Duffy is, despite the high accolade of laureateship, not the most popular contemporary poet. The English Faculty often resounds with criticism: “too feminist”, “too lesbian” and even “too school curriculum”. And it’s true: Duffy is often infuriating, mainly in her use of “Poetic Devices”. Assonating lists abound, and if there aren’t three alliterating lines per poem it’s probably by somebody else. Yet her latest collection is really rather good. Less tightly focused than Rapture, The Bees is nonetheless not a random selection. Rather this mixture of new and commissioned poems focuses around the image of the titular “bee” – bee-related paraphernalia invades poems seemingly unrelated to this theme.
According to the blurb, “Duffy’s point is clear: the bee symbolizes what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious to protect.” For Duffy the bee is life-giver, a natural carer and the incarnation of poetry itself: “here are my bees, / brazen, blurs on paper”. The most moving aspect of the collection, however, is that the bee is also the poet’s mother. As the world’s bees are mysteriously dying, it is her mother’s memory that Duffy seems most to want to save. ‘Premonitions’, the collection’s penultimate poem, is an anthem, perhaps even an answer, for the whole book. The poem, in a plot regularly used in Dr Who, has mother and daughter moving in different directions through time- “we first met when your last breath / cooled in my palm like an egg...The night before, we met again.” “If poetry could truly tell it backwards,” Duffy writes in ‘Last Post’, “then it would.”
The collection is not without flaws. Parliament – Duffy’s reworking of Chaucer’s ‘Parlement of Fowls’ – feels like a school exercise; twee and uninspiring, and this is definitely a collection for dipping rather than a straight-through read. But here are poems of such emotive power, generally the ones least bee-centric, that anyone who considers Duffy unworthy of her title is a fool.
