Poetry Collection: Selling Manhattan

Overview
Selling Manhattan (1987) finds Carol Ann Duffy continuing her exploration of contemporary life with an incisive eye for voice and situation. The poems traverse city streets, domestic interiors and media-saturated spaces, presenting speakers who range from the intimate to the theatrical. The title gesture , a compact, ironic nod to commerce and place , signals the book's interest in how modern identities are bought, sold and performed.
Duffy's ear for speech and knack for persona carry the collection. She shifts between conversational soliloquies and tightly crafted lyrical pieces, bringing the reader close to the emotional work of everyday life while maintaining a cool, often wry observational distance.

Themes
A dominant theme is urban living: the city appears as site of longing, anonymity and energy, where human connection competes with noise and spectacle. Duffy tracks the effects of late twentieth-century consumer culture on desire and selfhood, showing how market logic infiltrates personal relationships and language itself. The poems often pair glamour with grit, letting commercial images and private memory mirror one another.
Gender and the female perspective are central. Duffy writes women who are candid, sardonic, resourceful and sometimes tender, resisting sentimentalizing while revealing vulnerability. Power dynamics within love, work and public life recur, with the poet probing how women navigate expectation, performance and the demand to be visible yet contained.

Style and Voice
Natural, idiomatic diction anchors the book: lines move with conversational rhythm, enlivened by sudden metaphoric compressions and sharp epigrams. Duffy frequently uses dramatic monologue and imaginative personae, allowing different social voices to articulate desire, irony and complaint. The result is a plurality of perspectives that feels both theatrical and intimately familiar.
Formally the poems vary from tight, image-driven lyrics to longer pieces that accumulate anecdote and detail. There is a deliberate economy to the language; gestures that might be sentimental in other hands are pared down to terse, often witty statements. Repetition, staccato phrasing and strategic enjambment create momentum and a sense of urban breathlessness.

Imagery and Tone
Images of windows, mirrors, shopfronts and neon recur, portraying the city as both spectacle and looking-glass. Domestic motifs , kitchens, beds, telephones , collide with signs of mass culture, producing a landscape where private feeling is constantly mediated by screens and advertisements. Many poems turn on a single potent image that reframes a familiar scene in a revealing, sometimes unsettling way.
Tone moves between ironic detachment and sudden tenderness. Humor and a capacity for sharp satire sit alongside moments of poignancy, so that even the wryest pieces can yield an unexpected tenderness. The voice alternates between confident performance and exposure, offering a complex emotional register that resists easy categorization.

Significance
Selling Manhattan consolidates themes and techniques that would define much of Duffy's later work: the empathetic enactment of other voices, a focus on gendered experience, and an ability to find moral weight in small, urban moments. The collection helped broaden the reach of contemporary British poetry by combining accessibility with formal craft and political intelligence.
The poems continue to feel relevant for their attentiveness to the intersections of commerce, media and intimate life, and for their insistence that the personal is shaped by public structures. Selling Manhattan stands as a lively, piercing examination of modern urban subjectivity, delivered with Duffy's characteristic wit and moral clarity.