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The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate, and the much-anticipated successor to the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Rapture. After the intimate focus of the earlier book, The Bees finds Duffy using her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, poems of political anger; her celebrated ‘Last Post' (written for the last surviving soldiers to fight in the First World War) showed that powerful public poetry still has a central place in our culture. There are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and - most movingly - the poet's own mother. As Duffy's voice rises in this collection, her music intensifies, and every poem patterns itself into song.

The Bees is a work of great ecological and spiritual power, and Duffy's clearest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem as ‘secular prayer', as the means by which we remind ourselves what is most worthy of our attention and concern, our passion and our praise.