Collected Poems

From Publishers Weekly
The main details of Hughes's life are well-known: after his National Service with the RAF, the dashing poet marries the brilliant American Sylvia Plath in 1954, and becomes an instant celebrity with the publication of Hawk in the Rain in 1957. While "The Thought-Fox" scampers its way into numberless anthologies, he publishes the poems of Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967), where he treats his own voice as a force of nature, threaded through a violent animism. His wife and his lover die by suicide. He makes a major artistic breakthrough with the widely praised sequence Crow (1971), which draws on his deep knowledge of English folklore, and sacrifices, for a kind of Zarathustrian bluntness, all lingering traces of formalism (though blank verse and ballad would continue to be favored methods). He writes plays and several children's books, and becomes poet laureate in 1984, publishing a surprisingly good book of civic verse, Rain Charm for the Duchy, in 1992. His final volume, Birthday Letters, is a conflicted, front-page-news-making account of his relationship with Plath. This enormous, rewarding compendium contains all of the above as well as numerous poems that were previously uncollected (such as the lovely, Williams-y miniature "Snail" and the long "Scapegoat and Rabies," an indictment of the soldier culture that partly shaped Hughes); the entirety of his acclaimed Tales from Ovid; Hughes's appendices to the books as originally published; and copious bibliographic notes. Hughes is already canonical in Great Britain, and this volume, with its resolutely undomesticated bestiary, will mark out permanent space on the shelves of U.S. readers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Lauded as a poetic genius and demonized for the suicide of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath, Hughes remains a controversial and compelling figure, one deserving of the serious attention this mammoth first collected edition of his poems demands. Precocious and ambitious, Hughes began winning literary awards with his debut collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), thanks to Plath's encouragement. Earthy and mystical and steeped in folklore and myth, Hughes wrote lush and confident nature poems until Plath's death, after which his poetry turned spare and wary. In Crow (1970), for instance, images of fallen trees, shrunken forms, camouflage, sickness, and stasis abound, followed by the torment of Prometheus on His Crag (1973). But slowly the prolific and irrepressible Hughes regained his artistic grounding, and ultimately created a great treasury of original and exalted works, finally addressing his intense relationship with Plath in his final book, Birthday Letters (1998), a resounding collection that stunned the literary world. Supported with extensive notes, this definitive volume brings Hughes into crisp focus as a complex and major poet. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
All the poems of a great 20th-century poet

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.



About the Author
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) produced more than forty books of poetry, prose, drama, translation, and children's literature, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Racine's Phedre, and Euripides' Alcestis; and Birthday Letters. He lived in Devonshire.

Paul Keegan is poetry editor of Faber and Faber in London.



Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Only months after Farrar's publication of a massive edition of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems comes its even larger omnibus volume of his brooding British counterpart, the late Hughes. It's fitting, since Hughes's literary stature in Britain was arguably as great as Lowell's in the United States. Chronologically arranged, Collected Poems is triple the size of 1994's New Selected Poems and spans four decades-from Hughes's early scholastic publications, through the darkly mythic murmurings and primal tensions of milestones such as Hawk in the Rain, Crow, and Moortown, to the autobiographical and still controversial Birthday Letters, which chronicled his troubled marriage to poet Sylvia Plath. In between are generous helpings of uncollected poems, some of which have never been reprinted. The text used throughout is that of the last published version. Nonpoetic work, such as Part 2 of Wodwo, is omitted. Appendixes include Hughes's original notes and prefaces, lists of variant titles and contents pages, and notes detailing textual variants between published editions of the poems. Essential for academic libraries and highly recommended for public libraries.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices