the map-woman

• The Map-Woman is about the inescapability of your identity and memories through the metaphorical depiction of a female body.
• It has thirteen stanzas, with ten lines: logical, like a map.
• "A woman's skin was a map of the town where she'd grown from a child."

  • There is no specificity, it is universal
  • The identity she formed as a child has followed her forever
• "their bodies fading into the earth like old print on a page"

  • Although they are fading, they are prevalent and present
  • Simile - like a map
  • Their bodies are able to fade and eventually disappear, but she wishes this for her identity
  • Follows a typical Duffy asyndetic list of those in the town before her
• Duffy references Greengate Street, which is in Stafford where she lives, and the Beatles, which links to her childhood in Liverpool.
• "She sponged, soaped, scrubbed"

  • Sibilance
  • Asyndetic list to portray the effort she goes through to get rid of the map
• "She didn't live there now. She lived down south, abroad, en route..."

  • Slight tonal shift, caesura is change of location
  • She can never settle, but she had to escape her home town
  • Asyndetic list
• Duffy uses sound-based verbs like, "crying" "groaned" "shrieks" to portray the woman's tragic and oppressive past haunting her wherever she goes.
• "Her skin was her own small ghost, a shroud to be dead in ... a suicide letter"

  • Semantic field of death
  • Despite finally achieving what she desired throughout the whole poem, the shedding of her identity has not made her any happier
• "Deep in the bone, old streets tunnelled and burrowed, hunting for home"

  • She never can escape
  • This is because the map was deeper than just the surface of her skin, it is permanently in her bones