhood and memory, not about school.
• The Good Teachers. A poem of school memory in which teachers are remembered as figures of authority and influence. Ask how the speaker's recollection shapes the teachers, and what the ending suggests about what schooling leaves behind.
• Little Red-Cap. A first-person retelling of the Red Riding Hood story, in which the wolf is a poet and the girl moves from innocence into experience and then into control of the story. Notice how the fairy tale is reversed to give the girl the final word.
• Mrs Midas. The wife of the king who turned everything to gold narrates the cost of his gift on a household. Duffy turns myth into domestic comedy and loss, so ask how the plain, conversational voice makes the grief land.

Characteristic methods

Use these as lenses, then test them against the poems you actually study.

• Dramatic monologue and persona. Many of Duffy's poems are spoken by someone other than the poet: a figure from myth, history or literature, or an invented speaker. Ask who is speaking, to whom, and what the speaker wants. The gap between what the speaker says and what the poem reveals is often where the meaning sits.
• Rewriting familiar stories. Duffy often takes a well-known figure or tale and tells it from another perspective, frequently giving a voice to someone who was silenced or minimised. Explain what changes when the angle shifts and what that suggests about power and gender.
• Compression and the single image. She can build a poem around one controlling image or conceit. Identify it, trace how it develops, and say what it allows the poem to argue.
• Plain speech with sharp turns. The diction is often everyday and conversational, then a precise or startling word choice lands. Notice those turns.
• Form and sound. Look at line length, enjambment, stanza shape, rhyme (including half rhyme and internal rhyme), repetition and the way a final line closes or unsettles the poem. Say what each effect does.
• Tone. The same poem can move from humour to menace or tenderness. Track the shifts.

Reading a poem closely

A reliable routine for any set poem:

1. Situation and speaker. Who is speaking, to whom, and when?
2. Central idea. What is the poem about beneath its surface subject?
3. Key techniques. Choose three or four that clearly carry the meaning, and be ready to name where they occur.
4. Shape. How does the poem begin, develop and end? What changes?
5. Effect. What does the poem make the reader think or feel, and why?

Practise writing a single paragraph on each poem in the form: point, technique, quoted evidence from your own copy, effect. Since this page does not quote the poems, collect your own short quotations from your copy of the Pan Macmillan edition.

Context as a driver of argument

Duffy's work comes from a late twentieth and early twenty-first century context of feminist rewriting, interest in the dramatic monologue as a form, and a poetry that aimed to be widely heard. Use context only where it sharpens your reading. For example, you might argue that giving voice to a marginalised figure is a way of challenging a received story. Keep contextual claims brief and connect them to specific features of a poem.

Common pitfalls

• Paraphrasing line by line. Analyse the poem; do not retell it.
• Treating the speaker as the poet. Where a poem is a persona poem, say so and discuss the speaker as a construction.
• Technique spotting. A list of devices with no effect scores poorly.
• Writing about the collection as a whole when the question is about one or two poems.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. Answer the question, name the poems you will use and state a thesis about how Duffy uses voice and form to challenge or complicate a view of people and power.

Body 1. Voice and persona in Little Red-Cap or Mrs Midas: speaker, situation, tone, and what the poem reveals beyond what the speaker states.

Body 2. A poem that extends or contrasts the first, such as War Photographer or Stealing, where a controlled voice meets an uncomfortable situation.

Body 3. A poem of childhood and schooling (In Mrs Tilscher's Class or The Good Teachers) or of childhood memory (We Remember Your Childhood Well), with attention to sound, structure and how the ending lands.

Conclusion. Argue that Duffy lets the people usually spoken about speak for themselves: a wife in Mrs Midas, a girl in Little Red-Cap, a thief in Stealing. Each voice reveals more than it says, and the poem's form (rhyme, a monologue's plain speech, an ending that turns) makes the reader the one who must judge.

Read the text

Collected Poems is in copyright. Borrow it from your school or a public library, or buy it from a bookseller. NESA sets the Pan Macmillan Paperbacks edition (2019, ISBN 9781447231752), so use that edition.

Sources

• NESA, HSC English prescriptions (checked 7 October 2026, year 2026).
• NESA, English Standard Year 12 content pages: page 1, page 2 (prescription lists, checked 7 October 2026).