heptagrammaton’s Reviews > A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Poems > Status Update

"When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit
He looks like an old woman
Trying to get her knickers off.
In the end he lumbers away
To find some other buzzard, maybe older,
To show him how."

lmao. 10/10. best book ever.

One has no choice but to stan spraddled crows guzzling dropped ice cream .

"The cruel earth's offerings
The mad earth's missionaries."

"Skylarks" is full of magical dynamism, of a profound and awesome beauty of the brimful cup of life. These are vignettes still, if potent ones - so concrete analysis would easily fly into the realms of subjective elaboration, if I were to chase it. So I remain, singularly attractive by startling turns of phrase.

"...the command, Not die
But climb
Climb
Obedient as to death a dead thing."

- Skylarks

There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing od heads —
The allotment of death
For the one path of my path is direct
Through the bones of the living.

- "Hawk Roosting"

I, too, appreciate the wiseman/devil/force of nature/abjurer of the world/archduke of a circle of Hell look of a mountain goat.

Horizons, again, in "The Horses" - the repeating motif, a thing of earthly vastness, fencing in the scene. I do wonder how much of a reaccuring pattern this is in 1957's "The Hawk in the Rain"

There's a great weary sorrow, overhanging.

"Pike" takes an entrancing, vivid, violent and sublime turn - somewhat reminiscent of "The Hawk in the Rain" in the rapid vivid haecceity of theme and phrase Hughes seems to excel at.