Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: The Bees
Author: Carol Ann Duffy
Narrator: Carol Ann Duffy
Format: Unabridged
Length: 1 hr and 24 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-21-17
Publisher: Macmillan Digital Audio
Genres: Classics, Poetry
Publisher's Summary:
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 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. The Bees, at once intimate and public, is a work of great power from one of our most cherished poets.
Critic Reviews:
"Swooningly glorious." (The Times)
"Indisputably her best volume." (Sunday Times)
Members Reviews:
Powerful poems
âThe Beesâ (2014) was poet Carol Anne Duffyâs first collection since her British Poet Laureate appointment. Itâs a decidedly different collection from earlier collections like âRapture.â
It includes a few âpoet laureateâ poems on events and locations in Britain, but the poems demonstrate Duffyâs strengths as a poet, and particularly her use of metaphor, interior rhyme, and use of occasional alliteration. Yet the poems are eminently approachable, and suggest why Duffy is a popular poet in Britain (perhaps for much the same reason Billy Collins remains popular in the United States).
Telling the bees
When I went to read
the bulletin about broken holy beads
to the bees,
the beads were the bees themselvesâ
(though once Iâd been
a bairn with a bamboo-cane,
keen to follow the beekeeper
down to the hives, tap and tell
all news â whose bride, who lied, whoâd died â
and had seen the bees as a rosary, girdling,
garden by garden, the land;
or had heard their hard devotional sound
in the ears of flowers
as I barely breathed, beheld
their bold, intimate touchâ)
for a scattered bracelet of bees
lay on the grass by their bungled hive.
So how could I tell the bees?
Black blood in the sea.
Corn buttercup brought to its knee.
No honey for tea.
She plays with alliteration (bees and beads) and rhyme (the bride who lied and died), while pushing powerful images â a baby (bairn) with a cane, the beesâ âdevotional sound in the ears of flowers,â and a âscattered bracelet of bees.â When I read it aloud, I kept hearing the sounds of two particular letters â b and d.
In addition to "Rapture" and "The Bees," Duffyâs poetry collections include "Fleshweathercock and Other Poems" (1973); "Fifth Last Song" (1982); "Standing Female Nude" (1985); "Thrown Voices" (1986); "Selling Manhattan" (1987); "The Other Country" (1990); "Mean Time" (1993); "Selected Poems" (1994); "The Pamphlet" (1998); "The Worldâs Wife" (2001); "New Selected Poems" (2004); and "Feminine Gospels" (2005). Her Christmas poems include "Another Night Before Christmas" (2006); "Mrs. Scrooge" (2009); and "Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem" (2012). Sheâs also written plays and works for children and edited several anthologies, and with Eliana Tomkin wrote a CD of 10 songs entitled Rapture that followed the poetry collection.
Duffy is one powerful poet with a distinguished body of work.
