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Bees
are, culturally speaking, a hard act to follow. In the popular imagination,
they fly despite their shape and size (although it has recently been shown
that bee flight is more complex than supposed: the bees' wings create the
lift necessary for flight by combining short strokes, rotation and an
extremely fast wing-beat - approximately 230 times per second; the
unviable-shape-vs-flight myth is based on a mode of flight mechanics alien to
the bee); the myth is all however, and the bee stands for what is impossible,
for wise nature over silly science.
This is not the only metaphoric possibility offered by the bee: the hive and
the swarm, signifying the communal yet strictly hierarchical arrangement of
the most familiar and/or common bee species (there are about 20,000 species
as it happens), have meant their appropriation into political discourse from
Aristotle onwards; according to one source, the use of bees as parallel to human
society was at its strongest in the Stuart period. If Duffy did her research,
she must surely have enjoyed learning that the Queen Bee was, until, 1609,
understood to be a King-Bee - and this debate raged until at least the 1740s
- a missed opportunity for Queen Elizabeth I of England with regard to the
gender politics of monarchy. Since the 1940s, courtesy of Karl von Frisch, we
also have the concept of the 'waggle dance', in which supposedly, a bee
returning to the hive, imparts information concerning food sources to its bee
fellows. (This hypothesis is also, it seems, misguided: foraging information
is, if I understand the literature, more likely to be gleaned from odours
brought back by the bee.) The elision of 'dance' with language is
irresistible however, not least for a poet concerned with pattern, form and
meaning.
Then there is the slightly mystical aspect of the bee: as any beekeeper
knows, a death in the family has to be reported to their swarm/hive, as soon
as possible, or you risk losing the swarm. The bee cares about us: it
produces honey for us, it feels our upheavals and griefs, it stings us only
in extremis (unlike the nasty wasp) and at cost - 'confirming' what humans
perceive to be the bee's selflessness in general - a sacrificial quality best
caught, in poetic terms, by Osip Mandelstam: in his poem 'Take from my palms'
the bee transmutes sunlight into honey, but is itself then transmuted further
into light, as the beeswax is used for candles; finally, the bee is connected
utterly with regeneration, and thus life, as it pollinates. Understandably
then, the bee as a barometer of climate and ecological change, biological and
scientific veracity aside, is a ready-made cultural sign, bursting with
sentiment, emotional shorthand and portent. At every level, the bee speaks
to us about ourselves. At every level, we read the bee as a moral, political,
cultural text. So, for Duffy to harness the bee to her own poetic endeavour
is bold. Is it inspired? Or are the cliches - the myths, the expectations,
the several 'there suck we' lines - too thickly clustered, too in attendance,
to let the poetry breathe? The answer is, I feel, both.
Duffy makes her intent, and desired allegiances, clear with her first poem,
'Bees':
Here are my
bees,
brazen, blurs
on paper,
besotted;
buzzwords, dancing
their
flawless, airy maps.
The poet: industrious, performing poeisis out of the raw material from, and
at the heart of the thing; shameless with alliteration and puns - 'bees,
brazen, blurs, besotted, buzzwords', then 'glide/gilded, glad, golden',
Duffy's 'poet bees' have '[b]een deep [...] in the parts of flowers'; and the
poem enacts the crafting of its final rhyming couplet building to its
climactic offering of a certain rhyme, as its honey:
[...] and know of us
how your
scent pervades
my shadowed,
busy heart,
and honey is
art.
'Us' is the poem's first full rhyme, with the previous line's 'thus';
'pervades' echoes 'glide' from the previous stanza, but only echoes it,
returning the poem to its less defined shape; 'heart' and 'art' arrive with
resounding conviction at the envoi. The poem functions too, as Duffy's
equivalent of the waggle dance: arriving at our hive, it dances with promise,
asks that we 'read' the moves, to follow them to source. For there is an
agenda driving this collection one feels, and something labours in
consequence - not on every page, but to the point at times where one is
reminded that the word 'drone' is also part of apiary terminology. This is
not to say that the poetry does not engage, that it does not sing or fly or
even sting. 'Last Post' for example, which is much grittier on the page than
Duffy's own reading of it suggests, recalls, or rewinds the war poem, from
the moment of death, 'begin[ning] / that moment shrapnel scythed you to the
stinking mudÉ / but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood / run upwards
from the slime into its wounds; / see lines and lines of British boys rewind
/ back'. The poem's irony is that it cannot effect this, for, '[i]f poetry
could truly tell it backwards / then it would.' Placed immediately after
'Bees', the poem suggests a bittersweet art, in which poetry's function is
undermined by its very artistry: honey at least nourishes, beeswax can
literally illumine the darkness, but what does art do? The failure of pattern and form, of
sound, is further suggested in 'Echo': 'I think I was searching...' but there
is nothing there, only 'emptying air' - the poet is deceived by reflections
and her own imagination. It takes 'Scheherazade' to reaffirm the salvationary
power of the imagination and utterance, in which even an arrangement of
letters takes on the magic of the incantation, while the 'first story I said
/ led to the light' and imagination can reverse death itself: 'A dead woman
unfurled / out of a shroud.'
The collection is beautifully presented: the cover is eggshell blue, with a
gold embossed honeycomb pattern; the sections are divided by pages in which a
line of Duffy's poetry is inscribed as if in stone. The typography dominates,
simultaneously raising the ghosts of poetry as image and of the poet David
Jones. But where Jones's work exploits the aesthetic of the 'carved' lines to
undermine such easy ennobling gestures, in Duffy's collection it emptily
restates the production values - the book wants us to admire it for itself.
This puts the poetry in danger, weakens a voice already thin at times: the
political poems, such as ... well, 'Politics' say very little rather
self-consciously: 'Politics! - to your industry, investment, wealth;
roars to your / conscience, moral compass, truth, POLITICS POLITICS.' This is
a rant shouting that it is a poem. 'The Falling Soldier', which follows
'Politics', is also weak, rendering an extraordinary image, ordinary, as if
it cannot see that Capa's photograph is enough. Then there are the 'list'
poems: 'The Counties', 'Oxfam', 'Drams', which simply list, simply repeat,
complacent in the belief that imagery and motif will effect poeisis. This is
tired poetry.
There are good, there are excellent poems in this collection. 'Virgil's Bees'
is a georgic for our times, 'The White Horses' celebrates the glorious folly
of those hillside inscriptions, while 'Dorothy Wordsworth is Dead' distils
the gritty and passionate pared essence of the woman that revives her for us.
And the final poem, 'A Rare Bee' helps to frame the collection: the poet
seeks out muse and inspiration, her 'poet bees' no longer enough, by riding
into the forest in search of 'honey so pure' that 'when pressed to the pout of
a poet / it made her profound'. This final poem, describing as it does the
anguish of one's own mediocrity, is where, for me the truth of the collection
lies: in the 'terrible tune of the hermit's grief' a 'gesturing, dying bee' -
the poet must be both hermit and bee, feeling and dying - for us. Complacency
has no place in this vocation.
© Kym Martindale 2012
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