Elmet: Poems

by Ted Hughes

Most of the poems in this book were written by Ted Hughes in response to Fay Godwin's photographs of the part of Yorkshire in which he grew up. Their collaboration was first published as Remains of Elmet in 1979. Elmet includes additional poems and photographs.

Genres: Poetry, Photography, Art, Nature

112 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 1979

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

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

High Sea-Light

Pearl-robe
Of earth's grit

Heaven glows through
Into the streams
Into gulping mouths

Into a world
Of busy dark atoms
Inside the live wreathed stone

Of light worn warm by a wonder.

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking for the new novel Elmet on the library site, and this came up in the search also. It was like finding a buried treasure of a book.
Lovely lyrical poems by Ted Huges counterposed with breathtaking black and white photos of the moors. it looks like there's a new edition out, minus the photos, but they add so much life and mystery it would be a shame to read the poems without them.
I was drawn into the moors, still so lonely and desolate looking as when the Brontes lived at Haworth Parsonage.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains poems which commemorate the particular region to which Ted Hughes belonged and in which he was born -- Yorkshire. The poems in the volume called “Remains of Elmet” rejoice the landscape of that region, the ecology of that region, and the rural life there. Many of the supreme poems in this volume express the poet’s feeling of elation on recalling those familiar scenes in the midst of which he had been reared. All the poems here, portray Nature and rural life with an unusual minuteness and exactness.

[Kyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars! Hughes is (and remains) one of my favourite poets! This collection does showcase his incredible talent with words and there were many beautiful phrases.
For most part, I enjoyed reading this collection, but it becomes slightly repetitive at times and just not something I could always really get into. At times, I slightly missed the emotion Hughes instills so beautifully in his poems (of course there were a couple that did convey emotion, but the majority didn't really for me).

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary collection and Ted's best. Fairly un-Hughes in a way miles and miles from Birthday Letters stylistically. Just incredible & a guide to The Landscape Poem

[Stephen Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mytholmroyd, Heptonstall, Slack. Lumbutts, Bridestones, Mankinholes. Hardcastle Crags and Stoodly Pike. The place names around where I have come to live lend themselves naturally to poetry. My adopted home town, for example, carries a name which some speculate derives from two words for death, tod and mort. Todmorden. Death-death-wood.

Ted Hughes lived around here too, and REMAINS OF ELMET is his attempt to capture a particular moment in the area’s history, when the cotton mills closed down along with their attendant chapels: it’s an elegy, but also a celebration of permanence. These valleys have a long history. Fay Godwin’s accompanying black-and-white landscape photography is spectacular: dark and doomy and stirring, depicting the kind of moors on which Brontë heroines get lost (the Brontës lived around here, too, over in Haworth; Emily gets her own poem in the collection, as does the Brontë parsonage).

Once I imagined that I would live out my life back in London, but now I’m up here, I think I’ll be sticking around. It gladdens me no end that some of the landmarks shown in this gloomily beautiful book are visible from my house.

[Fin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A part of Britain I do not know well, and wish now I knew better. Fay Godwin's photography is beautiful and elegiac, focusing on the bones of dead sheep, the crumbling masonry and small quiet cemeteries in industrial towns dotting the Calder valley, and the play of (often fading) light on the Yorkshire moors. Hughes is in typical Hughes flow here - every groove in the landscape is a wound, every tree or rock is a frozen catastrophe, every trout an intrusion of the divine (love his love for fish). Perhaps pound for pound less individually memorable than River, and absolutely not in the league of a Crow or Hawk in the Wind, but a brooding, stark vision for sure, flushed with words and phrases that feel great in the mouth.

[Phoebe Meikle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highlights ~ "The Dark River" "Lump Chimneys" "Curlews" "Heather" "Churn-Milk Joan" "The Canal's Drowning Black" "Mount Zion" "Emily Bronte" and "Tick Tock Tick Tock".

[Steve Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the photos by Fay Godwin, this book of poems is quite breathtaking in its imagery. They complement each other totally and bring to life Hughes's words.
Love it 😀

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decided to read this as I have spent time in many of the places that feature in the poems. This certainly added to my enjoyment of the book and to some of the places as well. particularly Heptonstall - I loved the poem about Heptonstall Cemetery. I relish how Hughes' poems have a rough yet often beautiful language that reflects so well the landscape.
My particular favourite poems were Emily Brontë and Brontë Parsonage as well as the merciless attack on Rhododendrons, which while I think are beautiful in the right setting, can be as hideous as Hughes portrays.

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like this less than most of Hughes's books. It seems to need some glosses to explain what you need to know for the poems to make sense.

[Chris S · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems combined with Fay Godwin's stunning black and white photography create a perfect Yorkshire mood - bleak and beautiful.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awfully opaque, but many pieces have primal power about them.

[ciel · Rating 4 out of 5]

must admit my somewhat weird relation to ted that is always in my way of praising him highly but he's gooood, hm.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ted Hughes is a poet whose work, although I dislike him from the outset as any self-respecting Sylvia Plath fan does, I have tried to read some of, and simply haven't enjoyed. Nevertheless I thought I would give him another go and read a full collection of his poetry, here presented stunningly with photos of areas described by Fay Godwin.

I certainly enjoyed aspects of this: there were occasional times when I felt he had a nice turn of phrase, and having travelled to Yorkshire a couple of years ago on a literary 'tour', Heptonstall (and the cemetry), Emily Brontë, Top Withens, Howarth and the Brontë Parsonage were all big buzzwords for me. I really enjoyed seeing Godwin's take on so many familiar places, and I'd hoped that Hughes would be able to bring something more to it for me. He does evoke the area really well, you get a sense of the sprit (or dispirit) of the place, however I wasn't sure how much that was me projecting how much I loved and remember those places onto it and letting that fill in gaps - how much was Hughes really evoking the place and how much of it was me going "ooh yep Heptonstall I'm there already". I'll say I did like the poems where he brought in folklore and myth, which I enjoyed then going away and researching more about before coming back to the poem. I also liked the way the location of the poem seems to wind its way towards (and indeed the last few poems end up at) Heptonstall (where Sylvia Plath is buried), as it suddenly dawns on you that the ghosts that Hughes presents as haunting 'the remains of Elmet' (i.e. Yorkshire), such as industrialisation and the physical ruins that has left behind, World War I and others, are also manifested as personal ghosts for the poet - here the memory of Plath. It feels as though the collection inevitably draws from a more general sorrow of the place to a much more personal one.

However, the incredibly long historical view that the title immediately evokes left me wishing that Hughes wrote more about the landscape itself, the shape of which has been formed by and inherited from tribes and kingdoms from very, very long ago (Becca Banks and Grim's Ditch for example), and that he took, again, a much longer view of history. This is brought out from time to time in poems such as Churn-Milk Joan, however it was only really the last 200 odd years that got a good look in, which I thought was a shame, having geared up for reading the collection by reading lots about the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons and the Angles.

There were also times when I thought Hughes' writing was genuinely just bad. When I read the title of the poem Emily Brontë, I felt like I had just taken a huge run up and was about to launch into a fantastic poem about one of my heroes, from Yorkshire, in a collection about Yorkshire, by a renowned Yorkshire-born poet. And then the first stanza goes:


The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.
His fierce, high tide in her ear was her secret.
But his kiss was fatal.


What a crying disservice to once of the fiercest female writers and poets, not to mention a feminist icon, to open a poem about her, in THIS of all poetry collections, by talking about some totally, totally irrelevant love interest man??? Not to mention that the second and third lines are SO cringey they genuinely sound like lines from a fanfic by a 14-year-old girl?

All in all, as collections of poetry go, it was very pretty thanks to the photos. And when I think about the poetry from a distance, I think yes, it was nice to read about the modern state of what once was Elmet, especially as I have been a tourist in many of those spots. But as soon as I think more closely about the writing I just think thank u, next quite frankly.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The upturned face of this land
The mad singing of the hills
The prophetic mouth of the rain

That fell asleep

Under migraine of headscarves the clatter
Of clog-irons and looms
And gutter-water and clog-irons
And clog-irons and biblical texts

Stretchs awake, out of Revelations
And returns itself.

Chapels, chimneys, vanish in the brightening

And the hills walk out on the hills
The rain talks to its gods
The light, opening younger, fresher wings
Holds this land up again like an offering

Heavy with the dream of a people.

- The Trance of Light, pg. 7

* * *

It set out -
Spleandour bursts against its brow
Broke over its shoulders.
The hills heeled, meeting the blast of space.

The stone rigging was strong.
Exhilarated men
Cupped hands and shouted to each other
And grew stronger riding the first winters.

The great adventure had begun -
Even the grass
Agreed and came with them,
And crops and cattle -

No survivors.
Here is the hulk, every rib shattered.

A few crazed sheep
Pulling its weeds
On a shore of cloud.

- Hill Walls, pg. 12

* * *

Death-struggle of the glacier
Enlarged the long gullet of Calder
Down which its corpse vanished.

Farms came, stony masticators
Of generations that ate each other
To nothing inside them.

The sunk mill-towns were cemeteries
Digesting utterly
All with whom they swelled.

Now, coil behind coil,
A wind-parched ache,
An absence, famished and staring,
Admits tourists

To pick among crumbling, loose molars
And empty sockets.

- Remains of Elmet, pg. 23

* * *

- a frost-frail

Amethyst.

An iron earth sinking,
Frozen in its wounds.

A snipe
Knowing it has to move fast
Hurtles upwards and downwards

Drumming in the high dark - witchdoctor

Climbing and diving

Drawing the new
Needle of moon
Down

Gently

Into its eggs.

- Spring-Dusk, pg. 34

* * *

Dripped a chill virulence
Into my nape -
Rubberised prison-wear of suppression!

Guarding and guarded by
The Council's black
Forbidding forbidden stones.

The policeman's protected leaf!

Detestable evergreen sterility!
Over dead acid gardens
Where blue windows, shrined in Sunday, shrank

To arthritic clockwork,
Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways
Vast and black and proper as museums.

Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!
Rhododendrons and rain!
It is all one. It is over.

Evergloom of official tittivation -
Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,
And the graveyard park,

Ugly as a brass-band in India.

- Rhododendrons, pg. 47

* * *

Infatuated stones.

Hills seeming to strain
And cry out
In labour.

Three weird sisters.

Imbecile silence
Of a stone god
Cut into gravestones.

The brother
Who tasted the cauldron of thunder
Electrocuted.

A house
Emptied and scarred black.

In a land
Emptied and scarred black.

- Haworth Parsonage, pg. 54

* * *

Wind slams across the tops
The spray cuts upward.

You claw your way
Over a giant beating wing.

And Thomas and Walter and Edith
Are living fathers

Esther and Sylvia
Living feathers

Where all the horizons lift wings
A family of dark swans

And go beating low through storm-silver
Toward the Atlantic.

- Heptonstall Cemetery, pg. 66

[Colin Cloutus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hughes ties the death of his mother with the steady decay, of Elmet, at the hand of industrialisation, 'the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the angles' — the remains of which being the Calder Valley where the young Hughes grew up.

As with the majority of Hughes works, it brings together the mystic and a vivid normality — though perhaps a normality not felt by metropolitan/urban readers or even contemporary people of small towns like myself — but for the first time adds a biographical tone to many pieces. And, again, as with the bulk of his work, his poems can be enigmatic or incoherent even with much re-reading, but their imagery is so vivid and language so rich that the emotional and poetic implications reach you even without a 'logical' understanding — an uncommon beauty which he shares with Blake and Yeats.

Reading this specific photograph edition is essential to the reading of the poems, as often they are direct meditations upon the photographs, or vividly interact with them — Fay's photographs are in economical black and white, moody and bleak, but Hughes' song succeeds in colouring many, and adding depth to the sorrow seen in the broken walls, scattered field stone and wandering livestock.

The final poem 'The Angel' continues from where Moortown Elegies left off, and where Birthday Letters would later resume, of mourning those close to him in publication through intimate verse — a dream of a terrible angel with a halo of square linen, the same linen that would be the death shroud of his mother.

Beautiful book.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discovered this 1979 book when looking for a copy of Fiona Mozley's novel, "Elmet," which I am now reading. "The Remains of Elmet," Ted Hughes poems & Fay Godwin's photos is darkly effective. Neither the poems nor the photographs are happy, but that is the point...this is "The REMAINS of Elmet" --not what was but what is left after all has changed, has ultimately failed, and what remains is sorrow, brokenness, death, dysfunction, and damaged still beautiful nature, after a grand, sad & turbulent history. My ancestors left this area a long time ago. Now I better understand why. Still, the dark photos practically dripping with what appears to be continual rain shows there's still a stark beauty in the remains. Three stars because I liked the book but it did not make me happy.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of black and white photography by Fay Godwin, featuring landscapes of the Calder Valley, which inspired Hughes to write accompanying poetry. I found it interesting to read his poetry with the visual prompts because they are so intimately linked and both the poetry and the photographs become richer for being paired together. Interesting to see Hughes exploring some of his eternal themes. The mythology of the landscape and the layers of time and civilisation settling and then peeling back from the raw materials beneath. I have read this collection before but not for years and it was a welcome revisit. He is so rooted in place that you sense his exploration of not just the history of his home but of himself.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and aggressive view of the remains of East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Hughes' anger at the changing of his ancestral homeland and the love he bears for it pour through his poems.

Crown Point Pensioners is a beautiful example of the lands connections to the old folk who grew up in here.

Cock Crows is a rare example of the romanticisation of the hills and cloughs of our natural home.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1979, Remains of Elmet is a remarkable marriage of words and images. Fay Godwin's stark black and white photographs of the Calder Valley, Hughes' childhood landscape, go so well with the poems, and the whole effect is of a haunting and vaguely troubling poetic psychogeography.

[Stefan Grieve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not many poems stood out to me. The once that did illustrated an atmospheric, sharp, bitter and damp vision with occasional haunting phrase. The poems 'Emily Bronte' and the final poem, 'The Angel' stood out to me the most

[Andrew Guttridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had got the older edition which came with the photos by Fay Godwin. I feel like this would have added something to the reading experience.

I found most of the poems slight, certain lines stood out. And places came alive. But then the poems would abruptly end.

[Kristin]

Read about 1/3 of this before it was due at the library. I’m living now in the area Hughes wrote about, and some of it is certainly resonant, as are the photographs, but I just didn’t care very much. Maybe I’m too biased because of Sylvia?

[Chris Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very evocative but I can’t help but feel like I’ve only gotten half the experience by reading an edition without any of Fay Godwin’s photography.

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was drawn to this after reading Elmet. Some glorious poems that celebrate the area of this ancient Kingdom. And who but Ted Hughes could pen a poem entitle The Sluttiest Sheep in England.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad poems of a dying region coupled with great b&w photos. A good read, especially if you’ve spent times in similar areas of the US rust belt.

[evie lane · Rating 2 out of 5]

pretentious man discovers nature 😱

[J Grimsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Ted Hughes - perhaps unfashionable -bey hos craggy poetry appeals