#290:  AT THE SILVER RIVER’S EDGE.  In her book Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy gives us a moving and finely observed account of a love affair, from start—”Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head”—to finish (the last verse is called “Over.”)  It’s not a novel-in-verse: there are no background shots, no addresses, no names of restaurants. The whole is rendered instead in emotional detail: the startlement of intense pleasure, the sudden alertness to color and weather, the serrations of unexpected arguments and disagreements, the wary moves of rapprochement.  This is Carol Ann Duffy, so the verse is rapid, richly blooming in metaphor, with those terse rhymes often arriving just a few beats ahead of schedule, and often, yes, rapturous:

Then, like a sudden, easy birth, grace—

rendered as light to the softening earth,

the moon stepping slowly backwards

out of the morning sky, reward

for the dark hours we took to arrive and kneel

at the silver river’s edge near the heron priest,

anointed, given—what we would wish ourselves.

       Duffy makes a particularly canny decision: as the affair moves towards its end, she avoids entirely the sources of rift, the reasons for arguing, but accepts them as—inevitable, perhaps? There are no sour moments of he-said-she-said, no casting of blame, just a recognition that what takes flight must come back to earth.  For this reason and others, Rapture is a book whose main and memorable mood is truly romantic, lacking in bitters, with some sense of the breath caught and held in joy, written in what she calls “the syntax of love.”  “The small hours join us / face to face as we sleep and dream; / the whole of the huge night is our room.”

Rapture, by Carol Ann Duffy.  Picador, 2005.