If the dramatic monologue provides Duffy with a public platform for exploring issues of identity, then her love poetry surely provides her with a private one. Highly regarded for her many love poems, Duffy has, however, spoken of the difficulties of working in a genre that, perhaps more than any, depends traditionally on a division of power between lover and beloved, male and female. Perhaps because of this, with few exceptions, her love poems deal with unnamed and ungendered voices, and rarely are they explicit in their negotiation of the beloved's body. In order to explore the relationship between self and other in a form which typically places the woman as desired other, Duffy's poems explore new ways of negotiating the relationship between the subject and object of desire. She refigures heterocentric representations of desire both to affirm and problematize identity, throwing into question ideas of sameness and difference in the relationship of the lover and the beloved, and the inadequacies of language to articulate the nature of that experience.

An early poem, ‘Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer’ (SP 22), is a tightly wrought lyric which recounts a lesbian seduction. Within the context of the volume in which it appears, Standing Female Nude (1985), there is little explicit lesbian reference, and a ‘presumed heterosexuality’ permeates the volume. As such, the poem quietly invades the cultural context of heterosexuality:

The relationship between the two women takes place away from the male world. ‘Our secret life’ suggests that love between women is necessarily repressed or kept secret, but there is also the added suggestion here - a sense of wonder or surprise late in the poem - which also suggests that this is an initial or early lesbian experience.