The effortless virtuosity directness drama & humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired & best-loved contemporary poet Rapture her seventh collection is a book-length love-poem & a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love & read its transformations
- infatuation longing passion commitment rancour separation & grief
- as simply redemptive or destructive Rapture is a map of real love in all its churning complexity Yet in showing us that a song can be made from even the most painful episodes in our lives Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers & nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all