Rapture

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

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 a book-length love-poem and a moving act of personal testimony. What sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love and reads its transformations—infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation, and grief—not 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 terms of subtlety of expression. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.