Rapture

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In the title poem she speaks of "this chain of words"; in "Give" the lover listens to "the shadowy story I told"; in "Art" love is left only in "the chiselled, chilling marble of our kiss; / locked into soundless stone, our promises, / or fizzled into poems . The end of the line is enjambment and this helps the pace of the poem, although it is an enjambment line it does not dismiss the rhyming pattern. The poem presents itself in one single stanza but is effectively a sonnet as it contains fourteen lines. Her work is read and enjoyed equally by critics, academics and lay readers, and it features regularly on both university syllabuses and school syllabuses.

She gives us insight into such disturbed minds, and into the society that has let them down, without in any way condoning their wrongdoings: ‘Today I am going to kill something. At the close of Rapture, Duffy’s speaker can only mourn this, powerlessly watching their once-beloved river “flowing always somewhere else, even its name, / change, change” (‘Unloving’). But before forming any judgment of them, I found myself developing a hostility to the love object: the casualness, the 'strolling' into the life - even that lucky laugh.Carol Ann Duffy is a prominent Scottish poet who is still studied in schools and universities today. Carol Ann Duffy knows the power of a repeated trio of words - like Larkin's 'Begin afresh, afresh, afresh' (from 'The Trees') or Shakespeare's 'Never, never, never' in King Lear. It is the most powerful piece of work that she has produced, and one of the most important collections of love poetry of the twenty-first century: a first-person negotiation of a riverside falling-in-love competing with a darker desire to possess, which is sometimes satisfied but never satiated. The final poem, 'The Thames, London 2012', is Duffy's own: 'A Queen sails now into the sun, / flotilla a thousand proud […]. Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time.

Rapture was first published in 2005 in the UK by Picador, and in 2013 in the US, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Carol Ann Duffy: the legacy of the Laureateship, at the British Academy, London, 5-6 September 2019, will celebrate Duffy’s ten years as Poet Laureate in the wider context of forty-five years of literary work. Rhyme, in our supremely mongrel uninflected language, which draws its vowel sounds from so many different sources, is one of the most significant ways in which words as well as people partner each other to create relationships that are more than the sum of their parts. For someone who has made a comparatively quiet career, away from the public eye and the literary celebrity round, she has a loyal following and a high profile. Elegy’by Carol Ann Duffy is a sixteen line poem that is separated into two sets of eight lines or octaves.

The combination of tenderness and toughness, humour and lyricism, unconventional attitudes and conventional forms, has won her a very wide audience of readers and listeners. The speaker reflects on how quickly time passes and how things that once seemed permanent are now gone. Anthologies edited by Carol Ann Duffy include Out of Fashion (2004), in which she creates a vital dialogue between classic and contemporary poets over the two arts of poetry and fashion; Answering Back (2007); and To The Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems (2009). Anvil Poetry Press became her publisher for Standing Female Nude in 1985; Selling Manhattan (1987) brought her the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Other Country (1990) gained a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.