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Guillermina Perera de SaraviaListening to a single story is risky. It provides a partial view, a singleperspective that endangers the reliability of the story itself. A single storysilences the voices of those who have not had the chance to speak up,those who have not been heard throughout history. Listening to a singlestory has resulted in the postmodern urge to revise and resignify whathas been accepted, sometimes even blindly. Thus, those writing frompostcolonial, feminist, ethnic or diasporic perspectives – just to mention afew – have questioned tradition and traditional discourse, so thatconcepts such as “Never again will a story be told as if it were the onlyone”29 reverberate forcefully and throw a new light on the way we see ourworld.The current British Poet Laurate Carol Ann Duffy does precisely thisin her popular collection of poems The World’s Wife, published in 1999.With unforgettable humour and resorting to parody, Duffy revises andquestions tradition allowing women’s voices previously silenced to beclearly heard. In doing so, she recreates female figures from the mythical,historical, literary and biblical traditions, most of them wives ofemblematic men, in an attempt to unbury hidden truths and forgottenperspectives, point out the importance of discourse and silence in anysearch for identity, and show the dangers of accepting tradition blindly,with no further questioning. Duffy’s feminist stance is at the service of allthose voices that, for one reason or another, have been silencedthroughout history.Feminism, revisionism and parodyUndoubtedly, The World’s Wife is a feminist text. Duffy’s intention togive voice to previously silenced women in an attempt to define anddefend their identity is quintessentially feminist, and she does so throughrevision. Her means echo those of another very famous American writer,Adrienne Rich, for whom “re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeingwith fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – isfor women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”(167). Likewise, Carol Ann Duffy deals with the writing of the past in anew and different way, so as to break hold of a tradition that she is notinterested in passing on unquestioned.This revisionism responds as well to the postmodern characteristic ofquestioning from within. As Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon states,postmodernism examines history, the individual, language and itsreferents, the relationship among texts; all this through an ironicaldialogue with the past for the sake of revising and resignifying what has29 John Berger. Epigraph of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.102 LyCE Estudios 15/2012