A courier knocked at my door just after midday and presented me with the slim parcel that revealed itself as Carol Ann Duffy’s brand new collection-The Bees. Hurrah for ebay as Amazon would have made me wait until October.
Its a very full collection with a few superb poems already published to acclaim including Duffy’s ‘Last Post’ and her marvellous, moving poem about her mother, ‘Premonitions’.
Carol Ann Duffy is daring enough to experiment with voices, with time travelling, with resurrecting things painfully and messily lost. Carol Ann Duffy keeps asking how do ‘I’ as a poet, speak about emotional truth in a world dedicated to obfuscation and lies.
Her ‘bee’ words go deeply, go lightly through the realms of recollected, reanimated ‘lost’places and emotions, remapping their resonances and power. Carol Ann Duffy repeatedly explores self responsibility and the raw, yet cathartic relief of admission:
‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.’
She also likes dressing up as a pirate but more of that escapade of a poem later!
Janet Lewison