Rapture

by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy's 'Rapture' is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Romance, Queer, Fiction, Contemporary, School

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Reviews

[Lovisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

i sure love being gay and sad

[Bea · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars. Some of the poems in this collection I thought were lovely such as ‘Haworth’, ‘Art’ and ‘Ithaca’, while others just seemed too forced and didn’t seem to make much sense.

Maybe if you’ve read a lot of poetry before and like highly metaphorical writing, this one’s for you.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

an unfurling spool of poems about the infinite facets of love; favourite lines - 'falling in love is a glamorous hell' (from 'you') & 'I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea' (from 'tea')

[reread Jan 2021]

[Alexis Hall]

Falling in love
is glamorous hell, the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

Another modern cycle-- sensing a theme in what I like here.

This follows the course (or perhaps disintegration would be a better term) of a love affair - and is clearly massively, massively personal.

Which always fills me with this guilty squirm -- how would it feel being the 'you' of these poems? Literature is full of these invisible, voice-less people who are supposed to what ... be quietly proud of have Inspired Art? Become pieces of fiction for anyone to pick at? Inspiration it sometimes seems to me is a large part violation.

But nevertheless there's no denying the effectiveness of it here: love captured in both the universal sense and the particular, from the opening to close. The poems are characterised by Duffy's usual accessibility of language and a strong aural component. Traditional and overworked love poem themes (flowers, kisses, summer etc.) are re-worked into something that feels genuinely fresh.

There's some weaker poems. Tea is is kind of banal despite being on a subject that deeply appeals to me.

Hour is my favourite.

Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour,
bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich.
We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers
or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.

For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair
like treasure on the ground; the Midas light
turning your limbs to gold. Time slows, for here
we are millonaires, backhanding the night

so nothing dark will end our shining hour,
no jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit
hung from the blade of grass at your ear,
no chandelier or spotlight see you better lit

than here. Now. Time hates love, wants love poor,
but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.

[❀ annie ❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

sensual, tangible and authentic poetry from one of my favourite writers. was about time to give this one a re-read and i'm glad i did <3

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Text"

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unselfconscious collection about the joys and pains of romantic love. Duffy is unabashedly giddy, angry, and mournful in turn. These are easily digestible poems, and I would recommend these to anyone looking for an entry to reading poetry. 3.5⭐️

[Laala Kashef Alghata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Ann Duffy is a spectacular poet. She is one of the few writers where I agree with every good review. I won’t post them all, but suffice to say usually critics find different aspects of the writer to compliment or criticize, and I often agree with just one or two, if with any of them at all. With her, they’re all right.

Another thing that makes Duffy vastly different from other poets for me is this: I want to write like her. There are so many poets and writers I adore, that I would not have wanted to go through life having not read and not fallen in love with their words, but I’d never say, “This is how I want my writing to be perceived”. But with her, it is. The fluidity of her words, the ease of her metaphors that slide back into ordinary language, the preciseness of the emotions she conveys, all the while being accessible, modern and linguistically beautiful — it’s unbelievable. I never know who I want my writing to be like. In interviews I’ve been asked and I’ve always said I don’t know.

But now I definitely do. It’s not that I haven’t read her before. It’s just that I hadn’t distinguished the difference between strongly admiring and having a literary rolemodel.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems I liked others not so much. Poems about love are difficult.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and heartfelt, emotional and intelligent, sharp, messy, conflicted, beautiful.
Such a gorgeous collection from Carol Ann Duffy.

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

This collection of poems is heart wrenching and tragic. It tells of love in all its forms, the beauty, the moments when you are on the very top and feel like nothing can stop you, and the grief when it is over.

I'll take your lips,
ask, when I close my eyes, as though
in prayer, that they ripen out of the air
to be there again on mine,
or to say my name, or to smile, or to kiss
the sleep from my eyes.

It is intensely personal and intimate, and at times I felt like I was drowning in the pain of it.

Not one to read if you are feeling sad. Or maybe it's exactly what you should read. I don't know, my feelings are all over the place.

So glad I have a physical copy of this, and I’ll definitely read these again.

[Marcus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yawn

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased this as part of 2016's Oxfam Scorching Summer Reads campaign. Duffy is one of my favourite poets, and this was a collection which I hadn't yet had the pleasure to read. And a pleasure it is. Rapture is a series of interconnected poems about a single relationship, and the themes which Duffy encompasses are wide and surprising. A rich story weaves its way through.

As ever, her turns of phrase are beautiful, and I adored her use of nature imagery, and the way in which this was woven into the couple's story. The poems here almost sing. They are wonderful and hopeful; sometimes bleak; always buoyant, and utterly mesmerising.

[Ida Sagberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was planning to read a few poems before work. Ended up reading the whole book in one sitting, reading aloud some of the poems. Absolutely loved it. And was almost late to work!

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I love to say, I love love poetry. I was eager to dive into Duffy's because I'd heard so many good things about it and because I've admired an earlier volume of hers, The World's Wife, enough to read it more than once. Rapture lived up to my anticipation, rewarding me with good poetry about the high feeling of love. The volume follows the course of a love affair--presumably an experience of Duffy's--from its fresh breath of discovery to the crash characterized as death and darkness. In between is song. My favorite here is called "Answer," a simple repetitive litany of the natural elements which make up her lover. One of the most beautiful is called "The Love Poem." It contains phrases from well-known love poems of the past which help Duffy speak the rapture of her intense emotions. Duffy, though, spills her love just as well as poets of the past. Love, she says, brings life and death. It's tangled in the sheets of her ecstasy. It's framed in the window of her loss. It darts from the page to stab the reader with experience, just what we expect from good poetry like this.

[Claudia Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...so my love will be shade
where you are,
and yours,
as I turn in my sleep,
the bud of a star."

This poetry is simple and warm and honest. It is thoughtful and sweet without gooey sentimentality. It feels like a breath of fresh air on a cold night, and a warm bath after a run. Clear, candid and colorful with imagery, the feelings in these poems are tangible to any reader.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

[...]
you’re where I stand, hearing the sea, crazy
for the shore, seeing the moon ache and fret
for the earth. When morning comes, the sun, ardent,
covers the trees in gold, you walk

towards me,
out of the season, out of the light love reasons.

[Lea Dokter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though not my favourite collection of Duffy poems, Rapture is a lyrical examination of love in all its facets. I will never not be impressed by Duffy's imaginitive, surprising metaphors and strong yet subtle use of rhyme.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's the simple honesty of Rapture that makes it what it is - rather than trying to be overly deep and metaphorical Duffy just writes from the heart, and it shines because of that.

[busé]

Şairlerden daha çok sevdiğim bir şey varsa o da gay şairlerdir. Çok duygusal bir derlemeydi, Duff’ın dilini zaten çok seviyorum, bu romantik yanını görünce bir kere daha hayran oldum. Bu kadın boşuna poet laureate seçilmemiş dostlar.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hotter than hell. I burned for you day and night;/ got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right,/ in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light. "

[Jasmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

We went down, the day of the Year of the Monkey,
dim sum and dragons bound.

Your fair head
was a pearl in the mouth of the crowd. The fireworks
were as loud as love, if love were allowed
a sound.

(from Chinatown)

This collection starts off strong. Duffy is particularly impressive when portraying the breathless infatuation ('Text', 'Name', 'Haworth') and ferocity ('Rain') of desire that characterise the so-called "honeymoon phase" of a romantic relationship. There is a playful irony to many of these poems, allowing Duffy to temper their intensity by gently poking fun at the speaker's maniacal obsession with the beloved.

Unfortunately, this self-awareness is less present in the second half of the book, where the quality of the poems is more inconsistent and the repetitive imagery frequently falls flat. There are exceptions to this, and Duffy has some interesting things to say about the relationship between love and poetic creation in 'The Love Poem' and 'Art', both found towards the end of the collection. Reading these poems, I was reminded of Sharon Olds's poem 'The Easel', which has a very different take on the subject.

The significance of the natural world is crucial to Duffy's aims in this volume, and is most powerfully explored when she presents pathetic fallacy as a reflection of the human tendency to project one's needs and emotions onto the external environment. This is tragically apparent in the speaker's transition from 'Absence' to 'Unloving', during which they learn to examine nature from two opposing standpoints.

Duffy's use of form, rhythm, and rhyme is masterful, as is exemplified by the delightful 'Quickdraw'. However, I feel this commitment to rhyme and form can deter her from honesty and originality; I'm thinking in particular of the ending to 'Elegy'. Her reworking of the traditional love poem - such as with the broken sonnet 'Epiphany' and the bittersweet and knowing 'Finding the Words' - works well alongside her riffing on the words of Shakespeare, Donne, and Barrett-Browning. In fact, Duffy's use of traditional love symbolism and imagery gives her best poems an almost mythic quality, as is the case with 'Give', which is in many ways the centrepoint of this collection.

Some other favourites in this volume include 'Hour', 'Cuba', and 'Venus'.

I'd also like to add that I thoroughly enjoyed following the progress of the heron, who cropped up in many of the poems and was definitely my favourite character.

[Chahna · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars
I loved this collection! So many amazing love poems.

[Jia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember reading the first stanza of 'wintering' in The Guardian's review some time ago, at a particularly heartbroken moment in my life. It was as if Carol Ann Duffy had reached into my heart and distilled the tumult into words. This is a lovely read, the poems inside like fine pearls strung into a necklace, a movingly beautiful piece of work showcasing the breadth of human emotion; the tangle of feelings that come tied up with love. It is also, one of the most accessible collections of poetry I've come across in my limited exposure to the form.

[Miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well-written as would be expected from the Poet Laureate, slightly repetitive at times but the themes that run through the book give it the cohesion which leads the reviewers to recommend looking at it as a collection rather than taking the poems individually. The different emotions in the love affair are depicted brilliantly.

[Thesincouch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved some poems more than others - some were absolutely amazing and all in all a good poetry collection. The thing is, and this surprises me, I was a bit tired that all the poems were about romantic love, which is nothing against the book because that's what it is about, but even so I think that's why I didn't like it more.

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely. My favourite is "Art". So many of them are beautiful, though. One of my favourite lines of poetry is from "Hours": "Time hates love, wants love poor,/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw."

[Aathira Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of love poems that I adored. I haven't read many contemporary love poets and I'm glad that I discovered Duffy at the right time. You can read this one time and again and still manage to discover something new each time. Made me fall in love all over again.

[Callum McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Ann Duffy weaves words together that ooze like honey. I don't know how she manages to compose poetry that is at times both gut-punchingly beautiful and yet entirely apporoachable, but I'm so glad that she does.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

reread but by god can a reread do things to you. for example I now want to scream like a banshee!