Rapture

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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] The idea that the time lovers spend together should not be spent on objects such as flowers, highlights how the emotion of love can transcend both time and the material world.

Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into something extraordinary. 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". They further go on to explain the strong emotions that love makes them feel. The image of a tiger, ready to kill is particularly striking. The narrator uses powerful words to convey a dark undertone to the poem. In this third line you can see the words “kill”, “flame” and “fierce” none of these would be readily associated with love, but have a stronger association with lust and desire. The stanza is rounded off by the narrator talking about how their loved one entered their life. How they strolled in. This, at least for me, created an image of somebody with nonchalance and arrogance. Duffy personifies love in these lines. Why do you think she does this? ‘Hour’ by Carol Ann Duffy: tone and imageryFrom lines ten to twelve, time remains a present theme alongside allusions to nature, bringing traditional romantic imagery to the forefront of the poem. Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World's Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Bees (2011), winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize; The Christmas Truce (2011), Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem (2012), illustrated by Stuart Kolakovic; Dorothy Wordsworth's Christmas Birthday (2014) and Sincerity (2018). Her children's poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009). In 2012, to mark the Diamond Jubilee, she compiled Jubilee Lines, 60 poems from 60 poets each covering one year of the Queen's reign. In the same year, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize.

Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep u s going and brings us closer to sustainability. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Rumpus must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Bird’s song is a classic piece of symbolism. In fact, it is so classic it could almost be considered a cliché. Duffy of course would know this and I think she uses it here with just a pinch of irony. Perhaps then the birds are not symbolic at all and the narrator is just taking in the scenery! Either way, this is a nice nod to romantic poetry drawing on nature to evoke certain emotions, in this case, love. Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet. In 1983, Duffy won the National Poetry Competition and in 2009 she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, becoming the first woman to receive the honour since its creation in 1616. Her collection Standing Female Nude (1985) established her as a key figure in poetry. Time is a key theme in the poem, as Duffy highlights how love allows two people to escape temporal boundaries. The poem itself explores a single hour spent between the narrator and their lover. Whether they spend seconds, hours, or years with each other, they are able to make the most of a moment in time, thereby transcending its boundaries. Romantic love 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?”The effortless virtuosity, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired contemporary poet.

If sexual desire were anything but insatiable, it would be something else. If experience couldn’t let language in, there’d be no poem, only rain. From “Bridgewater Hall”: She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess's Blankets (2009). Can you think of any traditional romantic poetry which uses natural imagery? For instance, Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18'.Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire. As a student in Liverpool she wrote poems and plays, became involved with "the scene" and Adrian Henry. With the collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she established her name. Three other important collections followed: Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread poetry award and the Forward prize. 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. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. She was made a CBE in 2001. Here is where the poem almost turns on its head. It is interesting that Duffy chose to make this transformation midway through a couplet. I wonder if this is deliberate and contains a sort of symbolism. Perhaps her way of saying that love can act at any time. Once again nature is used but here it seems to have far more positive connotations. For example, though their passion is lit with a ‘flame, like talent’ however this passion is ‘under your skin,’ which implies that their love between them was hidden. The tombstone becomes significant to this point as well as it mentions ‘who’ll guess’ the meaning behind the ‘scars of your dates’, never knowing the love they were a part of. 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.

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; 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. The poem continues, focusing purely on how love is able to oppose time between lines five and ten, thus underpinning the importance of the theme of time in the poem, as it is present throughout. The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] Once again the sky is referenced but the change of tone changes the view of the sky. Here the sky is still described as large but there are suggestions of it being a network joining places together. Perhaps a metaphor for how the narrator is now joined with their lover? the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. "The Love Poem’ is part of Duffy’s 2005 poetry collection Rapture, which contains a range of poems written in different forms and styles, following the story of a love affair. Rapture is a modern-day sonnet sequence. However, instead of being made up of sonnets, the collection consists of various poems of different forms, styles, and structures. The word ‘ elegy’ refers to a poem, which can be read in full here, of serious reflection, or more importantly a lament for the dead. In this case, the elegy is for Duffy’s lover that was lost to death, and her reactions and reflections on this. To begin, the bones are described as ‘brittle’, as though her lover was fragile, even precious to her, although fragile things are easily broken. Duffy then describes how beautiful the fingers are in their ‘little rings’, which could be a reference to a couple of things. The subject of her latest work [Rapture] is the specifics of love, not the specifics of the lovers. Its inhabitants could I offer no resistance. I surrender to extravagant poetry and the stormy powers of love and sex, and leap into the element of which we are composed, and use every muscle in our souls to stay afloat within. From “River”: Throughout the poem, there are a number of words that reference the physical body. These include “flesh,”“bones”“fingers,”“skull” and “blood.” While Duffy’s speaker might be romanticizing the physical parts of her relationship, she accepts what death will bring. She understands fully that every physical piece of her lover’s body, and her own body, will eventually be reduced to “brittle things.”