If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems

It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman-a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. The title of this book is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few-hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent. If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the author proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.

Table of Contents:
Contents Foreword Bill McKibben Introduction James P. Lenfestey Sherman Alexie In the Matter of Human v. Bee Maureen Ash Swarm Thorsten Bacon On Bees Aliki Barnstone Alas Willis Barnstone Eleven Tiny Commandments John Barr First Light Tree Bernstein A/B/C Scenarios Barry Blumenfeld Boy with Honeybee Hair Robert Bly Words Rising Sean Borodale 24th May: Collecting the Bees 6th September: Wild Comb Notes 10th February: Queen Karina Borowicz Medicine Ruins David Bottoms Cemetery Wings Jill Breckenridge Honey Fleda Brown Bees Robert Burns “Of A’ the Airts the Wind Can Blaw” John Burnside Melissographia John Caddy Two New World Bees Carpenter Bee Leaf Cutter Bee Jared Carter Landing the Bees Sharon Chmielarz Bees Lucille Clifton earth Samuel Taylor Coleridge Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath Lorna Crozier Angel of Bees Annie Deppe The Sacrament of the Bees Emily Dickinson With Flowers The bee is not afraid of me Possession Two Worlds The Bee Could I but ride indefinite The pedigree of honey To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee Josephine Dickinson B
 Carol Ann Duffy Bees Ariel Virgil’s Bees Ralph Waldo Emerson The Humble-Bee Heid E. Erdrich Intimate Detail Stung Earl of Essex (Robert Devereaux) The Buzzeinge Bee’s Complaynt John Evans The Bees Diane Fahey Bees Lawrence Ferlinghetti Alienation: Two Bees
 Nick Flynn Workers (Attendants) Hive Blind Huber (iii) Queen Stuart Friebert Supersedure Ross Gay Ode to the Beekeeper Eamon Grennan Up Against It Barbara Hamby The Language of Bees Tom Hennen Outside Work Jim Heynen The Man Who Talked to His Bees Selima Hill Elegy for the Bee-God Brenda Hillman In Summer, Everything is Something’s Twin Jane Hirshfield Bees Kevin Holden Bees Issa Haiku Helen Hunt Jackson My Bees: An Allegory Naomi Jackson Prairie Bees George Johnston Ecstatic Susan Deborah King Prayer Rudyard Kipling The Bee-Boy’s Song D. H. Lawrence Flapper David Lee On Finding a Drone Bee and a Painted Lady in the Same Claret Cup of Cactus Blossom James P. Lenfestey Honey Blaming the Bee Nathaniel “Max” Lenfestey Beard of Bees Her Sting Diane Lockward Invective Against the Bumblebee Antonio Machado Song Proverbs and Songs Last Night, As I Lay Sleeping Bruce MacKinnon The Bees Osip Mandelstam The Necklace Thomas McCarthy Foraging Honey-Bees Paula Meehan The January Bee Robert Morgan Bees Awater Honey Moving the Bees Lisel Mueller Life of a Queen Amy Nash Not Just a Question of Fertility Pablo Neruda Ode to the Bee Aimee Nezhukumatathil Bee Wolf Joan Nicholson Antics of Bees Naomi Shihab Nye Honeybee Bees Were Better Pollen Mary Oliver Happiness Honey at the Table Joe Paddock A Sort of Honey Linda Pastan The Death of the Bee Sylvia Plath The Bee Meeting Stings Lia Purpura Bee Jeri Reilly Honey Jame

About the Author :
James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he won several Page One Awards for excellence. He has published a collection of personal essays, five collections of poems, the poetry anthology Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs, and coedited Robert Bly in This World, also from Minnesota. His memoir with prose and poems, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, Milkweed Editions, was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award. Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “alternative Nobel,” in 2014. Marla Spivak is an entomologist and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. In 2010 she was awarded a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her pioneering research on honeybees. She heads the University’s Bee Lab (www.beelab.umn.edu).

Review :
"It’s a pleasure to flip through the pages, like a bee flitting from flower to flower."-Star Tribune "It makes for good summer reading, especially if you have a meadow handy. "-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "The anthology is wide-ranging and surely lasting."-The Hollins Critic "Bees provide a rich metaphorical palette of hives, honey, and stings, and this collection is a timely reminder of all they do for us as pollinators."-Boomarks