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Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama
Book by Ted Hughes
- GenresPoetry
60 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
3 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
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 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 29, 2021
Cave Birds is great at building mood, and bouncing off of illustrations, and procuring great illustrative responses, with explosive moving language, but I think it fails at its narrative concept.
The sequence can be generically framed as a man being punished through a harsh initiatory process by a Goddess for his offense against a composite form of her, in which he faces a grueling transformation from living to dead to undead to renewed, intermittently residing in the underworld and standing both torture and trial, and perceiving the many foul bird-demons with daunting claws and masses of disproportionate body parts and feathers — but the poems often draw such enigmatic sequences and narratives that any sense of narrative structure quickly dissappears. I think this fractured sense of narrative is a result of the text's writing process: originally through a nine piece sequence based on Baskin illustrations, but which became bloated into a larger text through more illustrations sent by Baskin, and later with illustration by Baskin of the expanded underworld sequence penned further by Hughes — letters from Baskin I have read in regard to the original Capriccio sequence suggest good intention and a desire to put their vibrant collaborations to paper, but one which becomes pressuring and perhaps distorting of the poetic vision Hughes had.
The poet himself coined the collection as tedious and too intellectual, likely what resulted in the poems' enigmatic nature. Many analyses of the sequence exist, none of which I have read and which I think would cloud my initial gut reaction to the text.
Though to be positive, when many of these poems are seen in an individual light, between poem and immediate illustration exclusively, they are more rewarding, clear and vibrant in the motion and emotion they procure. There are few settings of nature, how the normal Hughes poem would be at least next to, but of a purely supernatural landscape for the most part here. Interestingly, there are many cases of the creatures being compared to foliage, something I have not seen mentioned in brief scholarly comments on the collection.
The narrative basis of harming some 'composite Goddess' can be seen strongly in 'Something was happening,' though other poems narrating the events involving the She are of no clarity to me. The sequence ends cleanly: 'At the end of the ritual / up comes a goblin' — perhaps alluding to a rebirth into a mystical form of the evildoer, as opposed to the rebirth of the righteous around their burial stones into elves, but my knowledge of Nordic and English folklore/myth is slight.
Wouldn't reccomend this collection to a new reader of Hughes, or even after an entry-point of Crow. I expect Prometheus on His Crag and Adam and The Sacred Nine to be superior renditions of a sequence concept, as Prometheus was penned during his Orghast period in Iran, and Adam as a solo collection without illustrative or photographic accompaniment being considered.
The sequence can be generically framed as a man being punished through a harsh initiatory process by a Goddess for his offense against a composite form of her, in which he faces a grueling transformation from living to dead to undead to renewed, intermittently residing in the underworld and standing both torture and trial, and perceiving the many foul bird-demons with daunting claws and masses of disproportionate body parts and feathers — but the poems often draw such enigmatic sequences and narratives that any sense of narrative structure quickly dissappears. I think this fractured sense of narrative is a result of the text's writing process: originally through a nine piece sequence based on Baskin illustrations, but which became bloated into a larger text through more illustrations sent by Baskin, and later with illustration by Baskin of the expanded underworld sequence penned further by Hughes — letters from Baskin I have read in regard to the original Capriccio sequence suggest good intention and a desire to put their vibrant collaborations to paper, but one which becomes pressuring and perhaps distorting of the poetic vision Hughes had.
The poet himself coined the collection as tedious and too intellectual, likely what resulted in the poems' enigmatic nature. Many analyses of the sequence exist, none of which I have read and which I think would cloud my initial gut reaction to the text.
Though to be positive, when many of these poems are seen in an individual light, between poem and immediate illustration exclusively, they are more rewarding, clear and vibrant in the motion and emotion they procure. There are few settings of nature, how the normal Hughes poem would be at least next to, but of a purely supernatural landscape for the most part here. Interestingly, there are many cases of the creatures being compared to foliage, something I have not seen mentioned in brief scholarly comments on the collection.
The narrative basis of harming some 'composite Goddess' can be seen strongly in 'Something was happening,' though other poems narrating the events involving the She are of no clarity to me. The sequence ends cleanly: 'At the end of the ritual / up comes a goblin' — perhaps alluding to a rebirth into a mystical form of the evildoer, as opposed to the rebirth of the righteous around their burial stones into elves, but my knowledge of Nordic and English folklore/myth is slight.
Wouldn't reccomend this collection to a new reader of Hughes, or even after an entry-point of Crow. I expect Prometheus on His Crag and Adam and The Sacred Nine to be superior renditions of a sequence concept, as Prometheus was penned during his Orghast period in Iran, and Adam as a solo collection without illustrative or photographic accompaniment being considered.
July 14, 2022
The history of its composition is curious and complicated, and sometimes Hughes gives the impression of having been forced reluctantly to write it. It was written during a period, 1973-76, when to an observer Hughes seems to have been astonishingly productive, bringing to completion Gaudete, Season Songs and Moortown as well as Cave Birds. Yet, looking back on this period, he described it as a time when he lost concentration and failed to write what he should have been writing. This is partly a nostalgia for the creative ease and artistic directness of theCrow period, which is when he felt most creatively fulfilled. The poems in Cave Birds are more complex, richly-textured and occasionally obscure than Crow, which might explain why Hughes thought they were too ‘studied’ – Neil Roberts
This volume appeared in 1975. Several poems in this volume are among Hughes’s finest imaginative achievements.
These poems include ‘The Executioner’; ‘The Knight’; ‘Bride and Groom’; and ‘The Risen’.
Hughes permits himself great prosperity and sensuousness of language in these poems.
The basis of “Cave Birds” is a metaphysical detection, namely the detection of the universal in one’s own self.
The series of poems in “Cave Birds” opens with a remarkable composition which depicts a kind of psychic disturbance in which the hero’s self-satisfied analysis of the world and his place in it is devastated by the visitations of a variety of horrifying bird-beings who face up to him with persuasive substantiation of his material nature and his transience.
His sense of self is represented by a cockerel; and he is taken on a journey into himself, the first stage of which is a process of bereavement and renaissance.
In fact reincarnation and sexual merger govern certain poems in the entire sequence.
Sexual union is an allegory for wholeness of being and oneness with the world.
Poems which are particularly noteworthy in this volume, in addition to those already named, are: ‘The Jungle’; ‘The Guide’; ‘A Riddle’; and ‘Walking Bare’.
This volume appeared in 1975. Several poems in this volume are among Hughes’s finest imaginative achievements.
These poems include ‘The Executioner’; ‘The Knight’; ‘Bride and Groom’; and ‘The Risen’.
Hughes permits himself great prosperity and sensuousness of language in these poems.
The basis of “Cave Birds” is a metaphysical detection, namely the detection of the universal in one’s own self.
The series of poems in “Cave Birds” opens with a remarkable composition which depicts a kind of psychic disturbance in which the hero’s self-satisfied analysis of the world and his place in it is devastated by the visitations of a variety of horrifying bird-beings who face up to him with persuasive substantiation of his material nature and his transience.
His sense of self is represented by a cockerel; and he is taken on a journey into himself, the first stage of which is a process of bereavement and renaissance.
In fact reincarnation and sexual merger govern certain poems in the entire sequence.
Sexual union is an allegory for wholeness of being and oneness with the world.
Poems which are particularly noteworthy in this volume, in addition to those already named, are: ‘The Jungle’; ‘The Guide’; ‘A Riddle’; and ‘Walking Bare’.
September 30, 2015
Тед Хюз и красотата на грозното:
http://azcheta.com/ted-hyuz-peshterni...
Сложна митологична рамка прозира в поезията на Хюз, плетеница от природни картини, зверове и божества. Хюз използва лиричен, макар и сравнително опростен език и наситени метафори и сравнения, за да предаде характерните тъмни, на места почти готически краски на тежката тематика в дъното на своята поезия. Трудно е да се говори за основни теми в творчеството му, тъй като нечовешкият, почти чудовищен характер на героите му често поставя разстояние между тях и читателя и ги прави трудни за разбиране. Това, което задължително трябва да се изкара на преден план обаче, е специфичната естетика, която Хюз изгражда в своя малък, пъстър, преплетен свят – една естетика на грозотата.
Също както в мъртвешката поезия, по страниците на „Пещерни птици” съществува царство на разпада, на мъката, смъртта и тленността. Дали става дума за стария поет, оплакващ дните на своята известност в миналото, или челюст, намерена край брега на реката, или три черепа, „чиито сънища мрат,//където са били родени”, оставени на произвола на дъжда, малко неща показват своето постоянство. Природата поражда страхопочитание, а най-често чист ужас и с това, че тя изглежда безплодна – „Засмукало морето, загризало скалата,//едно дърво се мъчи да роди листа”. Морето, вятърът и камъкът са три от лъчите на вечността в света на Хюз.
http://azcheta.com/ted-hyuz-peshterni...
ИК "Народна култура"
http://azcheta.com/ted-hyuz-peshterni...
Сложна митологична рамка прозира в поезията на Хюз, плетеница от природни картини, зверове и божества. Хюз използва лиричен, макар и сравнително опростен език и наситени метафори и сравнения, за да предаде характерните тъмни, на места почти готически краски на тежката тематика в дъното на своята поезия. Трудно е да се говори за основни теми в творчеството му, тъй като нечовешкият, почти чудовищен характер на героите му често поставя разстояние между тях и читателя и ги прави трудни за разбиране. Това, което задължително трябва да се изкара на преден план обаче, е специфичната естетика, която Хюз изгражда в своя малък, пъстър, преплетен свят – една естетика на грозотата.
Също както в мъртвешката поезия, по страниците на „Пещерни птици” съществува царство на разпада, на мъката, смъртта и тленността. Дали става дума за стария поет, оплакващ дните на своята известност в миналото, или челюст, намерена край брега на реката, или три черепа, „чиито сънища мрат,//където са били родени”, оставени на произвола на дъжда, малко неща показват своето постоянство. Природата поражда страхопочитание, а най-често чист ужас и с това, че тя изглежда безплодна – „Засмукало морето, загризало скалата,//едно дърво се мъчи да роди листа”. Морето, вятърът и камъкът са три от лъчите на вечността в света на Хюз.
http://azcheta.com/ted-hyuz-peshterni...
ИК "Народна култура"
January 30, 2025
The scream
Vomited itself.
Thus ends the only poem in this collection not paired with an illustration by Leonard Baskin. The illustrations, much like the poems reacting to them, exist in the shadow of an uncanny valley. Not only are they indicative of that trademark 1970's style (I can't for the life of me find out what it was called or why it coalesced around this style), but they inexplicably anthropomorphize the birds involved. Feathers abound, but sometimes the legs and genitalia are mannish, fleshy, obtuse. Are these than an Icarus, and if so, who or what is their sun?
It seems as if everything written in the second half of Hughes's life was in the wake of Plath: stylistically and content-wise. A helpful article by Neil Roberts explains that this collection was written shortly after the death of Hughes' lover Assia Wevill, AND the death of his child with that lover, AND soon before the death of his own mother. Horrifyingly for Hughes, this lover (who he started cheating with while still married to Plath) killed herself in the same was as Plath. The guilt must have wracked his every living moment like a curse. In the course of this short collection, Hughes sees in these birds a mirror of the chimeric monster he had become, one who damns everyone he loves to death.
The violent momentum of his earlier work is still here, but it's turned inward, spiky as the barbs of his own conscience. Over the course of these poems, the man-bird Hughes is captured, questioned, put on trial, and executed, only to finally receive a sort of re-creation/consummation at the end. The penultimate poem "The bride and groom lie hidden for three days" follows a mutual reverse-vivisection of sorts, a man and a woman constructing each other bodypart by bodypart. It 'suffers' from the same problem of creation myths, where everything is somehow created from two primordial beings having sex or one primordial being killing another. Perhaps the impossibility itself is an intentional side effect, a leftover tincture of cynicism that has slipped through, even to this most wholesome moment of the collection.
It seems that Hughes can only find new life in death. He writes "Why are you afraid? / In the house of the dead are many cradles." This feels somewhat Christian, in that we traditionally mark saints days as their "birthday into heaven" (as Hughes writes, "In none of these is the aftertaste of death / Pronounced poor. This earth is heaven's sweetness."). I don't think he paints his death as some self-aggrandizing martyrdom, however; he not only understands but has physically experienced his guilt. His own actions have directly led to the deaths of the women closest to him. I don't think he's a superstitious man, but he does understand a certain moral causality in the universe.
The man-bird hybrids haunting these pages are strange: they don't provide the affordances to Hughes-as-speaker that you'd imagine. They don't allow him to fly away from his problems or even to sing a new song. They seem instead to judge him from on high, literally looking down at him from electrical wires, from tree branches. They also drown out his screams with their own squawks. He dies by means of talons, being flayed alive: "The accused / Confesses his body-- / The gripful of daggers." Perhaps the most gripping poem is one called "A flayed crow in the hall of judgment." It has all the darkness and nothingness that Hughes' post-Plath poetry brims with, but it attempts to wrestle with this death, this annihilation. At the climax it asks a series of unanswerable, rapid questions, each ripping the heart further away from its cage. It crescendos with "What feathers shall I have? What is my weakness good for?" In these words I hear the cry of a man in pain, uncertain that his pain has been worth it. Is he really just being derivative of Plath? Will anyone ever forgive him?
He seems to be moving into resignation but not yet into acceptance: "I shall not fight / Against whatever is allotted to me. // My soul skinned, and the soul-skin laid out / A mat for my judges." This is the closest he gets to a martyrdom metaphor, possibly alluding to St. Bartholomew here. More likely, I think he's referring to the way that chickens and other birds can have their feathers boiled off to be made useful. I think he knows he's beyond saving, but he wants to at least be useful somehow.
I want to say that Ted, you are useful.
Your pain is relatable even if your readers haven't gone to your particular extremes. We all know how painful the talons are when we're in the grip of remorse. We all have wronged and most of us feel viscerally that our wrongs outweigh our good deeds. I'm thankful that Hughes didn't kill himself, because he probably must have considered that around this time. One body can only take so much weight. The poem immediately before the consummation poem is perhaps the point of most abject solitude, yet there is a faint glimmer of hope. It starts:
Walking bare
What is left is just what my life bought me
The gem of myself.
A bare certainty, without confection.
Through this blowtorch light little enough
But enough.
The stones do not cease to support me.
Valleys unfold their invitations.
A progress beyond assay, breath by breath.
I rest just at my weight.
Movement is still patient with me--
Lightness beyond lightness releasing me further.
The image accompanying this poem is probably the most abstract of the book, with two legs splintering into long beaks or maybe long grasses the farther it goes up. It's a chilling, painful image, and at first glance, it's surprising that Hughes saw some sort of comfort in it. But then again, should catharsis really surprise us? The dissolution of this bird-man's body makes way for the re-construction in the next poem, where man and woman make each other anew. Despite all the failures of his relationships, he's still trying. According to Wikipedia he had just gotten re-married around this time. Despite everything, he still struggles on, like a fledgling fallen out of the nest too early, found shivering in the grass. He's vulnerable and small, and we readers have the choice to crush him or cradle him.
Vomited itself.
Thus ends the only poem in this collection not paired with an illustration by Leonard Baskin. The illustrations, much like the poems reacting to them, exist in the shadow of an uncanny valley. Not only are they indicative of that trademark 1970's style (I can't for the life of me find out what it was called or why it coalesced around this style), but they inexplicably anthropomorphize the birds involved. Feathers abound, but sometimes the legs and genitalia are mannish, fleshy, obtuse. Are these than an Icarus, and if so, who or what is their sun?
It seems as if everything written in the second half of Hughes's life was in the wake of Plath: stylistically and content-wise. A helpful article by Neil Roberts explains that this collection was written shortly after the death of Hughes' lover Assia Wevill, AND the death of his child with that lover, AND soon before the death of his own mother. Horrifyingly for Hughes, this lover (who he started cheating with while still married to Plath) killed herself in the same was as Plath. The guilt must have wracked his every living moment like a curse. In the course of this short collection, Hughes sees in these birds a mirror of the chimeric monster he had become, one who damns everyone he loves to death.
The violent momentum of his earlier work is still here, but it's turned inward, spiky as the barbs of his own conscience. Over the course of these poems, the man-bird Hughes is captured, questioned, put on trial, and executed, only to finally receive a sort of re-creation/consummation at the end. The penultimate poem "The bride and groom lie hidden for three days" follows a mutual reverse-vivisection of sorts, a man and a woman constructing each other bodypart by bodypart. It 'suffers' from the same problem of creation myths, where everything is somehow created from two primordial beings having sex or one primordial being killing another. Perhaps the impossibility itself is an intentional side effect, a leftover tincture of cynicism that has slipped through, even to this most wholesome moment of the collection.
It seems that Hughes can only find new life in death. He writes "Why are you afraid? / In the house of the dead are many cradles." This feels somewhat Christian, in that we traditionally mark saints days as their "birthday into heaven" (as Hughes writes, "In none of these is the aftertaste of death / Pronounced poor. This earth is heaven's sweetness."). I don't think he paints his death as some self-aggrandizing martyrdom, however; he not only understands but has physically experienced his guilt. His own actions have directly led to the deaths of the women closest to him. I don't think he's a superstitious man, but he does understand a certain moral causality in the universe.
The man-bird hybrids haunting these pages are strange: they don't provide the affordances to Hughes-as-speaker that you'd imagine. They don't allow him to fly away from his problems or even to sing a new song. They seem instead to judge him from on high, literally looking down at him from electrical wires, from tree branches. They also drown out his screams with their own squawks. He dies by means of talons, being flayed alive: "The accused / Confesses his body-- / The gripful of daggers." Perhaps the most gripping poem is one called "A flayed crow in the hall of judgment." It has all the darkness and nothingness that Hughes' post-Plath poetry brims with, but it attempts to wrestle with this death, this annihilation. At the climax it asks a series of unanswerable, rapid questions, each ripping the heart further away from its cage. It crescendos with "What feathers shall I have? What is my weakness good for?" In these words I hear the cry of a man in pain, uncertain that his pain has been worth it. Is he really just being derivative of Plath? Will anyone ever forgive him?
He seems to be moving into resignation but not yet into acceptance: "I shall not fight / Against whatever is allotted to me. // My soul skinned, and the soul-skin laid out / A mat for my judges." This is the closest he gets to a martyrdom metaphor, possibly alluding to St. Bartholomew here. More likely, I think he's referring to the way that chickens and other birds can have their feathers boiled off to be made useful. I think he knows he's beyond saving, but he wants to at least be useful somehow.
I want to say that Ted, you are useful.
Your pain is relatable even if your readers haven't gone to your particular extremes. We all know how painful the talons are when we're in the grip of remorse. We all have wronged and most of us feel viscerally that our wrongs outweigh our good deeds. I'm thankful that Hughes didn't kill himself, because he probably must have considered that around this time. One body can only take so much weight. The poem immediately before the consummation poem is perhaps the point of most abject solitude, yet there is a faint glimmer of hope. It starts:
Walking bare
What is left is just what my life bought me
The gem of myself.
A bare certainty, without confection.
Through this blowtorch light little enough
But enough.
The stones do not cease to support me.
Valleys unfold their invitations.
A progress beyond assay, breath by breath.
I rest just at my weight.
Movement is still patient with me--
Lightness beyond lightness releasing me further.
The image accompanying this poem is probably the most abstract of the book, with two legs splintering into long beaks or maybe long grasses the farther it goes up. It's a chilling, painful image, and at first glance, it's surprising that Hughes saw some sort of comfort in it. But then again, should catharsis really surprise us? The dissolution of this bird-man's body makes way for the re-construction in the next poem, where man and woman make each other anew. Despite all the failures of his relationships, he's still trying. According to Wikipedia he had just gotten re-married around this time. Despite everything, he still struggles on, like a fledgling fallen out of the nest too early, found shivering in the grass. He's vulnerable and small, and we readers have the choice to crush him or cradle him.
April 12, 2009
this should say 'by Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin', who drew the pictures, some of which are illustrations, but most of which prompted the poems. which are also very good, though possibly nightmare-inducing. and there is a little goblin at the end.
March 6, 2021
Hughes and Baskin - phenomenal creators and even the 70’s vibe transcends time to be a powerful poetic experience. Bought it used infused with use and a patina of age and shelf. Just like me.
At the end of the ritual
Up comes a goblin.
At the end of the ritual
Up comes a goblin.
October 7, 2024
« Colin » puts it right.
I don’t know why but the narrative was so confusing and blurry. At times I enjoyed the poems and the imagery used by Hughes, but mostly I didn’t. His poems here feels like a riddle, and the narrative was to be even more of a riddle. It was « too studied », as Hughes said it himself. I really enjoyed the references and the creativity. The overall idea is brilliant but it is not put right.
Maybe it’s just me! I should probably re read that again, when I’m in the right mood to crack open this book and actually enjoy it.
I shall say, the illustrations are incredible but mostly, they felt as if not matching the poem. But others, were more important than the poems.
I don’t know why but the narrative was so confusing and blurry. At times I enjoyed the poems and the imagery used by Hughes, but mostly I didn’t. His poems here feels like a riddle, and the narrative was to be even more of a riddle. It was « too studied », as Hughes said it himself. I really enjoyed the references and the creativity. The overall idea is brilliant but it is not put right.
Maybe it’s just me! I should probably re read that again, when I’m in the right mood to crack open this book and actually enjoy it.
I shall say, the illustrations are incredible but mostly, they felt as if not matching the poem. But others, were more important than the poems.
December 13, 2023
"The pondering body of the law teeters across
A web-glistening geometry."
I think this is my new favourite sentence. Strong contender for #1 favourite sentence is also this description of the judge:
"His gluttony
Is a strange one - his leavings are guilt and sentence."
A web-glistening geometry."
I think this is my new favourite sentence. Strong contender for #1 favourite sentence is also this description of the judge:
"His gluttony
Is a strange one - his leavings are guilt and sentence."
November 21, 2025
Not my faverite Ted Hughes But well worth readibg
May 20, 2018
Actual rating 4.5, but the book itself is so beautiful it deserves the extra half star.
This collection is subtitled "An Alchemical Cave Drama". It's not entirely clear what exactly about this sequence is "alchemical" or "dramatic", but the description feels right either way. The whole thing is a single unbroken sequence of poems that narrates a mystical story represented by the beautiful black and white illustrations of birds and such located on the right-hand pages of the book. Each poem advances what feels like a ritual, a summoning of and through the cave birds with their horrible gaps and feathers and monstrousness that follows the text of the sequence.
It took me a few poems to really get into the sequence; they don't make clear logical sense in any sort of conventional way. The first poem, "The Scream", sets the tone for the whole book as it opens "The was the sun on the wall--my childhood's / Nursery picture. And there was my gravestone / Which shared my dreams, and ate and drank with me happily" and ends" "The scream / Vomited itself." Every poem participates in this magic, with the words sometimes rising to a fevered dreamscape that animates the images next to them until it almost feels like the bird will leap from the page to attack you:
One of the stories being told is a courtroom drama, though it is unclear who is being tried, or for what, or how it would map onto a real court. Another is birth and death and the way they sometimes seem like the same thing, marking the ends of a life. Another is a spell to summon the goblin on the final page of the book--what that goblin is or why we would summon it is unclear.
Highly recommended, both as a book and as individual poems (if you're willing to take on a little confusion and uncertainty); an intriguing look at both an interpretation of the poetic sequence and its workings as well as the relationship between image and word/the effects of illustration as a part of/counterpart to/companion of literary work (or of literary work as elucidation of visual art).
This collection is subtitled "An Alchemical Cave Drama". It's not entirely clear what exactly about this sequence is "alchemical" or "dramatic", but the description feels right either way. The whole thing is a single unbroken sequence of poems that narrates a mystical story represented by the beautiful black and white illustrations of birds and such located on the right-hand pages of the book. Each poem advances what feels like a ritual, a summoning of and through the cave birds with their horrible gaps and feathers and monstrousness that follows the text of the sequence.
It took me a few poems to really get into the sequence; they don't make clear logical sense in any sort of conventional way. The first poem, "The Scream", sets the tone for the whole book as it opens "The was the sun on the wall--my childhood's / Nursery picture. And there was my gravestone / Which shared my dreams, and ate and drank with me happily" and ends" "The scream / Vomited itself." Every poem participates in this magic, with the words sometimes rising to a fevered dreamscape that animates the images next to them until it almost feels like the bird will leap from the page to attack you:
The champion of the swoonAs such, while certain individual poems or poem/picture pairs (it's really not clear what the experience of any of these poems would be like without the drawings next to them) could stand out on their own--"The scream," "The executioner," The knight," "The scapegoat," "She seemed so considerate," "The risen" (my choices for favorites)--I would emphatically recommend that the book be read all at once and in a single sitting. That way when we hear of the knight "He has conquered. He has surrendered everything." or "Blueflies lift off his beauty. / Beetles and ants officiate" we know the accused "Confesses his body-- / The gripful of daggers" and that there was "a leaning menhir, with my name on it. / And an epitaph, which read: / 'Under this rock, he found weapons.'" (just to pull from a few poems around "The knight").
Lolled his bauble head, a puppet, a zombie
And the lord of immortality is a carcase of opals,
A wine-skin of riddance, a goat of oaths
A slaking of thistles. (from "The scapegoat")
One of the stories being told is a courtroom drama, though it is unclear who is being tried, or for what, or how it would map onto a real court. Another is birth and death and the way they sometimes seem like the same thing, marking the ends of a life. Another is a spell to summon the goblin on the final page of the book--what that goblin is or why we would summon it is unclear.
Highly recommended, both as a book and as individual poems (if you're willing to take on a little confusion and uncertainty); an intriguing look at both an interpretation of the poetic sequence and its workings as well as the relationship between image and word/the effects of illustration as a part of/counterpart to/companion of literary work (or of literary work as elucidation of visual art).
July 7, 2017
Found this scratty and old, battered collection of illustration and poetry, in the depths of my university's library hidden away on a very crammed shelf. Cave birds does all relate to birds in some way, but the sort of not-quite birds that are illustrated and written about in this book, do create a palpable dread and anxiousness in the reader, as it's creepier than I was expecting.
I may be slightly biased, but I do think that without the illustration, there wouldn't be as much feeling in this collection as there would be, as the birds illustrated in this collection are sort of off looking in how they are drawn and presented. It makes me want just more poetry collections that are illustrated, as that would be a delight.
I may be slightly biased, but I do think that without the illustration, there wouldn't be as much feeling in this collection as there would be, as the birds illustrated in this collection are sort of off looking in how they are drawn and presented. It makes me want just more poetry collections that are illustrated, as that would be a delight.
August 19, 2009
A very strong, sometimes ferocious book of poems. It occurred to me on this reading that no matter how pagan Ted Hughes tries to be, his paganism is based on, is a reaction to a Christianity that he loathes. I have not read any Hughes criticism, so maybe this is a well-worn insight, but I'll stand by it. He often subverts Christian motifs in this book, and this seems to be a feature of the poems that impress me the most.
September 10, 2013
Some very odd poems which were quite difficult to read did not detract from the overall experience. You could tell that the poems were occasionally bundled together, and were edited and reworked so that the overarching theme of an "alchemical cave drama" didn't always appear. Still, it was wonderful to read these more complicated poems, after reading, what felt like, the simpler poems of Birthday Letters.
December 16, 2021
Cave birds really isn't Hughes at his best. Highlights ~ "The Scream" " She Seemed so Considerate" "A Green Mother" "As i Came, I Saw a Wood" "After There Was Nothing Came a Woman" "His Legs Ran About" and "Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days".
May 5, 2012
Good set of poems for sure and the pictures make the alchelmical drama come true...
June 27, 2019
I think Baskin's drawings must radically change the poetry, as without it, the poems' seem to be really lacking.
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