Frances Leviston reviews: Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy

Duffy's seventh collection is something of a departure for the poet regularly hailed as Britain's ‘best-loved’. Gone is the sharp sense of history, the wry snap of modern life, the distinct yet palatable feminism; all those competing stories she delighted in telling have dissolved, it seems, in the single most important story of all, that of the human love affair. These poems are intent as an obsessed lover upon their subject, returning to the same sacred images, waxing and waning through all the stages of infatuation from the disbelieving first flush of the opening poem, ‘You’, to ‘the death of love’ in the closing poem, ‘Over’. Stand Rapture against some of the most strenuously contemporary of her peers – John Stammers, say – and it becomes even clearer that Duffy is operating on a different plane, ahistorical, archetypal, where ‘moon’ and ‘rose’ and ‘kiss’ come clear of the abuses of tradition to be restored to the poet’s lexicon, as the things of the world are restored to the lover.

The book’s cherry-red boards, inlaid with a gilt depiction of the poems’ key motifs, look at first glance like a volume of Hans Christian Andersen (very Christmassy, some cynics might say), and indeed we find plenty of folktale material inside: the forest as locus amoenus, talismans such as ‘the gold weight of your head / on my numb arm’ (‘Treasure’), and repeating structures such as the tasks set by the beloved in ‘Give’: ‘Give me the river, / you asked the next night, then I’ll love you forever.’  But these are not the post-modern reworkings of The World’s Wife; nothing so self-conscious. They are simply the default, universal forms of the oldest story there is.

The fluent sonnet ‘Hour’ explores this peculiarly elastic sense of time: ‘For thousands of seconds we kiss’. It’s not so long, objectively, but its expression, those ‘thousands’, shows the poet at work, as love is, eking out what’s most precious, ‘backhanding the night’. Elsewhere ‘Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are’ (New Year’), and in ‘Night Marriage’ it is both ‘the long hours / I spend in your dreams’ and the ‘small hours’ that ‘join us, / face to face as we sleep and dream’.

A few pointed references seem to threaten this dreamy timelessness. ‘Text’, for example, opens, ‘I tend the mobile now / like an injured bird’ – it seems the phone has become so central to the conduction of love affairs that to leave it out would be unthinkable. Instead the simile throws the focus on to the bird, absorbing the element of modern technology into a natural order; and in ‘Quickdraw’ the two phones are ‘like guns’ in a smart, though not especially subtle, extended Western conceit.

There is a danger, in replicating love’s single-mindedness, of replicating also the boredom felt by those who do not share the rhapsodist’s feelings, and Rapture accordingly can seem to beg too much indulgence of the reader, relying on its rhythms and a sense of recognition to carry it through. The weakest poems are smoothly bland, unmemorable, like ‘Tea’, where the intimacy of the tea-making ritual is insisted upon rather than invoked. ‘Give’, as with a couple of the other more schematic pieces, suffers from a lack of the ingenuity necessary for such repetitions to work.

But, like a brilliant general with mixed troops, Duffy marshals her material so well that one can almost forget its occasional tiredness. A cliché is swiftly followed by something far more interesting, as in ‘I burned for you day and night; / got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right, / in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light’ (‘Rain’), so that the familiar phrase, by keeping better company than itself, is somehow ennobled. The rediscovery of things lost or undervalued is one of the book’s principal themes, and a nod, perhaps, to the foolhardiness of undertaking love poems in English. ‘Syntax’ declares ‘I want to call you thou’; words are rubbed at ‘till they gleamed in my palm / – I love you, I love you, I love you – / as though they were new’ (‘Finding the Words’). No Donne, then (just one of the many giants in this arena); but Rapture is nevertheles a fresh and skilful supplement to the tradition.

Rapture (Picador), 100pp

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