The Bees
Carol Ann Duffy
Picador £14.99
(978-0-330-44244-2)
Church
Times Bookshop £13.50 (Use code CT374 - free postage on UK
online orders during August)
Black Cat Bone
John Burnside
Jonathan Cape £10
(978-0-224-09385-9)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT374 - free postage on
UK online orders during August)
CAROL ANN DUFFY's first poetry collection as Poet Laureate is
billed as her '"closest affirmation yet of her belief in the poem
as 'secular prayer'". This disruptive definition sits in creative
tension with poems by John Burnside, whose Catholic and Celtic
influences brew their own incantations.
Duffy's definition can be traced back to her poem "Prayer",
which completed her 1993 collection Mean Time. This
recasts in secular form George Herbert's 17th-century sonnet of the
same name. While Herbert's "meditative catalogue of conceits" (in
Jack Dalglish's definition) ends with resolution, defining prayer
as "something understood", Duffy concludes with "the radio's
prayer" of the Shipping Forecast.
Echoes from that earlier poem resound into Duffy's new
collection as the ecological stewardship of the bees is threaded
through new poems like rosary beads. In places they become
synonymous: "broken holy beads" as "the beads were the bees
themselves . . ." ("Telling the Bees").
So The Bees becomes a post-modern prayer book through
its appropriation of cross-cultural forms, like the 23 haiku
celebrating whisky ("Drams"), or the personified elms of an earlier
England: "great, masterpiece trees who were overwhelmed" ("The
English Elms").
Duffy works widely, adopting words overheard from the Romantics
or Wilfred Owen and recasting them through her experiences of love
and bereavement, political protest, and the English and Scottish
landscape traditions.
Her images shine, like "the bronze buzz of a bee", and her
language ranges from the elegiac to the mischievous. Even if her
concept of "secular prayer" proves elusive, religious terminology
appears still to intrigue her.
Bees are celebrated as "concelebrants" in "Hive", where the
"Latin murmurs" continue the "Latin chanting" from "Prayer", and
that poem's "grade one piano scales" reappear within "Music". It
seems that her "affirmation" is not so much defined as
continuing.
While Duffy often appears to view the natural world from the
distance -"a driver sees a white horse printing its fresh old form
on turf like a poem" ("The White Horses) - John Burnside is
grounded there.
He portrays a world of shadows; twilight territory that
encompasses lingering paganism and Celtic reverence. His 12th
collection takes its title from "a powerful hoodoo talisman,
conferring success, invisibility and sexual power on its owner".
Ancient understandings, emanating particularly from surrounding
forests, enclose and infuse many of his poems.
The epic, ten-page poem "The Fair Chase" heralds and summarises
his collection. It tracks, with a reference to Psalm 109, a hunt
for a "beast", sensed rather than identified. An odyssey ends with
a single shot, yet "all I could find was an inkwash of blear in the
grass like a fogged stain after a thaw. . . no body, no warmth, no
aftermath, nothing to prize. . ."
This murder of emptiness (perhaps God, or a god?) conditions the
rest of the writer's life in a deserted community reminiscent of
Gray's elegised village, or Scottish victims of the
"clearances".
Burnside writes with a persistent sense of the "holy" or the
"other", sometimes adopting biblical text, and yet also through its
translation. Matthew 22.14, about many being called but few chosen,
becomes a meditation on how the spirituality of landscape might
prove more telling than institutionalised religion.
Sometimes he appears to pause, as in "Faith", to draw together
preoccupations of search and belief, the fragility of
relationships, and the interplay of time and distance. Here, he
brings his novelist's eye to a misty plot about abstractions, and
brings his poet's ear for vocabulary and cadence to its
representation:
he had left her one morning at
dawn
for the Sanskrit of rain.
Go far enough they say,
and some hideous god
will meet you like a shadow on
the road;
go further still, and scripture
closes in.
In "The Listener", Burnside takes Luke 11.16 ("because a friend
of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set
before him") to explore that sense of returning home as a stranger,
to a community belonging as much to the dead as to the survivors.
The poem unfolds like a spell, softly spoken and yet poignant in
the search and grief that hallmarks so much of this collection.
Burnside stands among our most profound metaphysical poets, and
we are unlikely to read anything more accurately mapping the cost
and diligence of spiritual search until he next reports from his
continuing pilgrimage.
Dr Halsall is poetry editor of Third Way
magazine.