Selected Poems, 1957-1981

by Ted Hughes

Paperback signed by the author, in very good condition. Creasing along the spine and spinesides, front cover, and cover edges are slightly rubbed. Page block and page edges are tanned. Pages are otherwise clear and binding is sound. LW

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

238 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 1982

About the author

Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
He married fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962 and Plath ended her own life in 1963.

Reviews

[Connor Stompanato]

I have been reading this poetry collection for far, far too long as I would read a few pages every day and then forget about it for a couple of weeks. Finally being able to say that I am finished with it feels so good. Poetry is so hard to rate and review (which is why I never give star ratings) and this collection is no different. A large part of that is because poems are so personal - what resonates deeply with one person will mean nothing to another.

Hughes' poetry, at least in this collection, focuses mostly on animals and nature. These are two things that I love, so you would expect that I would love his work, but it just didn't have the heart and soul and emotional draw that I want when I read poetry. Most of the time I was just bored, and many of these poems felt repetitive due to their subject matter.

There were a few that stood out to me. The first was 'Ghost Crabs' which had imagery based in horror and perhaps even war. It was creepy and memorable, with lines such as:
"They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea's cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands."

Another one that I enjoyed as it was very unlike the others in the collection was 'Wodwo' - it felt more existential and based in some sort of depressive episode:
"I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it."

"Sheep" also spoke to me the most out of all the animal-focused poems as it was about a mother sheep whose new-born lamb has died, and pain and grief that she feels. I'm vegan for animal rights reasons mostly and this poem just made me think about all the animals in the meat or dairy industry whose babies are taken away from them at birth, truly a heart-breaking act. An extract:
"A half-hour they have lamented,
Shaking their voices in desperation.
Bald brutal-voiced mothers braying out"

I'm glad I read some of Hughes' work as he is a very famous, influential writer (and the husband of my favourite author Sylvia Plath) but his style of poetry is definitely not my favourite.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This old dusty volume fell apart on me half way through. I've been carrying two and three page sections around as bookmarks lodged between the pages of my other readings. Not sure if I've committed a profanity or created an intimacy with these pages. In any case, she has lived a good life and will rest now. Perhaps one day I'll meet a book binder that bring her back together again.

Hughes is one of those rare white modern poets that make my reading voice feel inadequate. Carl Sandburg is another. Both draw words together that'll boom something crazy upstairs but flounce a fugly stale on your tongue. These poems won't sound without the pressure of a basketball in your lungs and a guttered gravel in your throat. And if you don't go lightheaded from all the yelp and bay, you'll certainly be crushed by dazzling violence of their content.

[Ben Thurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like a bit of Ted Hughes.

His range is remarkable: from brief and brutal studies of nature or roughspun quotidian mementos to song sequences and Trickster myths. So many of his poems re-enchant the elements and fabric of the world: the soil, the waters of pond, river and squalling sea, the beating air and all the fearsome or fearful creatures that make their way in these microcosms.

At their best, his poems are visceral and plangent, bristling with verbal and aural hooks to catch the mind on.

At their worst, I find them overwrought and occasionally peddling a profundity they have not fully earned.

But I'd be poorer without them.

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ted Hughes was prolific to the extreme, putting out many poetry collections - for both adults and children - children's stories in work with various illustrators, and illustrated projects of his own mature poems with good friend Leonard Baskin, he edited various collections of Selected Works for poets such as Emily Dickinson, his late wife Sylvia Plath, and modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, whom he translated and curated along with many others from Soviet-occupied countries in his "Modern Poetry in Translation" literary journal along with Daniel Weissbort.

His translations of Aeschylus, Euripides and his selected "Tales from Ovid" brought great acclaim, infused with his own ideas and as much a part of his literary tapestry as his other original (or rather, self-spun) works.
The Jungian archetypes, alchemy, shamanism, astrology, and tarot were personal infatuations of Hughes and these became a part of his poetic vision very early on, but they came to a full original and critical climax with his "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being", hailing from the Jungian myth-analysis and Robert Graves' The White Goddess. This same exploration of the archetypes can be seen throughout his poetry and the folklore inspirations are engrained into it along with his experimental prose-poetry effort "Gaudete".

Selected Poems 1957-1981 was made upon his ordination as the Royal Poet-Laureate of Queen Elizabeth II in 1984, and shows the vast expanse of his work from the start of his published career to that point through both selections from his many collections, and from extra non-collected poems that are from his own manuscripts or from journals and anthologies.

The content itself is thought-provoking, and his poetry can be a near-hallucinatory experience. People seem to focus on the rugged, raw nature of his poems - and this is present, no doubt, but within it is captured a beauty that transcends the basic attribution of "nature poet". While he is at many points an observer of nature, he embeds in it deeper meanings that are of no alien merit to us as humans, and he does go beyond this observational, meditative writing style. He incorporates himself, something which seems to be a problem with many of the Plath radicals whenever he hints towards a mourning of a loved partner through his poetry.
In his earlier poems this union of himself and nature is played out through memories - much akin to the early works of Seamus Heaney- or in the "shamanaic tradition", another Jungian element in his work - one which can be reduced to the idea of spirit animals and transformations, but it is much more complex than this. One of these shamanaic poems would be the famous 'The Thought Fox' which blends shamanism, the artistic/poetic self, and in my view, a catalyst for a psychoanalytic view of the conscious' relationship with the imagination - a timid thing that needs to be coaxed and watched gently, but which should be treasured and nourished at all costs. In a later poem I can't recall right now (in Lupercal I believe) this becomes an incoherent, hallucinatory experience where a farm-hand can't differentiate himself from the visions of a fox in the rafters of the barn above him.


And it is at this point i must confess that many of his poems simply do not make sense to me, but it frankly is not relevant. The meaning often seems so personal (and possibly too abstract) to have it fully cross the cobbled bridge from Hughes' pen to our minds, but it tackles the reader's heart: you may not be able to detect any clear, coherent merit or narrative, but the barrage of beautiful imagery washing over your imagination and into your heart is transcendental - and I suppose this is the beauty of poetry over prose or theatre. They're images without any realistic (or fantastical) picture. This is what I love about Hughes.
On occassion when he is more direct in his meaning, it is very intimate and charming (in particular his bird poems) and his dabbling in Greek myth usually had more coherency to me, but this is likely from personal interest.

This selection shows his poems becoming more abstract with time, the transition from Lupercal to Wodwo is staggering - and I suppose the context of the years they were written very much reflect this.
When he picks up a certain theme on the whole, he develops it and knows when to stop drawing it out - I'm pointing out 'Crow' here mainly.
While Crow seems to be an excellent collection from these selections, even they got dry after it transitioned into the next selection. His bastardisation of this Genesis setting is entertaining, but I found myself sort of cringing and found it to be as if he were a naughty child rearranging letters on a sign and sniggering to himself for far longer than was due, but perhaps I'm harsh, and I understand this was amidst a major boom of output in creation stories for children and other children's poetry works, so this was a useful contrast for him, and a collection that got stopped in its production by the death of Assia Wevil, and off-handed'ly published.
The following collections from Cave Birds to Remains of Elmet show a new maturity - before returning to his rural roots with Moortown Diary, written while farming with his father-in-law - dropping the relucatance to dabble in confessional and personal poetry more intensely and directly. The selections from the extras of Gaudete were particularly poignant.

In conclusion, this is a heavy collection as it covers such a vast body of work, but a great show of his progression towards his role as Poet Laureate in '84, and followed by a prolific 15 years before his death.


A master of words.

---------------
Favourites:
The Thought Fox
Six Young Men
Wilfred Owen's Photographs
Hawk Roosting
The Retired Colonel
Root, Stem, Leaf (I-III)
Stations (I-IV)
Scapegoats and Rabies (A Haunting, The Mascot, Wit's End, Two Minutes' Silence, The Red Carpet)
Gog
Out (The Dream Time)
Skylarks (I-VIII)
Gnat-Psalm
The Knight
Swifts
The Harvest Moon
"Once I said lightly..."
"A primrose petal's edge..."
"Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed..."
"Calves harshly parted from their mammas..."
Football at Slack
Heptonstall Cemetery
Tractor
Birth of Rainbow

[Gavin Lightfoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the nature poetry, some of the poetry was difficult to understand, but I think these were more personal poems related to Hughes life.

[rania · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don’t rlly know… some of his stuff reads like the less impressive poems heaney wrote .. i think i need to read birthday letters

[Joe Strawson · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first real foray into poetry. I'm happy to admit that I didn't understand a lot of what was being said. I did, however, find some of the parts I could understand very thought inducing. Ted Hughes clearly has the ability to look at everyday objects and scenarios in a completely different light to most people, unfortunately a lot of those things seem to be tractors and crows. He'd be a nightmare to go for a sunday walk in a field with.

[Kevin Pal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Ted Hughes' Selected Poems, 1957-1981 as a young student in England, not as a requirement for my literature studies, but as a reference to the many other authors and poets I was yearning to understand; I couldn't possibly read other mid-20th century English poets without using Hughes as a compass point.

Reading it again, some thirty years later, I was seemingly drawn to the same poems I had marked so many years earlier - poems that lived in a world of heavy, low-hanging clouds, small plots of land divided by stone walls, and farm animals milling about the English hill country. Skies filled with imaginary birds flying over ghostly forests echoing dead soldiers' war memories. Evening images of old men gathered in noisy pubs, among tilted farm buildings and village churches, spewing myths and stories and lies.

It is a hard world about which Ted Hughes writes about; it is tough and broken and old, and yet all strangely familiar to the very deepest bones in our bodies.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of 150+ poems extracted from 15 works from Ted Hughes’ early career. Note: there is a second volume that picks up where this one leaves off and continues to 1994, as well as another volume entitled “New Selected Poems” that covers his entire poetic career from 1957 – 1994.

The selected poems are largely free verse. However, particularly among his early works there are many examples of rhymed and near-rhymed verse. As would be expected of a collection of selections covering more than two decades, the topics and themes are varied. However, naturalistic symbolism is the dominant approach across the collection, as seen in one of Hughes’ most famous poems, “The Jaguar.” There are poems that take Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” Greek mythology, or other human-centric subjects for their subject matter, but imagery from nature is the most common means used by Hughes to achieve his aim – even when that aim is commenting on human subject matter.

There are a couple pages of explanatory notes, but – otherwise – the book is all poems, and no forwards, conclusions, graphics, or other ancillary matter. It’s 222 pages packed with poetry.

I enjoyed Hughes’ poetry and am fond of his use of natural imagery. That imagery is vivid and evocative, but some readers may find it a bit arcane or obscure for their tastes. One has to ride it like a river, rather than excavating like an archeologist. I would highly recommend this book for poetry readers.

[Lee Wainwright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tinkerish twists on biblical myths, folky pagan-type lore, free verse for animal lovers. Brilliant.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the early and mid-period stuff the best; some of the later rural verse tends to leave me appreciative but not especially concerned.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covers the period up to 1981 so excludes perhaps his best known collections - River, Birthday Letters.