The effortless virtuosity, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired contemporary poet.
Rapture, her 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 Duffy's refusal to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as either redemptive or destructive.
Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity; simultaneously direct and subtle, with poems that will find deep resonance in the experience of most readers, it is a collection that can and does speak for us all.