Bees

Product Description

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffys first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate & 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 & -- most movingly -- the poets own mother. As Duffys voice rises in this collection her music intensifies & every poem patterns itself into song. Woven & 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 -- & 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 & what is most precious & necessary for us to protect. The Bees is a work of great ecological & spiritual power & 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 & concern our passion & our praise.