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Book Reviews: 10. Liz Lochhead on The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy

How has the author used language and stylistic devices in order to achieve their purpose?

In Rapture in 2005, Carol Ann Duffy wrote a fevered volume-length hymn to

the "glamorous hell" of a love affair. Then, after the death of her mother in that
same year, she could, she said, for the longest while write no poems except
those for children.
She's back now, with a collection that is wonderfully varied for someone
who's had, in the past, a bit of a penchant for the book with a theme. Here's a
mixter maxter of every kind of Duffy poem: angry, political, elegiac – elegiac
about every endangered or disappearing thing in the natural world or the
individual psyche – witty, nakedly honest, accessible, mysterious. Here are
the willed, the skilled, the passionate ecological pleas and exhortations, the
other voices – though less frequent than before – the lists and litanies, and,
above all, the lovely lyrics of longing and loneliness and sorrow laced with
ephemeral moments of almost-acceptance, lightness and grace.
In The Bees she sings a love song to the lyric muse. A true votaress, she
here vows fidelity to the art of Virgil and Sappho, to the purity of her vocation:
to sing "childbirth's song, the lover's song, the song of death".

The examples of the latter will sting you to tears. The elegies for that much-
missed mother are the most moving poems in the whole book. "Cold" will stop
your own heart for a moment. While in the briefly consoling fiction of
"Premonitions" time is going backwards, nevertheless Duffy is clear-eyed about the ordinary,
universal, mundane things: "... the slow weeks removing the wheelchair, the drugs, / the oxygen mask
and tank, the commode, / the appointment cards".

Again and again, in songs of renunciation and loss ("Ballynahinch", "New

Vows" and "Valentine's", with its bitter brio) we find that the – implicit – answer
to "what will you do now / with the gift of your left life?" is: go on, sing it.
"Sung", a perfect wee lyric take on Burns's “Mary Morison” (even the name on
the overgrown gravestone is turned into a Sappho-like fragment here), says,
in its last couplet, that the song's the thing that will survive: "– a skull for a
bonnie head / – and love a simile, a rose, red, red".
Other notes are struck, good fun stuff. At the end of the deadpan and surreal
"The Human Bee" it's great to get the rock'n'roll riff of "... I'd known love / and
I'd saved some money / but I could not fly and I made no honey". Try saying
that aloud without going all Buddy Holly.

Duffy is brazen enough to write words such as besotted, smitten (several

times), enchantment, legend, shadow, soul, garlanded and (again and again)
moon, and to bring it all off brilliantly. To float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. A
word of warning, though: don't guzzle all these poems at once or they'll cloy.

Sip and dip. Poetry, like honey, is the product of toil and craft but, after the
willed alchemy, still has to slip down easy. And when it comes to
"Cockermouth and Workington", with its second stanza "Fouled fortune
followed, / but families filed into the fold / for a fire flared", the "???" pencilled
in my margin flags up the way that that overworked alliteration stuck in my
craw. In "Rings", a too-forced list includes "the ring of an owl's hoot as we
headed home in the dark" (my italics). Eh? Can't hear that, sorry.
But that sojourn with children's poetry has done her no harm. It's liberated her
– who was already, God knows, so bold and free – and given her the nerve to
go for the pursuit of pure pleasure in language: sounds, rhymes and half-
rhymes, clever consonances and assonances, sheer love of words, the
simple saying of them, the surprise of hearing them new again. These poems
are often like nursery rhymes for grownups. In "Scheherazade": "Dumb was
as good as dead; / better to utter". "Abracadabra" actually gets back the old
magic of your first childhood encounter with it.
As always, she is big on buzzwords; the cliché deftly, definitively subverted.
So here we get "Big Ask", "The Shirt", "Politics" and "The Female Husband",
full of the old Duffy breenge and swagger before its quiet (beekeeping) end.
In this collection – from the poet who's always lived so defiantly in the real
here-and-now world of "feedback, static, gibberish", of extraordinary rendition
and David Beckham – are Achilles, Echo, Leda and ("give him strength")
Atlas, as well as such old English folk archetypes as John Barleycorn and the
white horses of Wiltshire. Indeed, Englishness is satisfyingly celebrated here,
albeit elegiacally: the counties, the "masterpiece elms". There's an icy new
take on Chaucer's “Parlement of Foules” wherein all the named birds of the
air sing their songs of devastation.
Duffy is a popular poet, with the emphasis firmly on the poetry, not the
popularity. She has us listen in to the music of the quotidian, develops our
litmus for lies. Even “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE”, a piece of old-style Duffy
ventriloquism in the voice of the cloth-eared and irony-deficient English
teacher whose objection to another Duffy monologue had it banned from the
curriculum for glorifying violence, takes flight and asks the examinee to do the
impossible, and "explain how poetry / pursues the human like the smitten
moon / above the weeping, laughing earth".

Liz Lochhead. The Guardian. 4 November 2011