Customer Reviews

Collected Poems

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This enormous (1300+ pages) collection of Ted Hughes's poetry should cement his reputation as one of the two truly major British poets of the second half of the twentieth century. (The other being the much less prolific Philip Larkin.) This single volume collects ALL of Hughes's published poetry, including the late "Tales From Ovid" and "Birthday Letters," his bestselling book of poems about/for Sylvia Plath, as well as the works written in his official capacity as poet-laureate. Also included are many uncollected poems and works from books no longer easily available. Although the sheer size of this book is somewhat intimidating, this is the Hughes collection to buy if you want to immerse yourself in one of the last century's most versatile and surprising poets, an artist whose work ranges from savage evocations of Darwinian nature to earthy agrarian meditations to violent surrealism to seering, intimate confessions. This may be the most important volume of British poetry published this decade.

An astonishing top-to-bottom, stem-to-stern compendium of this singular (and singularly productive) poet. It challenges the reader to come to terms with the very wide aesthetic and emotional arc of Hughes' oeuvre. It is also a physical challenge to cart about and read with enjoyment. The prima facie scholarship of this edition, it is a clinic in poetics to keep you company for any future overseas flights endorsed by no less a modern poet than 'Famous' Seamus Heaney. There is no living American poet with as wide a palate or as uncompromising in its anti-suburban sensibility. Quite a handy tool for dealing with irredentist slatherers of Plath, too - you could seriously knock them cold with a drop of this tome.

Ted Hughes' poetry, which I first read thirty years ago, has always haunted me.

He was that rare thing, a modern poet that mattered.

This gigantic volume is almost too much of a good thing.....

First issue. In New Critical theory, I should be able to read the poems on their own. But who is doctrinaire enough to be able to ignore a life like this one? Perhaps someone who can look at Van Goghs without thinking of the artist's life could forget the sympathetic wife putting her head in the oven, and then the lover putting not only her head in the oven, but also killing the man's daughter? The son just killed himself too. I'm not enough of an aesthete, I guess. I care. It also rankles to read that "after his wife's death Hughes was demonized" when the opposite is true. Honors were heaped on him, he ended up Poet Laureate, and women, for reasons us Nice Guys just can't fathom, have adored him as a ladykiller. Diane Middlebrook's book explores the issue (her own marriage to an Alpha Male was famous in SF. She knew the territory.) Larkin and Auden are better poets and you don't have to forget things to enjoy them.

Second issue. When you *can* put the bio out of your mind, reading a poem like Tractor, what relief you feel to be out of the shrunken world of modern MFA poetry! "Poetry makes nothing happen" has become, "in poetry, nothing happens." How can it, when the modern poet does little in her life but teach, cook, eat and take a nice vacation? (I just read a poem, and not a short one, about two high school teachers in a huff with each other over how to chop onions correctly.) I'm not sold on Hawk, it's too selfconsciously macho. He's playing the role his good looks assigned him. But Hughes wrote so much, there's plenty to choose from, and the poems like Tractor get us out of the school and nursery and back into the world. Modern poetry ignores so much of life, that life ignores modern poetry. Hughes should have written a poem called Rat, not Hawk, but he brings life back into poetry. Four stars then.