Perhaps not surprisingly, placing Duffy into some neat compart- ment as a poet is an impossible task. Do we read her as a Scottish poet? A Scottish woman poet? A feminist poet? A working-class poet? Is she a political poet, a dramatic poet, or a lyric poet? Of course, she is all of these things and none of them, testimony to the fact that the value of the neat pigeonhole is undoubtedly suspect. What trying to place Duffy in these categories achieves, however, is that it gives us a way of understanding how she might be positioned, while at the same time highlighting an elusive quality that haunts her work and often translates into anxieties about the idea of the unsayable, and the unplaceable.

Duffy's first pamphlet of adolescent poems, Fleshweathercock, was published in 1973 by Howard Sergeant's Outposts Press when she was just 18. It was not until she was 27 that her second pamphlet, Fifth Last Song, was published by Headland with accompanying artwork by, among others, Jeff Nuttall, Adrian Henri and Henry Graham. Subtitled twenty-one love poems, it perhaps owes something to Adrienne Rich's sequence of lesbian love poems ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’ which appeared in her A Dream of A Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (1978), and Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (English translation 1969). Although Duffy herself considers it juvenilia, some of the better poems act as an interesting backdrop to her later work. In the title poem, ‘Fifth Last Song’ (FLS 8), a desire is expressed for union with the natural world which somehow blurs with the body of a lover: