Rapture

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The main themes of Rapture are love, loss, loneliness, gender issues, and death. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] CAROL: Yeah, I don’t really know . . . I suppose I don’t think of being a poet in terms of having a career. So for me, every new piece of work or new poem I start is what’s exciting and interesting about being, um, a poet and . . . one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in that writing life is writing poetry for children, which I didn’t do until my daughter was born, because I only wrote for adults. She’s twenty-three now, and when she was around two or three, I suddenly found that I wanted to write poems to share with her, for her, so that was the most surprisingly and lovely thing that happened to me as a poet, writing for children.

Interview with Carol Ann Duffy - The Lincoln Review Interview with Carol Ann Duffy - The Lincoln Review

CAROL: Yes, I think it’s very important to support young writers in a variety of different ways, either with workshops or teaching or poetry readings, um, festivals, competitions; so I’ve been involved in all of that because I think it’s, um, hugely enriching to pledge the arts: literature, music, theatre, visual arts—all of them in the centre of young people's lives.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ POEM ANALYSIS FROM RAPTURE COLLECTION (Carol Ann Duffy) - Document in A Level and IB English Literature

Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian The end of the affair | Carol Ann Duffy | The Guardian

RORY: So the consequences are very much a secondary part then of what you want to write? You write something, you’re like ‘okay, this expresses what I believe, I’m going to put this out into the world,’ what the consequences are of that, what people interpret that as, that’s not what I’m thinking of, it's more about what I want to write, rather than what effect it could have.

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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. CAROL: So, it was a story I was very familiar with and I was playing around with retelling to see if I could do something fresh with it— 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.

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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?” After 350 years of male dominance, the new royal poet is a Glaswegian lesbian […] Ten years ago she was passed over, but now her time has come. CAROL: I’m very fond of something Picasso said . . . in his case painting, but I’ve taken it on board as a writer which is “Inspiration will come, but it must find you working.” And I find that really really useful. CAROL: (Long pause) Well again, it’s interesting when people ask you questions because the question comes from the way the questioner thinks.MILLY: So like, the idea of subverting things and, like, looking at something that has already been written. CAROL: You write with your five senses, you write with your memory, your points of view, your language, and all that comes to bear on the poems one writes, but I wouldn’t think I’ve ever written a poem for a reason beyond writing a poem, so I don’t think of myself at all as an activist although, um, I’m in favour of activism but I think it’s a different talent. RORY: What kind of terms do you think in then? What’s the most important thing when you’re writing?

RAPTURE COLLECTION (Carol Ann Duffy) POEM ANALYSIS FROM RAPTURE COLLECTION (Carol Ann Duffy)

RORY: It seems to me that in your career, you’ve done everything that you could ever hope to do with poetry. I mean you’ve taught it at degree level, you’ve published collections, what would you say would be the highlight of your career so far?

CAROL: Well, I don’t think . . . that it’s important that everyone writes. I think it’s important that everyone reads from a young age and then some of those readers will want to become writers. I think that it’s an enriching and civilising and very human part of life to be able to sing, to be able to paint, to play an instrument, to have a go at writing a poem, to read, to go to the theatre, and we’re very much in danger of those things in education withering on the vine or not being properly invested in. I’m not kind of saying that everyone has to write and be a poet, but I am saying that everyone should read poetry and hear poetry and have it as part of lives and some of those will want to grow up and be writers. CAROL: So, you’ve got an audience there who might not have read the poem and you’ve also in a sense having to keep their attention or entertain them, you might introduce the poem by saying ‘I enjoy subversing this— Some of Duffy's phrases will not let you be. Living our ordinary lives without passion, we are "queuing for death"; speaking ordinary phrases without telling the whole truth means that "words, / are the cauls of the unsaid". The grammar and the thematic structures of Duffy's poems can seem compacted, as in the opening line of "Rapture": "Thought of by you all day, I think of you." But if you sometimes have to work hard to unknot Duffy's sense, the unravelling rewards.