Ted Hughes’s first collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957; his last, Birthday Letters, in 1998, the year he died. John Bayley, writing in the LRB, described his long poem Gaudete (1977) as ‘one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry’.
I
Weary of the cries God spoke to the Soul of Adam Saying: ‘Give me your body.’ And He Took Adam’s body and nailed it To a stake, saying: ‘This great beast Shall destroy your peace no more.’
Then God fortified with buttresses His house’s walls, and so devised a prison For the contorted body Of the beast. Outside, the Soul, in a shroud, Glorified the Majesty...
for Jack Brown
I Sitting Bull On Christmas MorningWho put this pit-head wheel, Smashed but carefully folded In some sooty fields, into his stocking? And this lifetime nightshift – a snarl Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened, His helmet. And the actual sun closed Into what looks like a bible of coal That falls to bits as he lifts it. Very strange. Packed in mossy...
When I peered down Onto Greenland’s appalling features Sheeted with snow-glare Under a hole of blaze in the violet
(I had slid open the shutter Of the jet’s port-hole – I wanted to escape The film about a daughter’s rebellion)
I mourned a little For my father. I thought of the pierced seal Down there under the ice Far from its breathing hole
Straining as he finally...
The Tourist Guide, with his Group, in the ring of horizons, Looked down onto Hebden. ‘You will notice How the walls are black.’ ‘Wash the black walls!’ Came the madman’s yell. Birdlike, wordless.
...
The nightmare is that last straight into the camera – Dice among dice, jounced in a jouncing cup. Never any nearer, bouncing in a huddle, on the spot. Struggling all together, glued in a clot.
The first dead cert I ever backed was Word From The Owner’s Mouth. Week before There was my jockey – ‘a day in the life of’ – Starred in Picture Post. Who? Somewhere
...
Alice Oswald talks about the poetry of Ted Hughes, with help from recordings of his readings at New York's 92nd Street Y
Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about...
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...
Captain Hook, ‘cadaverous and blackavised’, ‘never more sinister than when he is most polite’, lives in fear of the crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock....
He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to...
The worst of being dubbed Laureate today would not be the task of composing poems for royal and public occasions, but trying to make them sound like oneself, or even more so. Auden had no...
There is a particular type of literary criticism – these days very rare – that aims to exist intensely as bravura performance, dramatic spectacle. It would be pointless to object that...
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
‘When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what...
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...
Sue Lenier’s poems occupy 70 closely printed pages, of which I have read – the things I do for LRB! – 50 or so. If ‘read’ is the word for what one does, or can do,...
The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...
Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a...
Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each...
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