The Bees

Carol Ann Duffy, a prolific poet and playwright known for her dramatic flair, long ago ascended from author to public personality. She won the 2005 TS Eliot Prize for Rapture and in 2009 was named the UK’s first female poet laureate, a job where the duties have included penning a Homeric ode to David Beckham’s Achilles tendon and weighing in on Twitter as a literary form. This role suits Duffy, who cut her teeth on the dramatic monologue and has always held a Shakespearean belief that ordinary speech and “unpoetic” characters can be a fertile source of song. So it’s a surprising twist that her latest collection is influenced most noticeably by Yeats, that “60-year-old smiling public man” distracted from his duties, but still provoked to verse, by private griefs and by the subject of poetry itself.

The bees of Duffy’s title – which allude to Virgil’s bees, Yeats’ “bee-loud glade”, and Ariel’s song in The Tempest – recur throughout the book, announcing the poet’s devotion to her vocation and her mastery of it. “Here are my bees,/ brazen, blurs on paper,/ besotted; buzzwords, dancing/ their flawless airy maps,” the title poem begins. Good-natured boastfulness has always been part of her charm and has enabled projects such as The World’s Wife, which wittily retold western literary history through the wives of famous male characters.

Here, however, gusto strains against sorrow, both general (brought on by current political and environmental disasters) and particular (a mother’s death, a romantic rift), which weighs in from the outside. The tension created by these darker tones tests Duffy’s confidence and makes her moments of levity more poignant, delivering poems that are sparer, purer and often more musical than ever before.

“Your last word was water,” she writes to her mother. “Nights since I’ve cried, but gone/ to my own child’s side with a drink, watched/ her gulp it down then sleep. Water./ What a mother brings/ through darkness still/ to her parched daughter.” Such serious simplicity reminds one of “Prayer”, Duffy’s breathtaking incantation of loss from Mean Time (1993), probably the finest single poem in her oeuvre. “Dorothy Wordsworth is Dead” evokes another woman at the edge of history, though feminist ideology seems beside the point in this portrait of a passionate eccentric who “feared cows” and “found in the russet fronds/ of Osmunda ferns, fervour”;

and cold in her bed

uttered flowers, hepatica, daffodil, anemone,

crocus,

as a corpse in its manner does

in St. Oswald’s churchyard under the yews

her brother planted;

and trudged or lay by him till he kindled.

From the glancing near-rhymes of “crocus”, “corpse”, “does” and “yews”; to the gratifying locality of St Oswald’s; to the mixed tones of graveyard and bed, of “trudged” and “kindled,” these lines exhibit not only an expert ear but a keenly feeling one. The tender, imperilled hope of the poem’s last word, “kindled”, feels lived rather than performed, and one senses the speaker’s need for the “green gold of moss in [Dorothy’s] loose purse”, or something very like it, as a tonic to her own despair.

Duffy keeps a tight rein on the ominous force that propels her sure-footed elegies, though occasionally it still threatens to consume them. This might be an inevitable after-effect of Rapture and the tormented, if exhilarating, love affair it documented; one worries that Duffy is following Yeats into Maud Gonne territory, where, as romantic grief grows mythic in the mind of the lover, it becomes morose to all outside. Yet, as unhealthy an influence as Yeats can be, he remains an invaluable touchstone. “At Ballynahinch”, with its admixture of local name and personal pain, is the most Yeatsian and most stirringly original lyric here:

I lay on the bank at Ballynahinch

and saw the light hurl down

like hammers flung by the sun

to light-stun me, batter

the water to pewter,

... [by the one]

who had never loved me, no,

who would never love me, I knew,

down by the star-thrashed river at Ballynahinch,

at Ballynahinch, at Ballynahinch.

Duffy’s inward turn should not imply that there’s no room in The Bees for poems befitting a laureate. On the contrary, her penchant for place-names and slang, her roguish sense of humour, and her elegiac impulse combine into a public voice that is genuinely celebratory, though with an undercurrent of mournfulness and an ironic edge. These mixed tones make for some moving, lively tributes to subjects such as John Barleycorn and England’s World Cup loss that, in the hands of a stuffier poet, would make us snore. Like so much in this book, the “patriotic” poems strike an uneasy yet resonant note that’s appropriate to our ambiguous age. While fans of Duffy’s wild side might be disappointed by the overall restraint of The Bees, we should applaud any poet who is willing to take the risk of allowing her style and subject matter to mature. As Yeats knew well, maturity can be far more terrifying, and its results more enduring, than any passion.

Danielle Chapman is a poet and critic living in Chicago

The Bees, by Carol Ann Duffy, Picador, RRP£14.99, 84 pages