Reading through Carol Ann Duffy's unremarkable early pamphlet publications, one despairs of finding any sign of promise, any sign that this romantic and dreamy adolescent ('Cast off your thighs/and irrigate the desert of my body's europe') would one day be hailed as our best British poet, the voice of a generation. Then one comes across the poem 'Army', published by the preternaturally far-sighted Howard Sergeant in the pamphlet Fleshweathercocks in 1973, when Duffy was just 18 years old. It begins:

LRB 6 July 1995 | PDF Download