British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy

It’s a long and distinguished list, and includes Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Masefield, Sir John Betjeman, and Ted Hughes. Until 2009, the poets who served as British poet laureates were all men.

And then came Carol Ann Duffy.

A Scot, Duffy is a poet, playwright, children’s author, and anthology editor. Her first collection was published in 1973. Some 10 collections later, she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Rapture (2005).

Rapture is a remarkable collection of love poems documenting the rise and eventual fall of a love affair.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Travis Thrasher’s “The Remaining”

Last September, a movie about the Rapture – the “taking up” of believing Christians prior to the end times described in the Biblical book of Revelation – was released in theaters. Reception of the movie was so-so, and it seems to have disappeared rather quickly. After all of the “Left Behind” books by Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins (with Nicholas Cage in the movie), perhaps there’s nothing left to the imagination about the Rapture and its aftermath.

The movie script for “The Remaining” was “novelized,” and Travis Thrasher was the author who wrote the book, published under the same title. I normally don’t read novelizations, but I’ve read one of Thrasher’s before, “Home Run,” and he writes good stuff, even if he has to work from rather weak scripts.

The book is profoundly disturbing. Perhaps it’s meant to be. But my response to it has lingered for days after finishing it.

The story filters the Rapture through that most commonplace of events – a wedding. Six friends have come together for the wedding of two them in Wilmington, North Carolina. They’re all from the area; they’ve all gone to school together. A year before the wedding, one of them, Lauren, had a series of horrific visions and dreams about her friends dying. But the visions had faded, and this is a joyful event for the couple getting married, Dan and Skylar.

The entire book is set in roughly a 24-hour time period.

It’s during the wedding reception that the Rapture happens, except the believing Christians aren’t “taken up” bodily. They simply drop dead, and it is their souls that are taken up. Lauren is the only one of the six who dies on the spot.

Travis Thrasher

Chaos ensues. Explosions, plane crashes, trumpets sounding, fires, a ferocious hailstorm. Then comes the attacks by something – reptiles? Demons? It’s hard to see them clearly at night, but they’re attacking anything connected to faith, like church buildings, and anyone who is gaining faith as a result of the unfolding events. As events progress, the five remaining friends learn that this isn’t just happening in Wilmington but all around the world. Civilization as they’ve known it for all of their young lives had suddenly and horrifically come to an end.

Thrasher uses short chapters, and tight (and tense) writing to build the suspense and, yes, the horror. At times it’s difficult to keep reading, because it seems that all hope has been removed, and judgment is at hand. Telling the story through a wedding (taken from the movie script) somehow makes the narrative both terrible and compelling.

The effects of The Remaining still linger in the mind, though. And the heart. Thrasher has once again told a good, if horrible, story.

Top photograph: A scene from the movie by Affirm Pictures, a unit of Sony Pictures.

Chris Pennington’s “Rapture’s Rain”

Jason Stover is a high school physics teacher living with his wife Kristina and daughter Nikki in Lake Royale, North Carolina. They have a good life. Jason is even becoming interested in his wife’s faith, and has been attending a Bible study with several friends from church.

Then comes the day he walking in his yard, and the air cracks and sizzles. Jason wakes up a day later, still in the yard, and goes looking for his family. But they’ve vanished. So have most of the other members of their Bible study. So have a lot of people.

Jason does find some of his friends, and together they begin to try to understand what’s happened. People all over the world are reported missing. Some are saying the vanishings suggest the rapture in the Bible. Jason and his friend begin to map it out. It looks like it might be that, but there are still unknowns.

Law and order begin to break down. A second physical disruption happens. And Jason begins to realize the planet is losing power, and that food no longer had the nutritional value it did before. Earth is dying, and the people left are dying with it.

This is the story of Rapture’s Rain by Chris Pennington.

I usually don’t read apocalyptic literature. I never read any of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. But I read Rapture’s Rain, and I kept reading through workouts on the elliptical and treadmill at the gym, while waiting for my computer to power up, and at night before I went to bed. I read it almost straight through. It’s a riveting story.

But more than that, it is also (surprisingly) realistic. Instead of describing the “macro” viewpoint of what’s happening in the world, Pennington focuses on the up close and personal, the “micro” view of what happens to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And questions of faith – and what happens to faith – abound.

Thoroughly engaging, Rapture’s Rain is also, simply a good story.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.