The Bees

Here Carol Ann Duffy uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs love poems poems of political anger; there are elegies too for beloved friends and—most movingly—the poet’s own mother. Woven and weaving through the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy’s subject sometimes it strays into the poem or hovers at its edge. In the end Duffy’s 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 at once intimate and public is a work of great power from one of our most cherished poets.