The first thing I noticed when I went to MARBL to look at the manuscripts was that Duffy seemed to write very few drafts for her poems in The Other Country. In fact, it only took Duffy one day and one draft to complete “Descendants” almost exactly in the form that it is published. Even looking at “table of contents” for one of the notebooks that Duffy wrote in, it’s obvious that Duffy didn’t seem to spend as much time on the poems in The Other Country. Most of the poems only required a few days for her to write, even for the longer poems which she did revise multiple times (she wrote over three drafts for Making Money but it seems like those only took 2 days).

I wonder if maybe, because The Other Country is so much more focused on Duffy’s personal life and events that hit close to home for her, she was able to churn out the poems in The Other Country much faster and with less revisions. In addition, she did say that The World’s Wife was more like “popular entertainment” than The Other Country and because of this, perhaps she felt it was necessary to make sure that these poems were more relatable and relevant to the general public, requiring a longer editing and revision process.

As for “Descendants,” Duffy’s changes to the poem were pretty simple. She changed a few words and phrases but the general feeling of the poem remains the same. In the original, Duffy had written “all winter” instead of “for months” (line 4) and changing the phrasing definitely made more sense in conjunction with the rest of the poem; after all, the speaker alludes to the lack of seasons later in lines 11-12 (“Winter, I goes, Spring, Autumn, Summer, don’t give me / that crap“).

Duffy also changes “blanket” in line 6 to “groundsheet.” Although both terms can describe something placed on the ground during a picnic, I think the change actually fit well with the overall essence of the poem. Because this poem is about a post-nuclear world, where “blotchy purple face[s]” are considered “lovely” (17), it makes more sense to use “groundsheet” instead of “blanket” because “blanket” has (at least to me) a more loving and warm feeling to it. It reminds me of being cuddled up in bed, somewhere warm and inviting, the opposite of this poem.

One of the biggest changes I noticed was that Duffy deleted a few phrases between this first draft and the final published version. In the original, the last stanza was written as

over the dolphins. Click-click. Sad. I hate the bastard past, see,

and I’d piss on an ancestor as soon as trace one. Poems. Paintings.

Politics. That’s what the past was, I says to her, and look at us

now. We looked. At each other. At the trembling unsafe sky.

It’s interesting that Duffy deleted an entire line and reworked some of the line breaks. I thought, with Duffy’s distain for how the British government was running at the time, she would have kept the line “Politics. That’s what the past was.” However, maybe because the poem is more about the aftermath of a nuclear attack and not about the political state of Great Britain, Duffy felt it wasn’t necessary to include that line.