Only the scenery endures: stars, moon, roses, graves [...] This is an elemental love ­ it could belong to any time were An Unseen’, published in Duffy’s Laureate Poems collection Ritual Lighting, was commissioned as a poetic reaction to Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’. But it also strikes a chord with readers of Rapture, envisioning “all future / past” as the speaker asks, “Has forever been then?” and is told, “Yes, / forever has been.” It seems only right that the real answer to ‘now what?’ comes to us not from the living but from the dead. In ‘Snow’ (from her 2011 collection The Bees), the icy flakes scattered by the ghosts that walk beside us offer space and silence, and the possibility of healing and redirection. The dead also offer a different question: “Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?” Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all those competing stories she delighted in telling have dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story of all, that of the human love affair.” These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms." An extended rhapsody on a love affair, ushering the reader from first spark to full flame to final, messy

As we celebrate Carol Ann Duffy’s decade as Poet Laureate, Dr Mari Hughes-Edwards offers a response to the themes of love and loss in her work What Will You Do Now with the Gift of Your Life? by Stephen Raw.

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In Duffy’s poem the love she describes is fluctuating, romantic but also painful. Although it ultimately relates to a relationship on earth the religious hints are clearly present. a b Duffy, Carol Ann (2005). Rapture: poems. Recorded Books, Inc. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p.6. ISBN 9781466895867. OCLC 966079995. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Rapture is a collection of poetry written by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It marks her 37th work of poetry and has been described as "intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works" by the British Council. [1] Rapture was first published in 2005 in the UK by Picador, and in 2013 in the US, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. [2] This is the third poem in Duffy’s collection entltled Rapture. Of the fifty-two poems eighteen are sonnets. The sonnet template is favoured by poets for serious subjects, including love. Duffy traces the progress of a love affair, with all its fluctuations, joys and heartache.

The subject of her latest work [Rapture] is the specifics of love, not the specifics of the lovers. Its inhabitants could The word “Rapture” originally referred to the state of being, at the time of death, when a soul reached heaven and eternity in the presence of God. This ultimately came to mean extreme pleasure, earthly as well as religious.

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If a poem endures, the life is between the reader and the poem. The poet should not be in the way.' Duffy is operating on a different plane, ahistorical, archetypal, where ‘moon’ and ‘rose’ and ‘kiss’ come clear of the abuses of tradition to be restored to the poet’s lexicon, as the things of the world are restored to the lover.” She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated