Rapture

Rapture is a single love affair told in one long sequence of poems, from the first unbidden thought of the beloved to the last cold survey of what is left, and it is Carol Ann Duffy's most exposed book, the dramatic monologuist of The World's Wife setting aside the masks to write in what reads as her own voice. The sequence moves through the whole liturgy of a love, text messages and train journeys, rivers and moons, ecstatic possession, the first lie, jealousy, and the long instrumented ending, and Duffy runs it deliberately through the oldest machinery in the language, the sonnet shapes, the song forms, the borrowed sacred vocabulary her Catholic childhood left her, so that a twenty first century affair keeps flashing into the timeless tense of the love poets she is answering. The title is exact: rapture as bliss and rapture as seizure, being carried away in both the lovers' and the theologians' sense, and the book's argument, made by structure rather than statement, is that love is the one experience left that ordinary secular people still undergo religiously. The craft is everywhere but never obstructs; Duffy's gift, the reason she reaches readers most poets cannot, is for the plain phrase set exactly where it becomes incantation. Rapture won the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize, and four years later Duffy became Poet Laureate, the first woman in the office's history; the collection now sits on school syllabuses, which means the book of an adult affair is studied by teenagers, who reportedly understand it perfectly.