Fact was in black and white;
fiction was colour.
Inside a dragon, a jewel.
Abracadabra.
A magic carpet took flight,
bearing a girl.
The hand of a Queen shut tight
over a pearl.
from Scheherazade

This is my favourite of her collections so far, with poems about nature (including several about bees), war, mythology and storytelling. I can't choose a favourite poem from this collection as there were so many I enjoyed, including Scheherazade, Last Post, Big Ask and The Human Bee. ( )

At first I was disappointed in this collection. The constant alliteration seemed contrived and the poems did reach me emotionally. But as I read deeper into the book and reread certain poems and the more personal the poems became and the more familiar I became with the repetitions and alliterative style the more I enjoyed the book. And now I'm sad to see it end.

I have heard of Carol Ann Duffy, as Poet Laureate she is probably the highest profile poet in the UK at the moment. But until now have never read a single poem of hers, so was looking forward to this.

The Bees is not a collection of poems just about the small insect, but the bee features in some of the poems or merely brushes by the poem. Her subjects are diverse in this collection, from the First World war to Oxfam and as diverse as the hive to snow, with several about the bees.

One thing that impresses me about Duffy is her mastery of the English language. With startling brevity she is able to reach out to your soul and grasp it very firmly and carry you along by the emotion of the prose. Very good, will be looking for more of her collections.
( )

Although I didn't think this was up to the standard of Mean Time as a whole, there were a few in here that I really loved; namely - Virgil's Bees, Rings, Spell, Winter's Tale, A Goldfish, and Gesture. ( )

I am a big fan of Duffy’s poetry; in fact, I have several collections of her work, and recently picked up a very thick compendium of her work. However, that did not stop me from picking up this adorable reprint of an earlier volume. What you can’t see in the image above, is the lovely matte gold background and little metallic gold bits in the flowers (it would make a nice gift for someone, hint, hint).

Duffy is the UK’s current poet laureate, appointed in 2009 (the first woman to hold the position). I love her poetry. LOVE. Her poetry is not pretentious, it’s accessible, often musical, moving and sometimes just plain fun. The overarching theme or symbol of this collection is the bee, precious and endangered, and there are many poems here about bees, but there are other poems that buzz around the same ideas: the precious and endangered. Here’s a short bee poem, the first of the collection:

BEES

Here are my bees,
brazen, blurs on paper
besotted; buzzwords, dancing
their flawless, airy maps.

Been deep, my poet bees,
in the parts of flowers,
in daffodil, thistle, rose, even
the golden lotus; so glide,
gilded, glad, golden, thus—

wise — and know of us:
how your scent pervades
my shadowed, busy heart
and honey is art.

————————
And here is one of my favorite poems from the collection:

THE WOMAN IN THE MOON

Darlings, I write to you from the moon
where I hide behind famous light.
How could you think it ever a man up here?
A cow jumped over. The dish ran away with

the spoon. What reached me were your joys, griefs,
here’s-the-craic, losses, longings, you lives
brief, mine long, a talented loneliness. I must have
a thousand names for the earth, my blue vocation.

Round I go, the moon a diet of light, sliver of peat,
wedge of lemon, slice of melon, half an orange,
silver onion; your human sound falling through space,
childbirth’s song, the lover’s song, the song of death.

Devoted as words to things, I gaze, gawp, deserts
where forests were, sick seas. When night comes,
I see you gaping back as through you hear my Darlings,
what have you done, what have you done to the world? ( )