WINNER: Costa Poetry Award

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy's first collection of new poems as Poet Laureate and finds Duffy using her full poetic range. There are drinking songs, love poems, poems to the weather, poems of political anger - 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. Weaving through the book is itspresiding spirit: the bee. 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.