What do you think?
Rate this book
Gaudete
'The poem we are told was originally intended as a film scenario. Ted Hughes has that sure poetic instinct that heads implacably for the particular instances rather than ideas or abstraction; he has an especial talent for evoking the visual particular . . . Ted Hughes has produced a strange bastard form that [works] because he has such an acute sense of the suggestive power of specific visual images and the ability to evoke them in words.' Oliver Lyne, Times Literary Supplement
- GenresPoetryFictionLiterature
200 pages, Hardcover
First published November 28, 1977
13 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
Ted Hughes
378 books728 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
September 8, 2011
A swirling, twisted, phantasmagoria of a journey. I've been toying with the idea for some time that Ted Hughes was a genius of the English language. I don't say that lightly, but his ability to create razor sharp imagery, his colossal concepts of man and nature and their intertwined struggle, is just so powerful and vivid that I can't overlook the possibility. He had a unique vision, and he knew what to do with it.
The prologue to Gaudete is something to behold in its own right. I read it seven or eight times before I got to the main story proper. The story contains some dark imagery, but what a beautiful way to tell it. Fantastic.
The prologue to Gaudete is something to behold in its own right. I read it seven or eight times before I got to the main story proper. The story contains some dark imagery, but what a beautiful way to tell it. Fantastic.
October 14, 2009
I’ve gotten 97 pages into this one and am going to stop now. It is a remarkable book in many ways – the writing is powerful and clear, the images graphic and pointed, but there is simply too much fucking and not enough story for me. It is hardly surprising this was never made into the film Hughes apparently wanted it to be. This is a darker and more pornographic re-write of Under Milk Wood A Play for Voices, in many ways. But Thomas has infinite charm and the characters here just don’t seem as well crafted or differentiated for me to seem to remember who is who. (In the immortal words of Tom Waits, 'What was the girl with the snake skin's name?') I’ve gotten lost repeatedly. I’ve no idea which of the versions of the priest is doing the fucking at any one time, but I’m assuming that both of them are getting far more than their fair share – but hard to tell.
Also - this is not a play for voices - hardly anyone says a word the whole way through - something else that might have made it a difficult film to make.
In another sense this is also a retelling of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and the image of the Priest being split in two on the tree by the demons at the start and all of those dead bodies really is something else.
But in the end I just couldn’t give a stuff about any of the characters and everything was told so breathlessly that I really needed to just say, look, enough, no more.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have read it in snatches – so perhaps at some stage I will come back to it and give it an entire day and read the whole lot in one go – or then again perhaps not.
Also - this is not a play for voices - hardly anyone says a word the whole way through - something else that might have made it a difficult film to make.
In another sense this is also a retelling of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and the image of the Priest being split in two on the tree by the demons at the start and all of those dead bodies really is something else.
But in the end I just couldn’t give a stuff about any of the characters and everything was told so breathlessly that I really needed to just say, look, enough, no more.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have read it in snatches – so perhaps at some stage I will come back to it and give it an entire day and read the whole lot in one go – or then again perhaps not.
February 14, 2021
My least favourite - and I've read a lot of him.
April 15, 2017
Let us all rejoice at Ted Hughes' Gaudete. That's what "gaudete" means, after all—it's a plural imperative in Latin. Rejoice! But... what is there to rejoice about in this book-length mixture of poetry and prose, apart from the mere fact of its existence? The events Hughes describes within Gaudete are by no means joyful.
Nicholas Lumb, an ordinary Anglican vicar in a sleepy English country village, is abducted and replaced by a magical duplicate created from an oak tree. This changeling proceeds to seduce all of the women of childbearing age in the vicar's small town, using an ecstatic religious vision of a primitive, female-centered Christianity to convince them that sleeping with him means one of them would bear the next Messiah.
The husbands and fathers of the village are not immediately aware of this plan; the women speak of it only to each other, during their regular W.I. (Women's Institute) meetings in the basement of the church over which Lumb's doppelgänger presides. Much of Gaudete is devoted to the men and their slow awakening to the threat in their midst, an awakening that at first is more sorrowful than angry, as when the (retired) Naval Commander Estridge
The rest of Gaudete involves the women who, in their various ways, have succumbed to Lumb's blandishments. These scenes are sometimes graphic but never crude, and are often merely implied, past-tense, rather than presented nakedly as a tangle of writhing limbs on the page. Though there's plenty of that too. Hughes was not a fearful writer; he never shrank from the rawest and bloodiest extremes of human nature.
Hughes apparently wanted this book to be made into a film (and it would definitely make an... interesting addition to cinema; I can see how that would work), but it would take a lot of work. However, if Gaudete was ever turned into a screenplay, it was never produced, at least as far as I can tell. An obscure movie called "The Shout" (1978) does share a few thematic elements—the sleepy English country setting, a magical seduction—with Gaudete... it might be worth a look if you liked this book—or liked the idea of this book. For me, at least, Gaudete demanded much more careful attention than a simple reading of its plot would suggest, and while I did not like it as much as I had hoped, I must concede that in the end it was probably—if perhaps just barely—worth the effort.
Nicholas Lumb, an ordinary Anglican vicar in a sleepy English country village, is abducted and replaced by a magical duplicate created from an oak tree. This changeling proceeds to seduce all of the women of childbearing age in the vicar's small town, using an ecstatic religious vision of a primitive, female-centered Christianity to convince them that sleeping with him means one of them would bear the next Messiah.
The husbands and fathers of the village are not immediately aware of this plan; the women speak of it only to each other, during their regular W.I. (Women's Institute) meetings in the basement of the church over which Lumb's doppelgänger presides. Much of Gaudete is devoted to the men and their slow awakening to the threat in their midst, an awakening that at first is more sorrowful than angry, as when the (retired) Naval Commander Estridge
Is stricken with the knowledge that his dream of beautiful daughtersThis realization could of course be about any father's daughter, about any growing-up and consequent loss of innocence. The anger comes later, and it's unclear whether the men ever really understand the nature of the opponent they're confronting.
Has become a reality.
Simply, naturally, and now inevitably, there by the open window.
The dream was as beautiful as the daughters.
But the reality
Is beyond him. Unmanageable and frightening,
Like leopard cubs suddenly full-grown, come into their adult power and burdened with it.
—p.41
The rest of Gaudete involves the women who, in their various ways, have succumbed to Lumb's blandishments. These scenes are sometimes graphic but never crude, and are often merely implied, past-tense, rather than presented nakedly as a tangle of writhing limbs on the page. Though there's plenty of that too. Hughes was not a fearful writer; he never shrank from the rawest and bloodiest extremes of human nature.
Hughes apparently wanted this book to be made into a film (and it would definitely make an... interesting addition to cinema; I can see how that would work), but it would take a lot of work. However, if Gaudete was ever turned into a screenplay, it was never produced, at least as far as I can tell. An obscure movie called "The Shout" (1978) does share a few thematic elements—the sleepy English country setting, a magical seduction—with Gaudete... it might be worth a look if you liked this book—or liked the idea of this book. For me, at least, Gaudete demanded much more careful attention than a simple reading of its plot would suggest, and while I did not like it as much as I had hoped, I must concede that in the end it was probably—if perhaps just barely—worth the effort.
May 1, 2020
One of the most important books I have ever read. No one seems to grasp what it is about.
In the simplest sense it is the tale of a lost twin. I have written elsewhere about the whole relationship between Hughes and his partners as an enactment of "the dream of the womb" a repeating of intense love and tragic loss.
Hughes vicar becomes a changeling, a doppelganger, an emanation of his lost wombtwin. Usually the fairies take a baby and replace it wit a changeling. The baby is left to grow in fairyland while the changeling sickens and dies with the original parents.
Here Hughes gives an adult to the little people, who tie him to a log and beat him till the log becomes his other self. They then release the doppelganger on the priest's parishioners, where he tries to start a new religion, (the antichrist, perhaps) After the dark twin is killed, the original is found wandering in Ireland, land of the fay.
People seem to think there is no plot and no characters, because there is no dialogue.
They just don't get what it is all about, which is an intense poetry of the tortured soul.
You may be in the ten percent of us humans who lost a twin in the womb or at birth. If so you might appreciate this book.
Brilliant scholarly, obscure and intense, at least ten years in the writing.
Read it if you are bold enough
In the simplest sense it is the tale of a lost twin. I have written elsewhere about the whole relationship between Hughes and his partners as an enactment of "the dream of the womb" a repeating of intense love and tragic loss.
Hughes vicar becomes a changeling, a doppelganger, an emanation of his lost wombtwin. Usually the fairies take a baby and replace it wit a changeling. The baby is left to grow in fairyland while the changeling sickens and dies with the original parents.
Here Hughes gives an adult to the little people, who tie him to a log and beat him till the log becomes his other self. They then release the doppelganger on the priest's parishioners, where he tries to start a new religion, (the antichrist, perhaps) After the dark twin is killed, the original is found wandering in Ireland, land of the fay.
People seem to think there is no plot and no characters, because there is no dialogue.
They just don't get what it is all about, which is an intense poetry of the tortured soul.
You may be in the ten percent of us humans who lost a twin in the womb or at birth. If so you might appreciate this book.
Brilliant scholarly, obscure and intense, at least ten years in the writing.
Read it if you are bold enough
February 6, 2025
Poet Ted Hughes was expanding his oeuvre by penning a cinematic experience that turned into a series of prose works that became Gaudete (there's confusion given the early Faber and Faber cover's artwork, which is nightmare fuel in my opinion, spelled the Us as Vs even in Hughes' name for aesthetic reasons) which work better as written than performed. More familiar Hughes comes in the epilogue which is a mix of prose and poetry, the latter where Hughes tends to be a bit more masterful with his oak-dark imagery. There's a solemnity at the heart of all these bodies at the tip of one another's knives and it feels both monochromatic and potent. Imagine what could be done cinematically with this material so full of abstract concepts? (Abstracts are considered to be strictly prohibited when writing for a visual medium.) An obscure experiment with interesting elements.
August 3, 2024
So passionately told and intense and rough
December 26, 2024
Feels totally made for me. Maybe writing can be anything !
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 23, 2025
hell yeah
May 19, 2025
Despite its flaws really enjoyed this - not sure what to make of the epilogue though, which takes away from the poem's momentum
July 16, 2022
Gaudete is a kind of poem-play with a prologue and an epilogue. Hughes himself provided a diminutive summary of the substance of this play.
An Anglican clergyman, Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is kidnapped by spirits into the other world. The spirits create a photocopy of him to take his place in this world and to carry on his work. This changeling construes the role of a clergyman in his own way.
The tale recounts the closing day of events which lead to an annulment by the powers of both worlds. The original clergyman resurfaces in this world, but changed from what he used to be.
The story of Gaudete re-enacts a faithful choice made, so to speak, before life itself began. The introduction describes the conditions of this contract, and the tale shows how conditions are persistently created through which many women, and one woman particularly, are destroyed because of Reverend Lumb’s inadvertent but toothless brutality.
In turn, their destruction leads to his persecution and death.
In the epilogue, a new Lumb re-emerges with dissimilar values, to be exact those of modesty not violence, those of obedience of the will, not of sightless self-assertion. Yet, this evidently-altered Reverend Lumb would not have come into existence if the preceding events depicting the disparaging side of his personality had not occurred.
Lumb finally shares the fate of women who have been victims in his cause. This means that the only occasions in the world which can incite a man to change his manners and his temperament must grow out of his being entwined in circumstances so inexorable that he will feel bound to convert.
Such a change in the spiritual voyage of a man is an absolute necessity, and the inescapable circumstances which bring alout the change are also an absolute necessity. Thus ‘Gaudete’ has a profound implication as showing Hughes’s belief that a human being can advance spiritually only when compelled to do so by circumstances.
An Anglican clergyman, Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is kidnapped by spirits into the other world. The spirits create a photocopy of him to take his place in this world and to carry on his work. This changeling construes the role of a clergyman in his own way.
The tale recounts the closing day of events which lead to an annulment by the powers of both worlds. The original clergyman resurfaces in this world, but changed from what he used to be.
The story of Gaudete re-enacts a faithful choice made, so to speak, before life itself began. The introduction describes the conditions of this contract, and the tale shows how conditions are persistently created through which many women, and one woman particularly, are destroyed because of Reverend Lumb’s inadvertent but toothless brutality.
In turn, their destruction leads to his persecution and death.
In the epilogue, a new Lumb re-emerges with dissimilar values, to be exact those of modesty not violence, those of obedience of the will, not of sightless self-assertion. Yet, this evidently-altered Reverend Lumb would not have come into existence if the preceding events depicting the disparaging side of his personality had not occurred.
Lumb finally shares the fate of women who have been victims in his cause. This means that the only occasions in the world which can incite a man to change his manners and his temperament must grow out of his being entwined in circumstances so inexorable that he will feel bound to convert.
Such a change in the spiritual voyage of a man is an absolute necessity, and the inescapable circumstances which bring alout the change are also an absolute necessity. Thus ‘Gaudete’ has a profound implication as showing Hughes’s belief that a human being can advance spiritually only when compelled to do so by circumstances.
October 28, 2015
Astonishing - one hopes someone will eventually attempt to do the movie. maybe Danny Boyle?
November 5, 2023
Is this simultaneously one of the greatest poems Hughes wrote and one of the most puzzling? Unequivocally, yes. Indeed, let's go further and assert those attributes apply to 'Gaudete' not just in the context of the work of Hughes but in that of the whole of post-war poetry in English. This will be a deeply controversial opinion in 2023 I know. Apart from arguing on literary merits there is the subject matter of the poem (if of course one can maintain a questionable abstract distance and separate the two).
It's perhaps unsurprising that Hughes felt obliged to preface 'Gaudete' with an 'Argument':
An Anglican Clergyman, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is carried away into the other world by elemental spirits...
To fill his place in this world, for the time of his absence, the spirits make an exact duplicate of him out of an oak log, and fill it with elemental spirit life...
This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of love in his own log-like way.
He organises the women of his parish into a coven, a love-society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is the birth of a Messiah to be fathered by Lumb.
If that sounds odd and off-putting, I would understand both points of view but I nevertheless agree with John Bayley, writing a few years after its publication, that 'Gaudete' is 'one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry,'
Bayley goes on to say that part of the achievement of the poem is how 'fantasy – the very odd tale or legend that preoccupied the author – is made as real as life on the farm.' How Hughes brilliantly effects this is absolutely the most striking aspect but also from a technical point of view formally 'Gaudete' is remarkable. The nature and structure of the verse is brilliantly developed, its effortless shifting utterly organic, often achieving a completely graceful elision from prose to verse and back. Above all, it is the most dramatic and disturbing recreation of the Dionysos/Bacchae myth I have ever read. One of the epigraphs to the poem is from Heraclitus to the effect that Hades and Dionysos are one - and (paraphrasing) that therefore, one has to expect shocking things to occur. The whole poem feels as if it takes place not quite in its ostensible very English rural village setting but in some liminal space adjacent to it in which very brutal, amoral things are commonplace. (Although the incongruity of 'The Archers' meets Ovid is brilliantly done and not without considerable humour in places). This is profoundly unsettling and the depiction of the violence which is inseparable from Hughes' vision is necessarily difficult to read. But for me it remains a masterpiece for its Ovidian and Shakespearean reimagining. I understand this might be a divisive view - it's a testimony to my reaction to what I have read and not an argument, rhetorical or otherwise to persuade you to take a different view or even necessarily to read it.
It's a shock to pick up the 2003 'Collected Poems' and find that only the 'Epilogue' poems are included. Particularly as the later reprinting of the poem contains a longer, (sort of) clearer version of the 'Argument' for example, which suggests to me that Hughes was trying to engender a greater understanding of the work. To omit one of his most significant and extraordinary achievements from his 'Collected Poems' is a major decision. It's unclear what led Paul Keegan to do this. We know when Hughes was alive he included only some of the 'Epilogue poems' and no extract from the main poem in the 'Selected Poems' Faber put out in 1981. But this decision is explicable surely on the grounds that he didn't feel he wanted to break up what is a notably sustained piece of work. It doesn't follow at all that he somehow wanted this expunged from his canon in the same way Auden did with 'The Orators' for example.
Incidentally the ebook is of the later version of the poem (with the cut down version of the 'Argument' at the start). It fails to format a lot of the verse properly and indefensibly - does nobody at Faber think it worth employing someone with at least intermediate HTML skills?. The 'Epilogue poems' are also rendered, inexplicably, in a much larger font size. Unbelievably sloppy. I purchased this beautiful original edition (paperback but with the Baskin cover) after returning the Kindle one for a refund.
It's perhaps unsurprising that Hughes felt obliged to preface 'Gaudete' with an 'Argument':
An Anglican Clergyman, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is carried away into the other world by elemental spirits...
To fill his place in this world, for the time of his absence, the spirits make an exact duplicate of him out of an oak log, and fill it with elemental spirit life...
This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of love in his own log-like way.
He organises the women of his parish into a coven, a love-society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is the birth of a Messiah to be fathered by Lumb.
If that sounds odd and off-putting, I would understand both points of view but I nevertheless agree with John Bayley, writing a few years after its publication, that 'Gaudete' is 'one of the most remarkable achievements of modern poetry,'
Bayley goes on to say that part of the achievement of the poem is how 'fantasy – the very odd tale or legend that preoccupied the author – is made as real as life on the farm.' How Hughes brilliantly effects this is absolutely the most striking aspect but also from a technical point of view formally 'Gaudete' is remarkable. The nature and structure of the verse is brilliantly developed, its effortless shifting utterly organic, often achieving a completely graceful elision from prose to verse and back. Above all, it is the most dramatic and disturbing recreation of the Dionysos/Bacchae myth I have ever read. One of the epigraphs to the poem is from Heraclitus to the effect that Hades and Dionysos are one - and (paraphrasing) that therefore, one has to expect shocking things to occur. The whole poem feels as if it takes place not quite in its ostensible very English rural village setting but in some liminal space adjacent to it in which very brutal, amoral things are commonplace. (Although the incongruity of 'The Archers' meets Ovid is brilliantly done and not without considerable humour in places). This is profoundly unsettling and the depiction of the violence which is inseparable from Hughes' vision is necessarily difficult to read. But for me it remains a masterpiece for its Ovidian and Shakespearean reimagining. I understand this might be a divisive view - it's a testimony to my reaction to what I have read and not an argument, rhetorical or otherwise to persuade you to take a different view or even necessarily to read it.
It's a shock to pick up the 2003 'Collected Poems' and find that only the 'Epilogue' poems are included. Particularly as the later reprinting of the poem contains a longer, (sort of) clearer version of the 'Argument' for example, which suggests to me that Hughes was trying to engender a greater understanding of the work. To omit one of his most significant and extraordinary achievements from his 'Collected Poems' is a major decision. It's unclear what led Paul Keegan to do this. We know when Hughes was alive he included only some of the 'Epilogue poems' and no extract from the main poem in the 'Selected Poems' Faber put out in 1981. But this decision is explicable surely on the grounds that he didn't feel he wanted to break up what is a notably sustained piece of work. It doesn't follow at all that he somehow wanted this expunged from his canon in the same way Auden did with 'The Orators' for example.
Incidentally the ebook is of the later version of the poem (with the cut down version of the 'Argument' at the start). It fails to format a lot of the verse properly and indefensibly - does nobody at Faber think it worth employing someone with at least intermediate HTML skills?. The 'Epilogue poems' are also rendered, inexplicably, in a much larger font size. Unbelievably sloppy. I purchased this beautiful original edition (paperback but with the Baskin cover) after returning the Kindle one for a refund.
October 20, 2025
I picked up this book after I read a (distrubing) Ted Hughes biography. The description of the ‘plot’ and the fact that no one would publish it when Hughes first sent it out reacted with my morbid curiosity, already piqued by that biography. I couldn’t finish this poem-story. Of course, Hughes’ writing itself is powerful; I can’t stop being amazed by the images he uses and the sensations he conjures. But the ‘plot’ is just too either stupid, pathetic, boring, unhinged, or all of the above. In effect, it is about a changeling who is incarnated as a reverend of a small town, and he has sex with every woman there. Every poem appears to focus on a woman sexually obsessed with him, and consummation that is discovered by the husband, such that all hell breaks loose. It looks like Hughes, after in succession his two loves having killed themselves while together with him, is fixated on the moment of infidelity then causing suffering and torment. Hughes does get across how senseless it all is; the poems, if anything, get across the paradoxical state of obsession with the physicality and pleasure of sex, which is meant to be and inevitably becomes deeply meaningful, but when pursued in this way, is emptied of meaning—or the sublimity and power of love that would hold in consummation of a loving relationship gets sublimated and perverted in the amount of hatred, pain, and conflict between the people implicated.
October 22, 2025
I had to take a couple of days to digest Gaudete before I could form sentences about it. This book is a LOT.
I’m familiar with Ted Hughes’s poetry - Crow in particular, which I love - but this poem-as-novel is something else entirely. Honestly one of the best things I’ve ever read. Saying the language is exquisite feels like a vast understatement. It is though, it's incredible, loaded with elemental imagery (mud, water, blood, fire) and a mercilessly feral energy, with so many clever uses of enjambment that made me actually gasp.
The story itself is a bacchanal, foisted upon a quiet village by the doppelgänger of their minister. Hughes's exploitation of the sacred is calculated, and lends the whole thing a delicious extra layer of grotesque uncanniness. So many scenes of absolute horror, not in a cheap, sensational way, but with a dread that creeps in under the skin and continues to grow throughout the text as you begin to understand that things aren't going to get better. I caught myself grimacing at so many points, and half way through the epilogue I realised I’d been holding my breath.
There's no great lesson to be learned here. This isn't a moral fable. There is no closure or redemption, only the void. The ritual is spent.
Brutal. Brilliant. Book of the year, surely.
I’m familiar with Ted Hughes’s poetry - Crow in particular, which I love - but this poem-as-novel is something else entirely. Honestly one of the best things I’ve ever read. Saying the language is exquisite feels like a vast understatement. It is though, it's incredible, loaded with elemental imagery (mud, water, blood, fire) and a mercilessly feral energy, with so many clever uses of enjambment that made me actually gasp.
The story itself is a bacchanal, foisted upon a quiet village by the doppelgänger of their minister. Hughes's exploitation of the sacred is calculated, and lends the whole thing a delicious extra layer of grotesque uncanniness. So many scenes of absolute horror, not in a cheap, sensational way, but with a dread that creeps in under the skin and continues to grow throughout the text as you begin to understand that things aren't going to get better. I caught myself grimacing at so many points, and half way through the epilogue I realised I’d been holding my breath.
There's no great lesson to be learned here. This isn't a moral fable. There is no closure or redemption, only the void. The ritual is spent.
Brutal. Brilliant. Book of the year, surely.
June 11, 2025
The story of Lumb is graphic and reminded me of Hammer House of Horror movies from the 1970s.
A story which seems familiar, a vicar taken by spirits and his replacement, a demon-esque man fashioning his own version of Christianity, yep, a 70s film, violent and graphic with bored housewives having sex with the demon vicar.
But then, the epilogue, wow! Grabs you and takes you into a wonderful Hughes world.
Had to reread as soon as I finished, a magnificent series of poems which left me quite breathless and in awe. Whether Hughes meant it as a series of poems or to be taken as a conclusion to the story (which I'm sure it's meant to be) the epilogue is outstanding, an amazing read.
A story which seems familiar, a vicar taken by spirits and his replacement, a demon-esque man fashioning his own version of Christianity, yep, a 70s film, violent and graphic with bored housewives having sex with the demon vicar.
But then, the epilogue, wow! Grabs you and takes you into a wonderful Hughes world.
Had to reread as soon as I finished, a magnificent series of poems which left me quite breathless and in awe. Whether Hughes meant it as a series of poems or to be taken as a conclusion to the story (which I'm sure it's meant to be) the epilogue is outstanding, an amazing read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 5, 2020
I have to say this is the strangest book I have ever read. I have searched the Internet for background information and what led Hughes to write it. It sits in the strange, violent and nightmare that are evoked by The Wicker Man ( the original film), The Devils. Within it Hughes writes some amazing poetry. What led him to write this I really don’t know.
December 16, 2021
Some sort of hope for a film from this strange mess? Very lacking. Highlights~ "At the Top of My Soul" "I Watched a Wise Beetle" "In a World Where All is Temporary" "I Heard a Screech, Sudden" "The Rain Comes Again" "I See the Oak's Bride in the Oak's Grasp" and "Hearing Your Moan Echo, I Chill. I Shiver".
September 24, 2023
This surprised me. I have never understood the "genius" of Ted Hughes. His work always seemed a bit too simplistic, even dull at times to me. This collection is anything but dull. Every page or two we are introduced to characters from a small village whose lives will be supernaturally/spiritualy entwined as the volume progresses. Clever, spooky, and endearing.
December 5, 2024
It took me two years to finish this bastard but I'm so glad I picked it up again!!! Not to sound like a dumb bitch but the language is so visual it literally was like watching a film in my head. So much weirdness and fucking it was right up my street. Juicy af.
September 2, 2019
what a hot mess - amazing!
February 28, 2023
Jolly good. More details here:
https://discontinuednotes.com/2023/02...
https://discontinuednotes.com/2023/02...
December 27, 2023
I literally sped through this so quickly... and I know I'll go back through again at a slower pace now to fully appreciate it the prose.
October 22, 2015
I have had this book for a long time before reading it - I am embarrassed to say that there is a note in it indicating I bought it in 1987!
This is an odd book. The subject matter is odd and the writing style is odd. Weirdness has an appeal and so that is no criticism of the book. There is much to like. Hughes use of the language is at times completely masterful. The book slides between poetry and prose - and much of the poetry is prose like and much of the prose is poetical, so it transition between styles is easy.
It starts with a short one page synopsis in plain English. This is helpful as without it the book could appear as just a jumble of images. But the fact that it needs it is a bad sign to me. Perhaps it is just a reflection of the claim that this was intended as the basis for a film.
It might work better as a film. The odd thing is that even though it is mostly beautifully written and the story is interesting, it is strangely not compelling. Unfortunately, I also felt the climatic passages up to the death of tree-Lumb (I am giving nothing away as this is told in the first page of the book) is the weakest. The post death of tree-Lumb epilogue is interesting but difficult to get into.
Read this if you like Hughes style of writing, like an original and creative mind exploring ideas, or like the very odd or weird. Overall I suspect a niche taste.
This is an odd book. The subject matter is odd and the writing style is odd. Weirdness has an appeal and so that is no criticism of the book. There is much to like. Hughes use of the language is at times completely masterful. The book slides between poetry and prose - and much of the poetry is prose like and much of the prose is poetical, so it transition between styles is easy.
It starts with a short one page synopsis in plain English. This is helpful as without it the book could appear as just a jumble of images. But the fact that it needs it is a bad sign to me. Perhaps it is just a reflection of the claim that this was intended as the basis for a film.
It might work better as a film. The odd thing is that even though it is mostly beautifully written and the story is interesting, it is strangely not compelling. Unfortunately, I also felt the climatic passages up to the death of tree-Lumb (I am giving nothing away as this is told in the first page of the book) is the weakest. The post death of tree-Lumb epilogue is interesting but difficult to get into.
Read this if you like Hughes style of writing, like an original and creative mind exploring ideas, or like the very odd or weird. Overall I suspect a niche taste.
October 23, 2025
Picked it up because Tim Downie said it was worth a read. I wholly agree.
At first I had no idea what was happening. But being able to piece things together and predict where the story was going was fun. It felt original, but not too out-of-the-box that it leaves you confused.
The description in the book is so detailed. It was the first time in a long time where the images slipped into my mind, rather than having to do the work myself.
At first I had no idea what was happening. But being able to piece things together and predict where the story was going was fun. It felt original, but not too out-of-the-box that it leaves you confused.
The description in the book is so detailed. It was the first time in a long time where the images slipped into my mind, rather than having to do the work myself.
December 7, 2009
Hard work, but worth it. The cinematic element to the work is very strong - lots of powerful imagery... at times confusing and seriously fucked up... great fun.
May 3, 2015
While this was easy to follow, I found that I didn't care about the characters or plot. Many of the characters were forgettable.
January 23, 2025
Currently separating the art from the artist (I hate Ted Hughes but this is phenomenal)
January 21, 2008
ted putting the sham in his shamanism
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews