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Title: Rapture
Author: Carol Ann Duffy
Narrator: Carol Ann Duffy
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-13-17
Publisher: Macmillan Digital Audio
Genres: Drama & Poetry, Poetry
Publisher's Summary:
The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet.
Rapture, her seventh collection, is an audiobook-length love poem and 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 and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and 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 of 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 listeners, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all. /p>
Critic Reviews:
"Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages." (Rose Tremain)
Members Reviews:
Remarkable collection of love poems
A Scot, Carol Ann Duffy is a poet, playwright, childrenâs author, and anthology editor. Her first collection was published in 1973. Some 10 collections later, she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for âRaptureâ (2005).
âRaptureâ is a remarkable collection of love poems documenting the rise and eventual fall of a love affair. In Duffyâs case, this would have been a lesbian love affair; Duffy is not shy about her sexual orientation. (She was considered for the post laureate post in 1999 but deemed too controversial at that time.)
The poems in âRapture,â however, transcend any of the categories we might assign them. They could just as easily apply to any love affair. Reading them is an exercise in experiencing beauty and passion; Duffyâs language is often simple but it is invariably powerful.
Name
When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?
Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.
Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.
I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.
I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.
I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.
I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.
"Rapture" is a beautiful, intense collection.
A love affair
I was introduced to Carol Ann Duffy through the British Penguin edition of her "Selected Poems", which presents poems from her first five volumes of poetry. They were strong and intense, and they displayed formidable poetic skill and technique. It is fair to say that I was blown away. That led me to pick up RAPTURE, from 2005.
The overall tone is quite different. These are love poems. The volume as a whole traces the trajectory of a love affair (of unclear duration): from falling in love, to surrender of self (both physical and psychic) in the yearning for the other, to the unraveling and eventually bittersweet memories.
Most of the poems are lyrical, and once again Duffy displays impressive poetic skill and technique. There also is a wide range of style and structure. In some poems Duffy effectively repeats words or lines.