Rapture

Rapture, 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 from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations—infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancor, separation and grief—as simply redemptive or destructive. Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity. Yet in showing us that a song can be made o…