Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann's new collection her first since Rapture and since she was made Poet Laureate. 'Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time' Guardian 'Part of Duffy's talent besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety is her ventriloquism ...From verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets that is, she makes it look easy' Observer 'Nobody is ever going to need to be told how to enjoy a Carol Ann Duffy poem' Evening Standard 'Carol Ann Duffy is a poet who covers the stormy waterfront of desire, devotion and despair ...As always, she manages the rare feat of building on traditions, forebears, allusions while stirring and shaking the emotions with muscular, unpretentious force' Independent 'You can't classify Carol Ann as a love poet or a comic poet or a political poet because she is all these things and so much more' Sunday Times.

The Bees

weli 

The 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

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