The Bees is Carol Ann Duffys first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate, and the much-anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, poems of political anger; her celebrated Last Post (written for the last surviving soldiers to fight in the First World War) showed that powerful public poetry still has a central place in our culture. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and most movingly the poets own mother. As Duffys voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffys subject, sometimes it strays into the poem, or hovers at its edge and the reader soon begins to anticipate its appearance. In the end, Duffys point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary for us to protect. The Bees is a work of great ecological and spiritual power, and Duffys clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as secular prayer, as the means by which we remind ourselves what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise. |