Reviews of Madame Doubtfire's Dilemma
The poems offer satisfactions that are often witty and always individual. Dilys Rose's focus is not more wholly feminine than that of Carol Anne Duffy but it is in her revisioning of the plights and adventures of iconic female figures that Rose finds a distinctive poetic strategy. She gives voice to a Figurehead, to the Sirens, to a Caryatid and to Pandora. She enters the suffering of the Queen Bee and the Little Mermaid. And in a delightful sequence of poems she takes us inside, literally in the first case, Matryushka, Rag Doll, China Doll, a dressmaker's dummy, a Maumet, a Fertility Doll, a Performing Doll, a Fetish. And then there is the Artist and the Succubus and the, happily for the owner, unfeeling Fantasy with fully removable and adjustable parts. The linguistic vitality of Rose's dolls fights against the immobility and impotence of their conditions... Carol Ann Duffy and Dilys Rose are in their different ways great exploiters of difference, willing crossers and raiders or borders in the search for appropriate voice and form.
Hers is peculiar to the rising Scottish woman's voice; wry, astute and perforated by humour. Trenchant rather than clamorous, she is, above all, extrovert and not given to over-musing, preferring clear statement and unabashed labelling.
Dilys Rose' distinctive Scottishness is found not so much in her choice of language, but more in the spirit in which she writes. She has a fascinating colloquial quality, that of the throwaway and the jaunty, which can sometimes veer perilously towards slang, but she never loses her elegance, either in sloppiness or careless observations.
Many of her poems are cameos - a drunk in Edinburgh's Tollcross district, a rag-and-bone woman, an impoverished Polish grocer are all described with originality - and, when aded to poems about her travels in America and Asia, she emerges as something of a spokeswoman for the world's flotsam.
The Scotsman