Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy critics

'Rapture is a story of a love affair, from it's beginnings, through all its ups and downs to it's ending'

"These poems are intent as an obsessed lover"

'Fairytale vocabulary and ballad forms'

'‘Hour’ explores this peculiarly elastic sense of time'

'sensual, moving & strikingly original'

'Old fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance & metre'

'I have published them in chronological order... there was a seasonal and symbolic ending which felt right'

'It draws on tradition, but it's very up to date'

'Free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover who could be anyone but is not quite everyone'

'Poetry is above all, a series of intense moments... I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotions'

'Rapture is not the progress of one doomed love affair but rather a celebration of love'

'Intimate as a diary'

'Poetry of love is poetry of pain... love and grief are inextricably connected'

"Text' is a modern idyll and the phone a character in the drama'

'Poetry isn't something outside of life, it's at the centre of life'

'Combination of intimate & teasingly anonymous'

'A fresh and skilful supplement to the tradition'

'Death is a powerful presence throughout the collection'

'Unashamedly lyrical voice'

"The form that dominates Rapture is the sonnet, the magical shape so suited to reflections of love"

"An extended rhapsody on a love affair, ushering the reader from first spark to full flame to final, messy
conflagration."

"The trajectory of a love affair from its giddy beginnings, with poems of almost prelapsarian sensuality, to deep love
and then its sorrowful end."

"She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated
era."

`Only the scenery endures: stars, moon, roses, graves [...] This is an elemental love ­ it could belong to any time were
it not for the occasional contemporary accessories'

`If a poem endures, the life is between the reader and the poem. The poet should not be in the way.'

"The subject of her latest work [Rapture] is the specifics of love, not the specifics of the lovers. Its inhabitants could
be young or old, gay or straight."

"a coherent and passionate collection, very various in all its unity of purpose. In the language and circumstances of our
day and age, it reanimates and continues a long tradition of the poetry of love and loss"

"...the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. "

"These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms."

“She is a truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our imaginations by putting the whole range of human experiences into lines that capture the emotions perfectly.”

“Her aim is to communicate.”

“Love is an extremity, rivalled only by death”

“Cliché is overturned.”

[about Duffy] "a self-confessed atheist"

‘Rapture is Duffy’s most intimate avowal of same-sex desire’

"[...]Duffy is operating on a different plane, ahistorical, archetypal, where ‘moon’ and ‘rose’ and ‘kiss’ come clear of the abuses of tradition to be restored to the poet’s lexicon, as the things of the world are restored to the lover.”

“Pain has more character than the person who has inflicted it.”

“Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all those competing stories she delighted in telling have dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story of all, that of the human love affair.”