Bees

‘Swooningly glorious’ The Times‘Indisputably her best volume’ Sunday TimesThe Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she 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.

Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world, Wonderful . . . a poet alert to every sound and shape of language, Duffy is magnificent, grounded, heartfelt, dedicated to the notion that poetry can give us the music of life itself

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. Her collections include The World's Wife, Love Poems and Rapture. The Bees won the Costa Poetry Award.