Output details

The Bees

The Bees is Duffy’s Costa Award winning (2011) follow-up to Rapture, which won the TS Eliot Prize. It is her first collection since her appointment as Poet Laureate, and represents an attempt to fuse public (eg, her elegy for the last surviving WWI soldier) and private (eg her elegy to her own mother) registers in the same book. The imagery of bees is woven through these poems, as a presiding spirit and a symbol of grace. But the bee poems are elegiac too, shot through with a sense of the impending extinction of the honey-bee, thus making strong connections with contemporary eco-criticism. These poems are haunted by the echoes of other poets - notably Sylvia Plath in her bee poems, revisited by Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters. It brings to a culmination Duffy’s expression of the poem as a secular prayer or litany, first expressed in her much-anthologised ‘Prayer’ from Mean Time (1994). Here also, exemplified by a poem such as ‘Big Ask’ is Duffy as political (even polemical) poet, a rare trait in a Poet Laureate, and one recently recognised by the award of the Pen/Pinter Prize. Duffy’s deep reading and reinterpretation of classical myth (Sisyphus, Leda) is a key research element behind these poems. And since this is perhaps the most concerned with ‘what it means to be British’ (a central question for any Laureate) of all Duffy’s collections, these poems are built on deep reading and research into the work of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas (in particular their fusion of the violent and the pastoral), and William Wordsworth’s transformative descriptions of the English landscape. Rooted in the English lyric tradition, alive to ecological and political concerns, blending public and private voices, The Bees is the most impressive and complete collection from a serving Laureate for decades.

Reviewing The Bees in the Sunday Times Sean O’Brien writes that being Poet Laureate often damages a poet’s work through compromise necessitated by ceremony and obligation. Yet he declares Duffy’s first Laureate collection ‘arguably her most interesting book since Mean Time (1993)’. Duffy’s Laureateship, which involves national and international travel, public appearances, broadcasting, editing and commissions, manifests per se as a primary source for this book. To inhabit such a high-profile office and simultaneously create an authentic official register for Laureate poems is onerous and difficult, making The Bees a far more complex undertaking than any of her previous books.