The speaker reflects on how quickly time passes and how things that once seemed permanent are now gone. This awful truth struck reviewer Margaret Reynolds, writing in The Guardian in 2006, whose life deteriorated from a missed train stop as she read, to sleep-deprived workplace weeping, so deeply was she drawn into the terrible finality of Rapture’s ultimate question: ‘So, now what? Although time is the enemy of love, the emotion of love and the moments spent with a lover exist outside the limits of time. Duffy is both serious and humorous, often writing in a mischievous, playful style - in particular, she plays with words as she explores the way in which meaning and reality are constructed through language. It acts almost like a prompt to a speaker who is giving a speech it announces what the following stanza will be about effectively.

One is wrapped around my finger, as I crouch before “Lady Margaret”, Passiflora (passion flower) in my garden. Her work is often studied in schools in Britain, partially because her poetry is so engaging but also because she is the UK’s poet laureate. She declared that the position was worthwhile as it was ‘good to have someone who is prepared to say that poetry is part of our national life’, and in an interview in The Independent predicted that poetry would ‘become more important and take a larger part in our lives in the next century’. They are very complimentary describing their partner as a touchable dream, this is far removed from the previous descriptions. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995.These are poems that will be recognised by anyone who has ever been sexually obsessed to a self-punishing degree. This is a nice nod to the poem’s religious title and actually in itself is quite a clever collective noun for clouds.

Only gameshow hosts are braver in their use of puns, and in "Fall" she rushes headlong through at least five meanings of the word, to end with another pun in "your passionate gravity".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? We publish a Literature Newsletter when we have news and features on UK and international literature, plus opportunities for the industry to share. Carol Ann Duffy's collection of love poems reads as a single narrative: the poems are linked - hand in hand - from the beginning of an affair to its end.