Book review: The Bees | A Choosing

It was really very agreeable of the goddesses (and gods, if they could be bothered to be around) to arrange this particular, painfully overdue planetary re-alignment. After long centuries of waiting, we now at last have, in the UK, not just one but three female poets laureate.

THE BEES

By CAROL ANN DUFFY

Picador, 84pp, £14.99

A CHOOSING

By LIZ LOCHHEAD

Polygon, 91pp, £9.99

All are magnificent, grounded, heartfelt, dedicated to the notion that poetry can give us the music of life itself, can slip into our bloodstream and soul and – yes, also make a real difference in the real world.

All are Celts, of some ilk. All are interlinked. Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke, the wise and wonderful National Poet of Wales – to whom Duffy dedicates her new collection, whilst also contributing a brilliantly perceptive foreword to Lochhead’s new publication – are a force for absolute good in the land.

In another serendipitous celestial occurrence, the two Scots in the trio – Duffy and Lochhead, Scotland’s Makar – have their major new books out simultaneously. Duffy’s The Bees is her first collection since becoming UK poet laureate. It is a work of ravishing beauty. The physical book itself is all gilded honeycombs, gorgeous paper and honey-coloured ribbon bookmark.

Yet more beautiful are the remarkable contents, which range from contained political fury, to brilliant contemporary re-working of classical myths (a recurring and ever more excellent Duffy theme), to deeply felt ecological polemics and elegies. The pervasive and seductive theme of bees reveals her, perhaps for the first time, as the nature poet needed for our times, the poet of climate change par excellence. Duffy plays effortlessly with metre and form, sonnets and triplets, legends and spells and nursery rhymes, folklore and the ancient feel of the traditions of the land itself

Any new book of poetry from Lochhead should frankly spark ceilidh celebrations in every Scottish town and village. This collection, which ranges over more than four decades, shows all the vivid, vital, jazzy verbal energy – as Duffy calls it, “her warm broth of quirky rhythms and street wise speech patterns” – which has made her Scotland’s National Treasure. Her rumbustious energy rears up off the page, right into the ear, vivid, vernacular and joyous, as well as reflective and intensely moving.

Each book is crammed with copious riches. The poets share a scrupulous intellectual and emotional integrity, the very antithesis of pomposity or Parnassian grandstanding. Both have worked for decades perfecting their art so that it may straightaway enter the heart.

They draw on the fellowship of writers across time, whether Mary Shelley or Dorothy Wordsworth, Shakespeare or a congregation of Scottish poets: Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig. They adore names – whether of clothes labels of the 1940s or of English country pubs, the otherwise unnoticed poetry of everyday language. They both write with almost unbearable tenderness about the deaths of their mothers, exquisitely judged works of consolation and resurrection, specific lives re-made anew by words.

In Lochhead’s hugely popular “Kidspoem /Bairnsang” she contrasts the vibrant Scots language of her childhood with the desiccated English imposed on her at school. It finishes – usually to roars of delight from the audience, at readings in Scotland anyway: “the way it had to be said/ was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.” These two writers are emphatically none of the above – except, resplendently, grown-up.

Lochhead’s A Choosing is her own subtly interconnected pick of poems she has written since she was very young, that somehow speak to each other and to us. Lovers of her poetry – and they are legion – will fall upon old feisty favourites with cries of joy and be intrigued by new connections, and – wonderfully – a couple of new poems including the quiet and heartbreaking “Persimmons”, a delicate love song to her late husband Tom.

Duffy’s work is equally intriguingly interlinked despite the dizzying range, from Atlas holding up the world (“the last ounce of a hummingbird”) to her exhilarating, excoriating exposure of politicians’ dodgy spin-doctoring over Iraq. It seems there is nothing she cannot do – and beware the foolish or ignorant person who arouses the Duffy wrath. Try to ban a poem from schools, about kids carrying knives, out of brain-dead political correctness, and you will have as a swift poetic riposte skewering your ignorance. (Quite a lot of knives and blood in Shakespeare, actually, Mrs external examiner Schofield.)

A curiosity about the book is that there are no notes – the reader may or may not know that “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE” was provoked by a ludicrously misguided attempt at censorship. Does it matter that the almost literally entrancing “Virgil’s Bees” was commissioned for the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference?

Or that a blazingly uplifting hymn to life in the face of adversity, “Gesture” (“Know – your hand is a star; your blood is famous in your heart”) was a response to an award ceremony for acts of exceptional courage?

Or that “Last Post”, a desperately poignant rewinding of time for the young men lost in the First World War (just as time is rewound for her mother) marked the death of the last survivor of that carnage? Do the less football-literate amongst us need to be reminded that the superb “Achilles” was inspired by a foot injury suffered by contemporary god David Beckham? Clearly a deliberate decision was taken that the poems should stand alone, without paraphernalia or context – and they do.

An ingenious theming emerges – a sequence around snow, for instance, heart-shifting poems about Duffy’s beloved daughter Ella. Bees begin and end the book and dance their “flawless, airy maps” throughout.

Just as the bees return to flowers, pollinating, giving the gift of life, so do these two books. Follow the dance, the map – there are endless sweet riches here.

Lochhead pointedly closes her collection with “Poets need not be garlanded”. She insists it is the poetry itself that matters. “Poets need no laurels surely? Their poems … crown them with green.” We should all be glad that these poets are indeed garlanded, whether by goddesses or government, and that they give to us so much green, so much nectar, so much on which to feed and be fully nourished.