Description
Book SynopsisBee Journal is a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive.
It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
Trade ReviewSean Borodale is without doubt the most exciting new poet I have read since Alice Oswald. His
Bee Journal raises the bar for us all and announces a thrilling new voice in British poetry -- Carol Ann Duffy
Truly heady and intense poems, honey itself in poetic form, a sustained
tour de force of language and thought -- Simon Armitage
This book is a kind of uncut home-movie of bees. I like its oddness and hurriedness, its way of catching the world exactly as it happens in the split-second before it sets into poetry. These are pre-poems, note-poems dictated by phenomena. Their context is bees, but their subject (intriguingly) is Time... -- Alice Oswald
Harbours great energy and abundant imagination...a strikingly original voice * Resurgence *
Borodale is an extremely accomplished poet…the most beautiful expression of what it is like to live with bees that you could hope to find…they show a wonderful clarity of thought and expression and a great talent for capturing an impression. The recent rising popularity of beekeeping has spawned a number of popular books on the subject but this towers above them all in ambition and emotional effect. It is an exquisite window into bees and beekeeping -- Ian Douglas * Telegraph *
