The Bees

Winner of the 2011 Costa Poetry Award by UK Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy."Beautiful and moving poetry for the real world." -Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian"Indisputably her best volume." -Sunday TimesIn The Bees, Duffy uses her full poetic range: love poems, drinking songs, poems of political anger, and elegies for beloved friends, and - most movingly - the poet's own mother.Woven throughout the book is its presiding spirit: the bee. Sometimes the bee is Duffy's subject, sometimes straying into the poem, or hovering 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.At once intimate and public, The Bees is a work of great power from one of the UK's most cherished poets.