The Bees

`Swooningly glorious' The Times

`Indisputably her best volume' Sunday Times

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 ...