A collection of stories by the Poet Laureate of England includes among others the fable ""O'Kelly's Angel,"" about a man who captures and cages an angel, and ""The Wound,"" about an episode in World War II.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Ted Hughes is Britain's reigning poet laureate, and he confesses that most of his short fiction is merely "an accompaniment to my poems." But there are many gems here, including the affecting trilogy portraying the poet's South Yorkshire childhood. The finest tale in this collection may be "The Wound," actually a radio play about a dying soldier trekking across a pitiless desert. The death-march transforms itself into an allegory of the Buddhist path from death to rebirth. Most of these short stories date from the 1950s and 60s, before Hughes became a famous poet.
From Publishers Weekly
This collection of taut, intense stories, described by England's Poet Laureate Hughes (Crow; Winter Pollen) in his foreword as a kind of "accompaniment" to his poems, displays his characteristic violent streak and animal-fixated animism. With themes of hunters, prey and nature's hidden power, the loose story sequence begins with "Deadfall," a yarn in which a ghost may be either an old woman or a trapped fox, and culminates in "The Head," a gory, magic-real tale of hunters on a prodigious slaughter spree in the jungle. Even when Hughes revisits the ordinary world of his native Yorkshire in the three most neatly constructed stories ("Sunday," "The Rain Horse" and "The Harvesting"), man and animal clash to the point of trading places. Sometimes, Hughes delivers only mood set pieces, such as the waiting game between a secret admirer and his doppelganger at his beloved's threshold in "The Suitor" and the blizzard-blinded limbo of "Snow." Though Hughes is not a natural raconteur, these stories (one of which has never been published before; two others not previously published here; the remainder out of print since 1967) show how effectively he can concentrate his talent for forceful images into compelling narratives.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
When Ockham's Razor is Broken,
This review is from: Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Stories (Paperback)
This collection includes the whole gamut of short stories from pretentious but weak parable ('O'Kelly's Angel') to real gem ('The Deadfall'). The author is a famous poet, and I believe his poems are excellent. His language is rich. But his prosaic works, cloyed with numerous images and metaphors sometimes rather complicated and unnecessary, force to recall the Ockham's Razor. Nevertheless his ardent aversion to abominable massacre of God's small critters hypocritically named 'hunt', expressed at least in three of his stories, takes all my sympathies.
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