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’.
No map or Latin ever
Netted one deity from this river. TAW meant simply ‘water’. What became of her Who poured these pools from her ewer?
Who wove her names for her people Into a shimmery tent – with alder and oak-leaf
And the flowing deer? What were her real names?
She painted men’s and women’s souls Into her tunnel water With the brother-blood of raven and...
Big wings dawns dark. The sun is hunting. Thunder collects, under granite eyebrows.
The horizons are ravenous. The dark mountain has an electric eye. The sun lowers its meat-hook.
His spread fingers measure a heaven, then a heaven. His ancestors worship only him And his children’s children cry to him alone.
His trapeze is a continent. The sun is looking for fuel With the gaze of a...
The tree creeps on its knees. The dead branch aims, in the last light. The cat-bird is telescopic.
The sun’s escape Shudders shot By wings of ashes.
The moon falls, with all its moths, Into a bird’s face.
Stars spark From the rasp of its cry.
Till the moon-eater, cooling, Yawns dawn And sleeps bark.
Enter Hamlet, stabbed, no longer baffled, Stepping across his mother, drowned in a pearl, Carrying lifeless Ophelia. Now enter
Stabbed Othello, enlightened at last, From his cistern of toad-genderings, bearing Suffocated Desdemona. Now enter
Headless Macbeth, regicide killed in him, Stepping from the cauldron of sisters Bearing his cold Queen. Now enter
Crack-brained Lear,...
Honeysuckle hanging its fangs. Foxglove rearing its opened belly. Dogrose touching the membrane.
And through the dew’s mist, the oak’s mass Comes plunging, comes tossing dark antlers.
Then a shattering Of the river’s hole, where something leaps out –
The stillness snarls, moon-mouthed, and shivers.
Summer dripping stars, biting at the nape. Lob-worms coupling in...
Alice Oswald talks about the poetry of Ted Hughes, with help from recordings of his readings at New York's 92nd Street Y
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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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