Every weekend, we delve into the British backlist and recommend a book for you. This week, our suggestion is former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s love-themed collection, Rapture. Even if you’re not usually into poetry, it’s worth giving this slim volume a go — it’s not too obscure, I promise. There’s even a poem about making tea.
“Carol Ann Duffy’s seventh collection is a book-length love poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart is Duffy’s refusal to simplify the contradictions and transformations of love – infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief. Instead, Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity, showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers and will, ultimately, prove that poetry can and should speak for us all.”
Buy it here in the UK, here in the US, from anywhere postage-free here, or at your local bookshop.
The Brit Lit Blog 