Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy critics

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Flashcards of critical quotes on Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture, for A2/gce English Literature students.
Magdalena Kolodziej
Flashcards by Magdalena Kolodziej, updated more than 1 year ago
Magdalena Kolodziej
Created by Magdalena Kolodziej about 10 years ago
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Question Answer
'Rapture is a story of a love affair, from it's beginnings, through all its ups and downs to it's ending' Carol Ann Duffy
"These poems are intent as an obsessed lover" Frances Leviston
'Fairytale vocabulary and ballad forms' Margaret Reynolds
'‘Hour’ explores this peculiarly elastic sense of time' Frances Leviston
'sensual, moving & strikingly original' John Preston
'Old fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance & metre' Margaret Reynolds
'I have published them in chronological order... there was a seasonal and symbolic ending which felt right' Carol Ann Duffy
'It draws on tradition, but it's very up to date' Margaret Reynolds
'Free of particularity, of identifying characteristics about the lover who could be anyone but is not quite everyone' Kate Kellaway
'Poetry is above all, a series of intense moments... I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotions' Carol Ann Duffy
'Rapture is not the progress of one doomed love affair but rather a celebration of love' Kate Ashdown
'Intimate as a diary' Kate Kellaway
'Poetry of love is poetry of pain... love and grief are inextricably connected' Kate Ashdown
"Text' is a modern idyll and the phone a character in the drama' Kate Kellaway
'Poetry isn't something outside of life, it's at the centre of life' Carol Ann Duffy
'Combination of intimate & teasingly anonymous' Kate Kellaway
'A fresh and skilful supplement to the tradition' Frances Leviston
'Death is a powerful presence throughout the collection' Kate Ashdown
'Unashamedly lyrical voice' Margaret Reynolds
"The form that dominates Rapture is the sonnet, the magical shape so suited to reflections of love" Ruth Padel
"An extended rhapsody on a love affair, ushering the reader from first spark to full flame to final, messy conflagration." Xan Brooks
"The trajectory of a love affair from its giddy beginnings, with poems of almost prelapsarian sensuality, to deep love and then its sorrowful end." Ginny Dougary
"She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated era." Levinia Greenlaw
`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' Kate Kellaway
`If a poem endures, the life is between the reader and the poem. The poet should not be in the way.' Carol Ann Duffy
"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." Xan Brooks
"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" David Constantine
"...the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. " Elizabeth O'Reilly
"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." Elizabeth O'Reilly
“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.” Gordon Brown
“Her aim is to communicate.” Eliana Tomkins
“Love is an extremity, rivalled only by death” Kate Kellaway
“Cliché is overturned.” Xan Brooks
[about Duffy] "a self-confessed atheist" Carol Ann Duffy
‘Rapture is Duffy’s most intimate avowal of same-sex desire’ Sarah Ditum
"[...]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.” John Stammers
“Pain has more character than the person who has inflicted it.” Kate Kellaway
“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.” Frances Leviston
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