Bee Journal, Sean Borodale, Jonathan Cape, 112pp, £10 (paperback)
Bees have been a symbol and source of eloquence for centuries. In ancient Hebrew the words ‘bee’ and ‘word’ come from the same root. They were in the air for Hesiod, Pindar, Virgil, Milton, John Day in his Parliament of Bees, and more recently for Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath among others. In our own parlous times this marvellous little creature once again touches the lips of contemporary poets: as when the City of London Festival in 2010 took for its theme The Poetry of Bees, with new poems from David Harsent, Fiona Sampson, Jo Shapcott, Matthew Welton and Luke Heeley. Since then the Poet Laureate’s latest collection, The Bees, has followed.
It is usually clear whether a poet has actually kept bees. Sean Borodale does ‘scriptive and documentary poems written on location’ and is also a Granta-nominated New Poet. Bee Journal is his first poetry collection, comprising a sequence of poems on his personal initiation which, as every beekeeper knows, can be challenging for the beginner. His zesty ninety- page book is very much hands-on. His poems chart a twenty-month period, from the arrival of his nucleus colony in late May of year one through to the January of year three, when his bees died of starvation. They are, says the fulsome publisher’s blurb, ‘written at the hive wearing veil and gloves’, as distinct from being emotion recollected in tranquillity (though he was also Northern Arts Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust in 1999). If this seems to make extra demands on poet and beekeeper alike, Borodale confronts these with skill and a steady eye. Indeed, the book hums like a hive full of words, and the reader quickly gets the buzz.
Listen, small pitch patch of bee-wing song
is strung with a sound made of now’s last flowerheads.
The poems are presented as journal entries with dated headings, some with a clue to content (‘Collecting the Bees’, ‘Business of Frames’, ‘Hive Check’, ‘The Honey Jar’). A creative tension thus builds between explaining his practical interaction with the bees and letting his lyrical impulses take flight:
I would go naked, raw-boned, into that garden
if I extracted myself from this game of being keeper of bees
Of course, the bees inspire the words – that is the point. Occasionally, though, the register may wobble a bit. The poet is naturally excited, for example, to see proof that his new queen has mated and begun to lay, but does this deserve two pages of clipboard notes on the state of all the brood frames? It is perhaps Alice Oswald’s back-cover credit that best resolves any apparent dilemma, and captures the essence of the collection: ‘the book is a kind of uncut home-movie … 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 …’
Indeed, but Borodale’s poetic eye is a wonderful prism. The light bounces to and from it with a constant sparkle; the colours revealed are subtle and sometimes unexpected; the instants are caught in his fast-exposure word- camera:
They fan out of the door a Minerva beard,
lay out the flight paths, the locks of hair,
combing the air’s amnesia to a noise.
‘Bees Emerging in February’
The rusks of hexagon
are mute strength in volume;
plain as a Shaker would fashion a drawer;
materially earnest,
divine, pure of toil.
‘Brace Comb’
This in my arms (this heavy box) I take to the apiary.
I look at the road we have to cross.
You are not fully ordinary, bees.
The ordinary mortals go by in cars.
The poet’s word-hive, like his bee-hive, becomes the repository of much diligent foraging. In ‘The Honey Jar’, we read:
I do not take the honey but lift it down:
the jar of it on the high shelf
is a ghost of goings on …
I have the whole life coat of light passed through it …
Miracle, another word for this,
opens gold gates: a paraphrase for survival.
We are not far here from the élan of earlier miracles of rare device, where the poet builds his dome in air for all to see and to feed on his honeydew. Taken as a whole, one can but admire the sprezzatura of this first collection.
Bees, however, have much to teach us; they have been around longer. Watch them draw out the combs with their own wax, stock the hive with pollen and nectar for the young brood and winter stores, invert the sugars with enzymes from within their own heads and evaporate the water content from nectar to a precise margin. Only thus will their harvest be transmuted into honey and sealed on the comb with no risk of fermenting. The wise beekeeper will then check, frame by frame, that the alchemy is complete, before spinning off the honey.
With poems, too, as this lively and enjoyable book reminds us, it is those that are first fully proofed whose light may shine longest and best from the high shelf.