In each dram we swig a mouthful of history.  The taste kindles the tongue; it binds us to the land until of a sudden we can peer through the heron's unerring eye:

What the heron saw,
the homesick salmon's shadow,
shy in this whiskey.

Notwithstanding her public pronouncements, her insistence on the "democracy" of poetry, Duffy is an incantatory poet. Her best poems display an "alchemical, nectar-slurred, pollen-furred" exuberance. She is too much given to clanging alliteration — "I gaze, gawp, glare" is only one example — and to occasional mawkish notes, as in "the robin's blushing bounce", but when she clings, doggedly alliterative, to "the bronze buzz of a bee", she fully inhabits Yeats's "bee-loud glade", and the effect is exhilarating. Nor are her bees mere symbols; she is attentive to their ways. She catches their "hard devotional sound/in the ears of flowers". She can "bless the winter clusters of the bees" as they crowd within the hive to protect their queen. Though the collection contains such much-admired "public" poems as "The Last Post", these seem too self-consciously programmatic alongside her dafter flights. In several fine sonnets, cunningly camouflaged, she displays a secret self, freed from agendas. The most moving of these poems are those about her late mother, especially a poignant Christmas poem in which

I saw a coffin, shouldered
through snow, shrouded
in its cold, laced sheet.

"The hive is love," Duffy writes. From what I've observed of bee-hives, I'm not so sure of this. And yet, maybe she's right: maybe the piercing grief at the heart of the hive is the most riddling shape of love.