Customer Reviews

Crow (Penguin/Faber Audiobooks)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this slim but powerful volume of poetry, Ted Hughes creates poems like bare bones, blood-blackened stones, jagged icicles, all that's defiant & frightened & forever struggling against a meaningless Universe & an often malevolent God. Crow is a figure of myth, a hungry, hardscrabble chaos of feathers & dark dreams -- sometimes a trickster, sometimes a victim, sometimes a guide, sometimes a Prometheus of sorts. He inhabits an utterly bleak world ... and yet, there's a tremendous energy & bare beauty to these poems. Crow is Death & also Life, setting himself against infinite forces, a battered symbol of soul & negation both. Not for every taste, of course, but recommended for those who view the pain & mystery of existence with an unblinking eye.

This small book, full of repetitions, ambiguities and contrasts may change the way you think about writing and reading forever. It holds a dark mystery as it plays back and forth against itself and forward with momentum. Possesses a deep, raw quality unlike any other book. I was so amazed by the sheer audacity and mystery of this writing that I read about 5 more Ted Hughes books. Sadly, none of them really grabbed me. I have reread this a few times and it has never lost its energy.

Eerie, Dark, Without Emotion is Ted Hughes' Crow. This small book of poetry takes us on a journey into the Stark and Selfish World of Crow. Crow defies all; even God.

It is not irony that Hughes dedicated this book to the memory of Assia and Shura.

At times it seems Crow is the personification of Hughes himself.

I find Crow to be a very beautiful, albeit nihilistic book of verse.

Ted Hughes' "Crow" may well be my favorite 20th century book of poetry, and I purchased this copy to present as a Christmas present. Leonard Baskin's illustrations are stunning, and I was happy to find a copy through Amazon via a third party. However, despite the book being advertised on-line with Baskin's cover, the copy I was sent had a purely black cover, and Baskin's illustrations were not included in the edition I was sent (hence my 3-star ranking, instead of the 5 stars the book deserves). Because it was a Christmas gift, I did not have the time to return the item and request the edition I believed I had ordered.

All that being said, and with all due respect to his "Birthday Letters," Britain's former poet-laureate created his masterpiece with "Crow," introducing a volatile new character into the Garden of Eden who upsets and upends the order of things as we know it. Ted Hughes was a shaman of a poet, connected to darker energies and a mojo that by turns is sinister and hilarious. Not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for fundamentalists--Rick Santorum, beware! Infinitely more entertaining than King James, sexual, violent and irreverent, "Crow" is both a satire of one of the seed-myths of Middle Eastern culture (i.e., Genesis) and a gutsy interpolation into that myth of a "trickster" energy more akin to Coyote of the American Southwest than to anything biblical.