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Wodwo
'... the best English poet of his generation. Forty poems, five stories (including that extraordinary celebration of panic The Rain Horse), and a play. In them move the ghostly shapes of beasts, predators and prey, the Norsemen, and the damaged Tommies, and all the figures of that mythology through which Ted Hughes communicates his disturbing vision of England and its history.' The Guardian
'. . . he is the most powerful and original poet now writing in this country.' A. Alvarez in The Observer
'. . . quite the best book by an English poet since Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Wed-dings . . . the passion and exactness with which he looks at skylarks, stones, hare-bells, gnats, ferns and thistles, and makes them his own in an entirely fresh way, is extremely intense and thrilling.' Derwent May in The Times
'. . . he is the most powerful and original poet now writing in this country.' A. Alvarez in The Observer
'. . . quite the best book by an English poet since Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Wed-dings . . . the passion and exactness with which he looks at skylarks, stones, hare-bells, gnats, ferns and thistles, and makes them his own in an entirely fresh way, is extremely intense and thrilling.' Derwent May in The Times
192 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1971
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About the author
Ted Hughes
375 books726 followersEdward 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
March 4, 2012
In fairness, I didn't read the whole thing. The version I read is contained within Collected Poems. THAT book is over a thousand pages long. In order for me to keep my thoughts together, I'm thinking of it in terms of the various collections (though there is a virtual gold mine of uncollected work in the BIG book). Wodwo has a prose side to it, which was not included in the Collected Poems edition. Evidently Hughes meant for the two to play off of each other. Whatever. I can say that the poems are really good. According to my index, Wodwo is the 4th (or 3rd) collection by Hughes. Prior to Wodwo, there was a collection called Recklings, which looks, due to its length, to be a chapbook of sorts. It's also really good.
As I think I said elsewhere, in the long stretch of uncollected poems that came out after Luprecal (1960), Hughes found (for me at least), his voice. His earlier collections have good poems, but as collections they seem uneven. And cold. There is precision, but no heart. But sometime after 1960 Hughes seemed to discover or construct a personal mythology. These would of course become the "Crow" poems, which can be pretty dark, but also darkly funny. Crow, as a character, seems to me to be a lot like Loki, a trickster. But there's much more going on in Wodwo (which means wild man or troll in Middle English? It comes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) than this Crow character. But what Crow does provide for Hughes is a mythological foundation for his poetry to operate from. Interestingly, with Crow (and his ties to Norse mythology), and Sir Gawain, Hughes, for all of his razor blade lines, shows himself to be a poet that was deeply traditional in his interests. But as a poet of genius, he knew he had to make it new. And he did. Highly recommended (for the poetry portion of the book).
Here's a link (from a bipolar discussion group!) to one poem, "Ghost Crabs," that I really liked. It reminds me, a great deal, of Plath's grim beach poems from The Colossus and Other Poems. The influence between these two great poets, worked both ways. The link is the best I could find. The Hughes estate has his poetry on a tight leash.
http://www.dailystrength.org/c/Bipola...
As I think I said elsewhere, in the long stretch of uncollected poems that came out after Luprecal (1960), Hughes found (for me at least), his voice. His earlier collections have good poems, but as collections they seem uneven. And cold. There is precision, but no heart. But sometime after 1960 Hughes seemed to discover or construct a personal mythology. These would of course become the "Crow" poems, which can be pretty dark, but also darkly funny. Crow, as a character, seems to me to be a lot like Loki, a trickster. But there's much more going on in Wodwo (which means wild man or troll in Middle English? It comes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) than this Crow character. But what Crow does provide for Hughes is a mythological foundation for his poetry to operate from. Interestingly, with Crow (and his ties to Norse mythology), and Sir Gawain, Hughes, for all of his razor blade lines, shows himself to be a poet that was deeply traditional in his interests. But as a poet of genius, he knew he had to make it new. And he did. Highly recommended (for the poetry portion of the book).
Here's a link (from a bipolar discussion group!) to one poem, "Ghost Crabs," that I really liked. It reminds me, a great deal, of Plath's grim beach poems from The Colossus and Other Poems. The influence between these two great poets, worked both ways. The link is the best I could find. The Hughes estate has his poetry on a tight leash.
http://www.dailystrength.org/c/Bipola...
January 21, 2021
Black village of gravestones.
The hill's collapsed skull
Whose dreams die back
Where they were born.
Skull of a sheep
Whose meat melts
Under its own rafters.
Only the flies leave it.
Skull of a bird,
The great geographies
Drained to sutures
Of cracked windowsills.
Life tries.
Death tries.
The stone tries.
Only the rain never tires.
June 2, 2011
Wodwo was Hughes' second published poetry collection. I'd read all the poems before in Collected Poems and many are very familiar from many years of reading Hughes' work. What came as a surprise and made me buy this seperately is that the book comes in three parts; some short stories (and one play) sandwiched by two sets of poems. These aren't collected in Collected Poems and I had never even heard of Hughes writing prose fiction aimed at adults. The stories (and play) are difficult in that they are overtly symbolic and more or less cryptic. The connecting theme is transformation. The first story, The Rain Horse (easily my favourite) has the protagonist menaced by a horse on open farm land; he desperately flees the strangely behaving creature. The play (last of the prose works) has a wounded soldier experiencing a surreal march toward the home lines to get treatment. He is unable to escape his nightmare.
From reading Selected Letters Ted Hughes it becomes clear that Hughes felt a psychological transformation occurring within him whilst writing the material for this book, so that the poems fell into two distinct tonal groups, representing before and after the change. The prose works subconciously ended up representing the change itself: The first shows Hughes struggling to reject the change, the last the inevitability, unavoidability of it.
Whatever this transformation was, it is visible in the poetry: Part 1 is tonally similar to Hawk in the Rain, Hughes first collection. Part 3 is the first step down the road that would lead to Crow.
I strongly recommend that Hughes fans who haven't already, get hold of this book and read it through linearly from beginning to end, bearing in mind the above comments.
From reading Selected Letters Ted Hughes it becomes clear that Hughes felt a psychological transformation occurring within him whilst writing the material for this book, so that the poems fell into two distinct tonal groups, representing before and after the change. The prose works subconciously ended up representing the change itself: The first shows Hughes struggling to reject the change, the last the inevitability, unavoidability of it.
Whatever this transformation was, it is visible in the poetry: Part 1 is tonally similar to Hawk in the Rain, Hughes first collection. Part 3 is the first step down the road that would lead to Crow.
I strongly recommend that Hughes fans who haven't already, get hold of this book and read it through linearly from beginning to end, bearing in mind the above comments.
September 10, 2024
The ultimate guide to the English countryside (and the English psyche) - it's bleak, desolate, howling, and completely alive
March 31, 2022
Given that it arrived from a kind of poetically-starved period in Hughes life, this is an admirable effort to put out what he had been slowly slouching towards for over a decade and a bit.
The whole thing has a real murkiness to it, and reading this inbetween stories by Thomas Ligotti, it felt very compatible.
The first section is, to me, quite mediocre for Hughes, but as a collective it is a collective pre-initiation and beginning of initiation, with dismemberment and the collapsing out of the womb happening in a dozen different manners, contorted endlessly to the point of incoherent, gestural, mood pieces.
But the short stories in section two do this better, and literally — animals are killed, and haunt humans, and all manner of drama between poet and muse take place amid this. This section is perhaps the best of Hughes attempts to ground his shamanic philosophy in a kind of magical realist fiction setting, even more so than the brilliant Gaudete epic, and it creates a kind of surreal folk horror that meets somewhere between the prose of Yeats, and Kafka's whole body of work.
Section three is wistful and redemptive in feeling, even when the poems rehash these initiatory journeys and deconstruction and tragedies, the likes of Ballad from a Fairy Tale, and even Gnat Psalm, seem to emit a sort of religious, Spring time ecstasy despite all the skulls and final atoms and spongey sheep corpses that crop up.
I find Hughes' work between Hawk in the Rain and Gaudete to be quite wishy-washy and unfocused, with the occasional gem. While this collection is considered mostly a thematic precursor to the unfinished Crow collection, I found it to be the most enjoyable of the bunch for its heavy, heady atmosphere, and incredibly successful integration of his foray into prose fiction.
May be one to grow on me.
The whole thing has a real murkiness to it, and reading this inbetween stories by Thomas Ligotti, it felt very compatible.
The first section is, to me, quite mediocre for Hughes, but as a collective it is a collective pre-initiation and beginning of initiation, with dismemberment and the collapsing out of the womb happening in a dozen different manners, contorted endlessly to the point of incoherent, gestural, mood pieces.
But the short stories in section two do this better, and literally — animals are killed, and haunt humans, and all manner of drama between poet and muse take place amid this. This section is perhaps the best of Hughes attempts to ground his shamanic philosophy in a kind of magical realist fiction setting, even more so than the brilliant Gaudete epic, and it creates a kind of surreal folk horror that meets somewhere between the prose of Yeats, and Kafka's whole body of work.
Section three is wistful and redemptive in feeling, even when the poems rehash these initiatory journeys and deconstruction and tragedies, the likes of Ballad from a Fairy Tale, and even Gnat Psalm, seem to emit a sort of religious, Spring time ecstasy despite all the skulls and final atoms and spongey sheep corpses that crop up.
I find Hughes' work between Hawk in the Rain and Gaudete to be quite wishy-washy and unfocused, with the occasional gem. While this collection is considered mostly a thematic precursor to the unfinished Crow collection, I found it to be the most enjoyable of the bunch for its heavy, heady atmosphere, and incredibly successful integration of his foray into prose fiction.
May be one to grow on me.
July 13, 2022
The term “Wodwo” is used to imply some sort of satyr or a spirit of the forests. Wodwo may consequently be considered as a mythological being, part- man, part-animal, and to a degree all kinds of elemental little things.
Hughes wrote a poem with the title “Wodwo”; and then he used this term as the heading for the whole volume of poems which included the poem Wodwo.
This volume of poems is an influential, yet disturbing, almost unwelcoming, book, and is Hughes’s primary undertaking into surrealism. This volume of poems discloses a concerned, beleaguered psyche locked in a shadowy darkness of the soul.
Much of the imagery in this volume is that of terror, disorder, blood, and bereavement, and some of it is that of bareness and quiet.
The volume contains a great number of poems; and most of them show Hughes’s premature self-assurance in man’s cultural progression, and then man’s historical venture weakening.
The central characters in these poems seem to contempt their cultural roots, and to have developed a fixation with man’s negativity.
For example, in the poem ‘A Vegetarian’ the speaker summarizes the stages of Western man’s journey from seduction to pregnancy, birth, wounding, and death in the sheep’s jaw movement of time in such a way that he seems to be candidly afraid of the entire process. Poems such as ‘Thistles’, ‘Ghost Crabs’, ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ are remarkable.
‘Scapegoat’ and ‘Rabies’ present expressionistic representations of weapons, chronic disputes, and destructiveness in the blood of the species, a recurring repetition of the jaguar’s “drum-song of murder” in man and beast alike.
In the poem ‘Karma’, Hughes finds it impossible to discover any lucid foundation for man’s inheritance of war-time slaughter.
Later in the volume, Hughes argues in the poem ‘Wings’ that even the progressions of 20th century philosophy, literature, and science show modern man’s absolute estrangement from any form of inherited astuteness, for the reason that each man is now terribly remote in his own existential anguish in a universe, the teleology of which man cannot appreciate but whose scientific improvements have blasted him to star-vapour.
The volume closes with its title poem which is a brooding piece about a wood sprite whose cardinal beliefs include a self-assurance in the limited but pleasing powers of his own perceiving consciousness as the generator and as the “exact centre” of experience.
To sum up, Hughes’s lack of expectation with Western culture finds idiom in unremitting torture, communicated to us through plenty objective correlatives, in the poems of ‘Wodwo’.
Hughes wrote a poem with the title “Wodwo”; and then he used this term as the heading for the whole volume of poems which included the poem Wodwo.
This volume of poems is an influential, yet disturbing, almost unwelcoming, book, and is Hughes’s primary undertaking into surrealism. This volume of poems discloses a concerned, beleaguered psyche locked in a shadowy darkness of the soul.
Much of the imagery in this volume is that of terror, disorder, blood, and bereavement, and some of it is that of bareness and quiet.
The volume contains a great number of poems; and most of them show Hughes’s premature self-assurance in man’s cultural progression, and then man’s historical venture weakening.
The central characters in these poems seem to contempt their cultural roots, and to have developed a fixation with man’s negativity.
For example, in the poem ‘A Vegetarian’ the speaker summarizes the stages of Western man’s journey from seduction to pregnancy, birth, wounding, and death in the sheep’s jaw movement of time in such a way that he seems to be candidly afraid of the entire process. Poems such as ‘Thistles’, ‘Ghost Crabs’, ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ are remarkable.
‘Scapegoat’ and ‘Rabies’ present expressionistic representations of weapons, chronic disputes, and destructiveness in the blood of the species, a recurring repetition of the jaguar’s “drum-song of murder” in man and beast alike.
In the poem ‘Karma’, Hughes finds it impossible to discover any lucid foundation for man’s inheritance of war-time slaughter.
Later in the volume, Hughes argues in the poem ‘Wings’ that even the progressions of 20th century philosophy, literature, and science show modern man’s absolute estrangement from any form of inherited astuteness, for the reason that each man is now terribly remote in his own existential anguish in a universe, the teleology of which man cannot appreciate but whose scientific improvements have blasted him to star-vapour.
The volume closes with its title poem which is a brooding piece about a wood sprite whose cardinal beliefs include a self-assurance in the limited but pleasing powers of his own perceiving consciousness as the generator and as the “exact centre” of experience.
To sum up, Hughes’s lack of expectation with Western culture finds idiom in unremitting torture, communicated to us through plenty objective correlatives, in the poems of ‘Wodwo’.
December 12, 2021
Wodwo, is Hughes's third and best collection so far, just as ambitious as his earlier work but with more of a voice. Highlights ~ "Thistles" "Ghost Crabs" "Sugar Loaf" "Wino" "The Green Wolf" "Kreutzer Sonata" "You Drive in a Circle" "Gnat Psalm" and "Wodwo".
July 27, 2015
Ted Hughes is a poet whose work resonates very deeply with me. I love the sensual wildness of his writing, the brutally cold eye with which he measures nature, and the ferocity that imbues his language, his imagery and rhymes.
'Wodwo' is a strange collection, but an important one. It was published in 1967, his first collection since Sylvia Plath's suicide, and it's difficult not to read this tragedy into the lines. Yet it's also hard – other than in, maybe, a poem like 'Ballad From a Fairy Tale' – to actually pick out such references.
What adds to the book's strangeness is the structure: a section of poems; a grouping of short stories and a radio play; and a further section of poems to finish.
The poems themselves are fully formed and crafted, and he offers some genuinely magnificent work, from the opening 'Thistles', through poems like the awesome 'Ghost Crabs', 'Out – I, II and III', and 'Skylarks', to the stunning and thought-provoking title-poem finale.
The prose section further muddies the waters. The stories maybe suffer a bit in terms of pacing, and the poetic quality of the language can sometimes distract from the plot being unfurled, but 'The Rain Horse' is beautiful and strange, ripe with Hughes' natural appetites for the otherworldly, and 'Sunday', offers another sort of sweetness, a piece of childhood nostalgia. And there is 'The Wound', a radio play that challenges with its fantastic narrative but finds, in its denouement, an unexpected and gut-wrenching cohesion.
So, there is an immense amount to like among these individual parts, but the bigger sense of the collection is murky and allusive. Reading the book again, there's a rawness and typical obscurity that makes me wonder if the poet is working out thoughts, ideas and emotional shapes here, trying to make sense of a mind in wildest spin and feeling his way to something greater. I think about a great artist, working on sketches that might precede a more defined project, struggling to make sense of the challenge that awaits. The painting to come might be the masterpiece, but there is often immense value also in the sketches. And in the poems of 'Wodwo', there are distinct flavours not only of earlier poetry, but also of what will soon follow (his major work, 'Crow').
'Wodwo' is a strange collection, but an important one. It was published in 1967, his first collection since Sylvia Plath's suicide, and it's difficult not to read this tragedy into the lines. Yet it's also hard – other than in, maybe, a poem like 'Ballad From a Fairy Tale' – to actually pick out such references.
What adds to the book's strangeness is the structure: a section of poems; a grouping of short stories and a radio play; and a further section of poems to finish.
The poems themselves are fully formed and crafted, and he offers some genuinely magnificent work, from the opening 'Thistles', through poems like the awesome 'Ghost Crabs', 'Out – I, II and III', and 'Skylarks', to the stunning and thought-provoking title-poem finale.
The prose section further muddies the waters. The stories maybe suffer a bit in terms of pacing, and the poetic quality of the language can sometimes distract from the plot being unfurled, but 'The Rain Horse' is beautiful and strange, ripe with Hughes' natural appetites for the otherworldly, and 'Sunday', offers another sort of sweetness, a piece of childhood nostalgia. And there is 'The Wound', a radio play that challenges with its fantastic narrative but finds, in its denouement, an unexpected and gut-wrenching cohesion.
So, there is an immense amount to like among these individual parts, but the bigger sense of the collection is murky and allusive. Reading the book again, there's a rawness and typical obscurity that makes me wonder if the poet is working out thoughts, ideas and emotional shapes here, trying to make sense of a mind in wildest spin and feeling his way to something greater. I think about a great artist, working on sketches that might precede a more defined project, struggling to make sense of the challenge that awaits. The painting to come might be the masterpiece, but there is often immense value also in the sketches. And in the poems of 'Wodwo', there are distinct flavours not only of earlier poetry, but also of what will soon follow (his major work, 'Crow').
March 22, 2015
One of my favorite poetry collections, though I was really only able to read it in small doses because I am a sensitive guy and the brutality and sensuality of these pieces did my nerves in. Here are some notes I made, with favorite pieces, and lines.
"Boom" - consumption as a way of mitigating inevitable death.
"Cadenza" - contains the first of many allusions to floating coffins and makes me think that he was thinking about Plath and how he is "like water, bearing the coffin that will not be silent," which may or may not be fact.
"Ghost Crabs" - "God's only toys" is startingly sad and filled me with longing for my long-unvisited birth town at the shore.
"A Wind Flashes the Grass" - "The trees too are afraid, they too are momentary, streams rivers of shadow."
"Wino" - is one of the most sensual pieces I've ever read.
"Stations" - my favorite poem in the book? Again, another allusion to "the lifeboat coffin."
"The Bear" - I love the way Hughes looks at animals, which are personified to an extent, but become forces of nature, almost godlke, less reflections of humanity...
"The Wound" - This play caused me several panic attacks and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone dealing with mental instability or weak nerves. It takes sensitivity to get on Hughes' level, however a healthy distance to the material should be a required stamp on the cover as a warning label. I don't know why people don't like this radio-play or short stories so much - poetry people being poetry people and not wanting to concentrate for 20 pages of dense prose perhaps? "The Rain Horse" was also phenomenal.
"You drive in a cirle" - "Your hardest look cannot anchor out among these rocks. Your coming days cannot anchor among these torn clouds that cannot anchor."
"Pibroch" - was devastating and hopeless, most of these poems could be so described. Does anyone see anything else in this work?
"The Full Moon and Frieda" - Beautiful and not depressing or hopeless and a great way to end this collection.
"Boom" - consumption as a way of mitigating inevitable death.
"Cadenza" - contains the first of many allusions to floating coffins and makes me think that he was thinking about Plath and how he is "like water, bearing the coffin that will not be silent," which may or may not be fact.
"Ghost Crabs" - "God's only toys" is startingly sad and filled me with longing for my long-unvisited birth town at the shore.
"A Wind Flashes the Grass" - "The trees too are afraid, they too are momentary, streams rivers of shadow."
"Wino" - is one of the most sensual pieces I've ever read.
"Stations" - my favorite poem in the book? Again, another allusion to "the lifeboat coffin."
"The Bear" - I love the way Hughes looks at animals, which are personified to an extent, but become forces of nature, almost godlke, less reflections of humanity...
"The Wound" - This play caused me several panic attacks and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone dealing with mental instability or weak nerves. It takes sensitivity to get on Hughes' level, however a healthy distance to the material should be a required stamp on the cover as a warning label. I don't know why people don't like this radio-play or short stories so much - poetry people being poetry people and not wanting to concentrate for 20 pages of dense prose perhaps? "The Rain Horse" was also phenomenal.
"You drive in a cirle" - "Your hardest look cannot anchor out among these rocks. Your coming days cannot anchor among these torn clouds that cannot anchor."
"Pibroch" - was devastating and hopeless, most of these poems could be so described. Does anyone see anything else in this work?
"The Full Moon and Frieda" - Beautiful and not depressing or hopeless and a great way to end this collection.
March 1, 2020
The poetry, particular in the final section, is excellent. There is a strange tenderness to it, despite its brutality, that I find appealing. The play was also quite good, although it starts to drag at certain points. The stories, however, didn't live up to the rest of the book. Several of them are quite awkward, "Snow," for example, is extremely mannered and self-conscious. The book would have been greatly improved by excising all the stories, with the exception of "The Rain Horse," which was quite good and thematically appropriate to the rest of the book.
December 10, 2012
My favourite Ted Hughes book, though like a lot of people I don't care for the prose sections.
Amazing vision - the idea that the Viking peoples paid up front for their Calvinism - and images that have never left my mind. Crystal clear images; terse, potent music, all with a very Northern spirit.
Amazing vision - the idea that the Viking peoples paid up front for their Calvinism - and images that have never left my mind. Crystal clear images; terse, potent music, all with a very Northern spirit.
October 20, 2019
Ted Hughes' poetry is generally pretty strange, but Wodwo is definitely the collection that I'm pegging as the strangest I've encountered yet. According to the general consensus online from professional reviewers this collection did signal a drastic change in his writing style after the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, so I guess I'm not alone in my judgement. That being said, the collection was actually pretty interesting, even though I can't say I understood all of it.
I'm a fan of Hughes' poetry in general though, so seeing this cllection where he's beginning todevelop a more amorphous style is crucial in reading his ouevre. He treats on themes around relgion and mythology, which came to dominate later collection like Crow, but the animal imagery and and stark realism that defined his early work are still present. The poems that deal with teh biblical serpent definitely stood out as collection favourites, because I can't help but enjoy his tongue in cheek treatment of the oft-maligned anti-hero, but I also enjoyed his more innocent poems that explore the wonder and fantasy of childhood as well.
The second section of this book, which is comprised onf short stories lost me a bit, to be honest. Hughes has an excellent way of telling stories, but I found most of these pieces subtly upsetting and some here downright terrifying in a way that I don't get out of his poems. I don't think that the stories were meant to be what we generally classify as the horror/thriller genre, but they explore themes around mankind's primal fears and challenges - aloneness in the universe, the darkness beyond our created light sources, and the fear of and need for control of the natural world.
I also didn't enjoy the play included here, because I'm not much of a fanof surrealist theatre and it was rather tricky to make sense of it. Once I got to the end the whole thing made sense as a fever dream of a soldier with a head wound, but getting there was a bit of a drag.
At least Hughes cautions readers in the prelude that they can choose to ignore the stories and plays included here or to treat them as footnotes. I was a bit surprised by this pre-emptory statement, but after having finished reading everything cover to cover I can definitely say that my enjoyment of this book would have been more without the so-called footnotes. But we still come away with some excellent poetry from this collection, an introduction to the new style of Hughes, and we can see the beginnings of the even more strange and delightful poetry that he will come to write.
I'm a fan of Hughes' poetry in general though, so seeing this cllection where he's beginning todevelop a more amorphous style is crucial in reading his ouevre. He treats on themes around relgion and mythology, which came to dominate later collection like Crow, but the animal imagery and and stark realism that defined his early work are still present. The poems that deal with teh biblical serpent definitely stood out as collection favourites, because I can't help but enjoy his tongue in cheek treatment of the oft-maligned anti-hero, but I also enjoyed his more innocent poems that explore the wonder and fantasy of childhood as well.
The second section of this book, which is comprised onf short stories lost me a bit, to be honest. Hughes has an excellent way of telling stories, but I found most of these pieces subtly upsetting and some here downright terrifying in a way that I don't get out of his poems. I don't think that the stories were meant to be what we generally classify as the horror/thriller genre, but they explore themes around mankind's primal fears and challenges - aloneness in the universe, the darkness beyond our created light sources, and the fear of and need for control of the natural world.
I also didn't enjoy the play included here, because I'm not much of a fanof surrealist theatre and it was rather tricky to make sense of it. Once I got to the end the whole thing made sense as a fever dream of a soldier with a head wound, but getting there was a bit of a drag.
At least Hughes cautions readers in the prelude that they can choose to ignore the stories and plays included here or to treat them as footnotes. I was a bit surprised by this pre-emptory statement, but after having finished reading everything cover to cover I can definitely say that my enjoyment of this book would have been more without the so-called footnotes. But we still come away with some excellent poetry from this collection, an introduction to the new style of Hughes, and we can see the beginnings of the even more strange and delightful poetry that he will come to write.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 24, 2020
I find it interesting to see distinctly flawed work by Hughes, especially having stuck to Birthday Letters, Crow, and Hawk in the Rain. Here we have short stories, a play, and about 50 poems bookending them. The poems themselves vary wildly between gorgeous, mediocre, and indecipherable, and the short stories show that Hughes absolutely had his literary niche. I wouldn’t recommend this one at all really; the best poems here have been collected and recollected so many times that it’s pointless to delve into a deep cut collection like this. Even so, it’s interesting to see this as the stylistic bridge between his brilliant amateur work and his brilliant mature work.
August 12, 2024
The tenor in Wodwo is unsurprisingly dark giving the timing of its publication. The book is split into three sections, two groups of poems sandwiching a series of short stories. I found some of Hughes poems difficult to read, and surprisingly found the prose to be quite thrilling and gripping at times; preferring this clarity when compared with the poems. The stories are equal parts morbid and uplifting, and when read in continuation (as intended) tell a greater story of sorrow, disassociation and ‘enlightenment’. I found ‘The Rain Horse’, ‘Snow’ and ‘The Harvesting’ all particularly moving, and would recommend Wodwo for these stories alone.
September 10, 2014
Some well-crafted poems (e.g. Thistle), and he succeeds best when he establishes an interesting metaphorical conceit that provides a good anchor/basis for the poem (e.g. M. Sartre Considers Current Affairs - I love the image of the world being reconstructed inside a philosopher's mind as if it were "spectre of a flower"). However, Hughes, for my tastes, is rather glib and rhetorical, and I feel this often works against the poems on several fronts. For one, there is the perennial attempt (which most poets are happily guilty of) to create some sort of vivid intensity, but this is lost the moment Hughes cannot let go of the opportunity to indulge in some detail. Maybe I'm too used to Plath's poetry, but when she succeeds, her poems don't just feel intense - they're not facsimile of a cauldron of emotions; there is a givenness about them, as Seamus Heaney noted, they are like events in and of themselves. Second, the attention detail always makes me feel like he's being somewhat patronising/indulgent towards his subject matter. The poem Skylarks comes to mind, with its somewhat fussy David Attenborough tone.
In Crow, Hughes manages to weld these two issues together and they distill into a strength - his Crow poems have a strange mythological fable-like quality to them. There are some attempts to do that here in Wodwo but it is too fragmentary to be satisfying. I freely admit that there may be some poems which I've failed to properly appreciate, and there maybe gems that I've missed, but I think on the whole, my general feelings on the book will probably not alter very much upon re-reading.
In Crow, Hughes manages to weld these two issues together and they distill into a strength - his Crow poems have a strange mythological fable-like quality to them. There are some attempts to do that here in Wodwo but it is too fragmentary to be satisfying. I freely admit that there may be some poems which I've failed to properly appreciate, and there maybe gems that I've missed, but I think on the whole, my general feelings on the book will probably not alter very much upon re-reading.
August 11, 2011
I skipped the prose sections. Overall the poetry parts seemed more satisfying to me than Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, and even Crow.
September 20, 2013
Masculine poetry.
Apparently not an oxymoron.
I admit, I like his wife's stuff better, but this was quite emotionally full and lyrical.
Apparently not an oxymoron.
I admit, I like his wife's stuff better, but this was quite emotionally full and lyrical.
May 10, 2014
masterful
July 25, 2021
5 stars for The wound, 3 stars for me being too thick to get some of the poems.
December 27, 2007
Uneven, but in many ways his best book, along with Lupercal.
May 19, 2018
The suitor
Out
Kreutzer Sonata
Karma
Full moon and Little Frieda
Wodwo
Out
Kreutzer Sonata
Karma
Full moon and Little Frieda
Wodwo
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