A collection of poems celebrating honey bees. The current crisis of health in bee populations makes this an important time to recognise their importance to us.
ISBN 978-0-9552952-7-0 and Direct from Grey Hen Press: www.greyhenpress.com
£8 (50p from the sale of each book will go to reasearch sponsored by the British Beekeepers Association)
‘Beekeeping has long been the preserve of the contemplative, the self-sufficient, those with an appreciation of the delicate and magnificent structures of a complex society: who more appropriate, then, than women poets of today, with their quiet eye for detail, order, industry, living-spaces, to explore that parallel world of skeps and keepers, queens and workers, lore, science, craft and myth, all the way from Ljubljana to Aberdeen, down the centuries from the middle ages to our own, in a rich honeycomb of bee-poems’ Anne-Marie Fyfe
‘If you’re wanting to buy a present for a friend, try this. The collection is successfully carried by the enthusiasm and fine observation of the writers, and by Cathy Benson’s delicate drawings. A satisfying anthology to browse in.’ Meg Peacocke
The Mother-Hive
For deep memory, we must learn
the language of bees, investigate hive-life –
how winged atoms make honey and store-cells,
how wax will only generate when the wax-makers
lie together for hours, quiescent, in great heat.
Comb-building takes place at night
at the borders of language and dream,
when the dead come back to talk.
Sometimes memory’s partitions melt,
we get to uncover bricked-up fireplaces.
We have a need to remember what is lost,
find it hard to fly the crowded hive,
leave it all behind.
When a store-cell opens,
wild hope bends an ear.
From The Price of Gold by Rose Cook
Rose Cook 