Selected Poems 1957-1994

by Hughes, Ted

• ISBN13: 9780374528645
• ISBN10: 0374528640
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-09
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Poems from every phase of the career of a great poet This selection of Ted Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book,The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor,Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; fromWodwo,CrowandGaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated intoBirthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death. The British poet, translator, author, and criticTed Hughes, born in 1930, wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life,Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being;Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus'sOresteia, Racine'sPhegrave;dre, and Euripedes'Alcestis; and the bestsellingBirthday Letters. Hughes served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II from 1984 until his death in 1998. This selection of Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, fully spans his brilliant, highly influential four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book,The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor,Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; fromWodwo,Crow,andGaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once a rural chronicler and a form-breaking modern artist.Selected Poems 1957-1994also includes previously uncollected pieces and eight poems later incorporated into Hughes's celebratedBirthday Letters, a meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death. This selection, made by the poet himself, offers verse from every phase of the four-decade career of a great modernist. "[Hughes] was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world . . . [His] poems were essentially reminders that we are all part of the same fabric."--Seamus Heaney "Ted Hughes, who died at 68, was as deserving a poet laureate as England had chosen. From the outset he showed an overwhelming vitality. He wrote or translated or edited some 40 books during his lifetime, books of verse, of translation, of essays, as well as books for children . . . Hughes as a student had taken up anthropology, not literature, and he chose to meditate his way into trancelike states of pre-consciousness before committing poems to paper. His poems, early or late, enter into the relations of living creatures; they move in close to animal consciousness . . . While inhabiting the bodies of creatures, mostly male, Hughes clambers back down the evolutionary chain. He searches deep into the riddles of language, too, those that precede any given tongue, language that reeks of the forest or even the jungle . . . Only inSelected Poems, 1957-1994does Hughes's imagination disclose a sensitivity that the poet had lacked or been constrained from uttering over all the earlier years: knowledge of the hearts of women. Not only does the final section include a group of eight poems relating to Sylvia Plath that he would include inBirthday Letters; butSelected Poemsgives us eight more that evidently plumb the soul of Assia Wevill, the woman who broke th

Author Biography

The masterful British poet and critic Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Racine's Phedre, and Euripedes' Alcestis; and Birthday Letters.

Table of Contents

The Thought-Fox	p. 3
Song	p. 4
The Jaguar	p. 4
Famous Poet	p. 5
Soliloquy	p. 7
The Horses	p. 7
Fallgrief's Girlfriends	p. 9
Egg-Head	p. 10
Vampire	p. 11
The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water	p. 12
Meeting	p. 13
Wind	p. 14
October Dawn	p. 14
The Casualty	p. 15
Bayonet Charge	p. 16
Six Young Men	p. 17
The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar	p. 19
Song from Bawdry Embraced	p. 20
Mayday on Holderness	p. 23
February	p. 24
Crow Hill	p. 25
A Woman Unconscious	p. 25
Strawberry Hill	p. 26
Fourth of July	p. 27
Esther's Tomcat	p. 27
Wilfred Owen's Photographs	p. 28
Relic	p. 29
Hawk Roosting	p. 29
Fire-Eater	p. 30
To Paint a Water Lily	p. 31
The Bull Moses	p. 32
Cat and Mouse	p. 33
View of a Pig	p. 34
The Retired Colonel	p. 35
November	p. 36
An Otter	p. 37
Witches	p. 39
Thrushes	p. 39
Snowdrop	p. 40
Pike	p. 41
Sunstroke	p. 42
Cleopatra to the Asp	p. 43
Stealing Trout on a May Morning	p. 45
Water	p. 48
Memory	p. 48
Tutorial	p. 49
Trees	p. 50
The Lake	p. 51
A Match	p. 52
Small Events	p. 52
Crow Wakes	p. 53
Thistles	p. 55
Still Life	p. 55
Her Husband	p. 56
Cadenza	p. 57
Ghost Crabs	p. 58
Public Bar TV	p. 59
Kafka	p. 60
Second Glance at a Jaguar	p. 60
Fern	p. 61
Stations	p. 61
The Green Wolf	p. 63
The Bear	p. 64
A Haunting	p. 65
The Mascot	p. 66
Wit's End	p. 67
Two Minutes' Silence	p. 68
The Red Carpet	p. 69
Theology	p. 70
Gog	p. 70
Kreutzer Sonata	p. 71
The Dream Time	p. 72
'The dead man in his cave beginning to sweat'	p. 73
Remembrance Day	p. 74
New Moon in January	p. 75
The Warriors of the North	p. 75
The Rat's Dance	p. 76
The Rat's Vision	p. 77
The Rat's Flight	p. 77
Heptonstall	p. 78
Skylarks	p. 78
Pibroch	p. 83
The Howling of Wolves	p. 84
Gnat-Psalm	p. 85
Full Moon and Little Frieda	p. 87
Wodwo	p. 87
Two Legends	p. 89
Lineage	p. 90
Examination at the Womb-Door	p. 90
A Childish Prank	p. 91
Crow's First Lesson	p. 92
That Moment	p. 93
Crow Tyrannosaurus	p. 93
The Black Beast	p. 94
Crow's Account of the Battle	p. 95
Crow's Fall	p. 97
Crow and the Birds	p. 98
Crow on the Beach	p. 99
The Contender	p. 99
Crow's Vanity	p. 101
A Horrible Religious Error	p. 101
In Laughter	p. 102
Robin Song	p. 103
Conjuring in Heaven	p. 104
Owl's Song	p. 104
Crow's Elephant Totem Song	p. 105
Dawn's Rose	p. 107
The Smile	p. 107
Crow's Battle Fury	p. 109
Crow Blacker than Ever	p. 110
Revenge Fable	p. 110
Bedtime Anecdote	p. 111
Apple Tragedy	p. 112
Crow's Last Stand	p. 113
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet	p. 114
Lovesong	p. 114
Notes for a Little Play	p. 116
The Lovepet	p. 117
How Water Began to Paly	p. 118
Littleblood	p. 119
The Scream	p. 121
The Executioner	p. 122
The Knight	p. 123
A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement	p. 124
Leaf Mould	p. 158
Moors	p. 160
Chinese History of Colden Water	p. 160
Rhododendrons	p. 161
Sunstruck	p. 162
Curlews	p. 163
For Billy Holt	p. 164
When Men Got to the Summit	p. 165
The Canal's Drowning Black	p. 166
Cock-Crows	p. 167
Mount Zion	p. 168
The Long Tunnel Ceiling	p. 169
Tree	p. 170
Heptonstall Old Church	p. 171
Widdop	p. 172
Emily Bronte	p. 173
Rain	p. 175
Dehorning	p. 176
Bringing in New Couples	p. 178
Tractor	p. 179
Roe-Deer	p. 181
Sketching a Thatcher	p. 182
Ravens	p. 184
February 17th	p. 186
Birth of Rainbow	p. 187
Coming Down Through Somerset	p. 188
The Day He Died	p. 190
A Memory	p. 191
Earth-Numb	p. 193
A Motorbike	p. 194
Deaf School	p. 195
Life is Trying to be Life	p. 196
Speech out of Shadow	p. 197
from Seven Dungeon Songs	p. 198
Tiger-Psalm	p. 201
In the M5 Restaurant	p. 203
That Star	p. 204
Poets	p. 204
Grosse Fuge	p. 205
Children	p. 206
Prospero and Sycorax	p. 206
The Stone	p. 207
TV Off	p. 208
A God	p. 208
Remembering Teheran	p. 211
Bones	p. 214
Do not Pick up the Telephone	p. 215
Reckless Head	p. 217
from Prometheus On His Crag	p. 218
A Violet at Lough Aughresberg	p. 223
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies	p. 223
Where I Sit Writing My Letter	p. 225
Tern	p. 226
The Honey Bee	p. 227
Sunstruck Foxglove	p. 227
Eclipse	p. 228
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper	p. 232
New Foal	p. 235
The Hen	p. 236
The Hare	p. 238
The River	p. 243
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan	p. 244
Low Water	p. 246
Japanese River Tales	p. 247
Ophelia	p. 249
Strangers	p. 249
The Gulkana	p. 250
Go Fishing	p. 255
Salmon Eggs	p. 256
A Cormorant	p. 258
An Eel	p. 259
Performance	p. 260
Night Arrival of Sea-Trout	p. 262
October Salmon	p. 262
That Morning	p. 265
The Fool's Evil Dream	p. 267
Nearly Awake	p. 268
Tell	p. 268
Dust As We Are	p. 269
Telegraph Wires	p. 270
Sacrifice	p. 271
For the Duration	p. 273
Under High Wood	p. 275
The Atlantic	p. 276
Little Whale Song	p. 278
Sitting Bull on Christmas Morning	p. 280
Nightvoice	p. 281
The Ghost Dancer	p. 283
Rain-Charm for the Duchy	p. 285
Old Oats	p. 289
The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers	p. 290
Anniversary	p. 291
Chaucer	p. 293
You Hated Spain	p. 294
The Earthenware Head	p. 295
The Tender Place	p. 297
Black Coat	p. 298
Being Christlike	p. 300
The God	p. 300
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother	p. 304
The Other	p. 305
The Locket	p. 306
Shibboleth	p. 307
Snow	p. 308
Folktale	p. 309
Opus 131	p. 310
Descent	p. 311
The Error	p. 312
Lines about Elias	p. 313
A Dove	p. 316
Index of Titles	p. 319
Index of First Lines	p. 327
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.