Bees: Poems - Softcover

Duffy, Carol Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865478082 ISBN 13: 9780865478084

Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl, 2014

Synopsis

A winner of the Costa Book Award, "beautiful and moving poetry for the real world" (The Guardian)

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as British 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, and poems of political anger. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends and--most movingly--for the poet's mother. As Duffy's voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song.
Woven into 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--and the reader soon begins to anticipate its appearance. 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 is Duffy's clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as "secular prayer," as the means by which we remind ourselves of what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.

About this title

Review:

"Wonderfully varied . . . [Some poems] will sting you to tears. The elegies for [her] much-missed mother are the most moving poems in the whole book. 'Cold' will stop your own heart for a moment. Duffy is brazen enough to write words such as 'besotted, ' 'smitten' . . . and to bring it all off brilliantly." --The Guardian

Book Description:

A critically accalimed collection from the Poet Laureate

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0865478082
• ISBN 13: 9780865478084
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96