Bee Journal (The Birds and the Bees)

Sean 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

Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal lifts the veil on the apiarists life and goes to the heart of the hive… The dense and intense language is the verbal equivalent of the honey that delights the tongue

Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph

Book to savour and reserve for treat reading, a bit like the best honey…a word-filled jar of golden treasure

Dovegrey Reader

This beekeeping journal in verse form provides an intimate portrait.

Stephanie Cross, Lady

The past few summers in the states as well as here in the UK I’ve become aware the music of buzzing insects such as bees has dimmed and it concerns me. Borodale’s poems are like honey on toast, a reminder of what I want my grandchildren to taste in the future as sweetly as I have in the past.

Virginia Schultz, The American