I'm not sure how I feel about this poetry collection. Part of the issue might be that I listened to it as an audiobook, something I don't usually do for poetry. Whilst I believe that listening to a poet speak their words aloud in the manner they intended is the most powerful way to consume poetry, listening to these one after the other while I tried to tackle some jobs wasn't the best thing to do.

This is a poetry collection about love. It's about engulfing passion, heartwrenching loss, and all the feelings that follow. I can see it being a collection that would stay with someone forever if they were in the throes of heartbreak. Again, another avenue to suggest that these poems would have hit me harder (or more deeply) at a different point in my life. This said, each poem is brimming with emotion, which pours out as you read, honest and raw. It would be impossible to read them and not be hit with the deep intimacy of Carol Ann Duffy's words.

As it stands, I found the hour I listened to these poems a depressing one. The imagery is bleak, and the collection focuses on the death of love. Those great loves lost.

Unfortunately, saying all this, it's neither the passion nor the imagery that I think of when I consider these poems. They're just rather underwhelming. Quite samey, with only one note being clanged throughout a piece which should have been a symphony. Yes, there's some beautiful imagery, and she appeals to anyone who's ever lost someone, but it often feels like there's no substance beyond a pretty word. The only way I can describe it is that the writing felt in line with the 'how to write a poem' formula we were taught in school. Nothing screamed this is something special beyond shared raw feeling.

Even the repetition of certain words (eg, something like loss, loss, loss rather than the word being repeated spread throughout the poem) is a little grating. It happened frequently enough that it screamed high school poetry even more. This alone threw me out of the moment the poems were trying to evoke.