false 996 14 0
The dialect of Hughes's native West Riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of his verse. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published. Other works soon followed.

Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath's suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated earlier), but thereafter he published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965 he was co-editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Some of Hughes's essays on subjects of literary and cultural criticism were published as Winter Pollen (1994). After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of Birthday Letters (1998). In 1984 he was appointed Britain's poet laureate.]]> male Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire 1930/08/17 1998/10/28 313277 0374525811 9780374525811 59 <![CDATA[Birthday Letters: Poems]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173673585m/313277.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173673585s/313277.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313277.Birthday_Letters_Poems 3.78 671 Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."

Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:

Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it.

]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 1998 97553 0571176550 9780571176557 24 <![CDATA[Crow]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171381262m/97553.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171381262s/97553.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97553.Crow 4.22 198 996 3.98 2324 315 1970 149505 0374125384 9780374125387 13 <![CDATA[Collected Poems]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172203055m/149505.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172203055s/149505.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149505.Collected_Poems 4.29 111 All the poems of a great 20th-century poet

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature's truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries.
]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 2003 119502 0571226124 9780571226122 23 <![CDATA[The Iron Man]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171785566m/119502.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171785566s/119502.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119502.The_Iron_Man 3.83 111 996 3.98 2324 315 1968 574889 057111976X 9780571119769 12 <![CDATA[The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175924253m/574889.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175924253s/574889.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/574889.The_Rattle_Bag_An_Anthology_of_Poetry 4.37 93 The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary literature's leading poets.

Moreover, Heaney and Hughes have elected to list their favorites not by theme or by author but simply by title (or by first line, when no title is given). As they explain in their Introduction: "We hope that our decision to impose an arbitrary alphabetical order allows the contents [of this book] to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them--each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big, voluble world."

With undisputed masterpieces and rare discoveries, with both classics and surprises galore, The Rattle Bag includes the work of such key poets as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath among its hundreds of poems. A helpful Glossary as well as an Index of Poets and Works are offered at the conclusion of this hefty, unorthodox, diverse, inspired, and inspiring collection of poetry.
</div>]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 29574 3.53 16036 1156 1982 1525 0374527059 9780374527051 11 <![CDATA[The Oresteia of Aeschylus: A New Translation by Ted Hughes]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1158284799m/1525.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1158284799s/1525.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1525.The_Oresteia_of_Aeschylus_A_New_Translation_by_Ted_Hughes 4.27 60 Phedre, Euripedes' Alcestis, and the trilogy of plays known as at The Oresteia, a family story of astonishing power and the background or inspiration for much subsequent drama, fiction, and poetry.

The Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephori, and the Eumenides--tell the story of the house of Atreus: After King Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son, Orestes, is commanded by Apollo to avenge the crime by killing his mother, and he returns from exile to do so, bringing on himself the wrath of the Furies and the judgment of the court of Athens.

Hughes's "acting version" of the trilogy is faithful to its nature as a dramatic work, and his translation is itself a great performance; while artfully inflected with the contemporary, it has a classical beauty and authority. Hughes's Oresteia is quickly becoming the standard edition for English-language readers and for the stage, too.
</div>]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 2000 256071 0374528640 9780374528645 7 <![CDATA[Selected Poems 1957-1994]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173199480m/256071.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173199480s/256071.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256071.Selected_Poems_1957_1994 3.96 55 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; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, 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 into Birthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.
</div>]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 2001 256072 0571086144 9780571086146 4 <![CDATA[The Hawk in the Rain: Poems]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173199481m/256072.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173199481s/256072.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256072.The_Hawk_in_the_Rain_Poems 3.94 31 Hawk in the Rain was the first collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The book won the New York Poetry Center First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore; it also won the Somerset Maugham Award. Indeed, Hawk in the Rain was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir, and in its pages we can still see the promising brilliance of one of the most important English-speaking poets of the modern age.
</div>]]> 996 3.98 2324 315 1957 1892251 0571221386 9780571221387 6 <![CDATA[Letters of Ted Hughes]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189886843m/1892251.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1189886843s/1892251.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1892251.Letters_of_Ted_Hughes 4.03 29 996 3.98 2324 315 259130 4.13 46 9 2007 572606 0312168179 9780312168179 3 <![CDATA[Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Stories]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175900376m/572606.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175900376s/572606.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572606.Difficulties_of_a_Bridegroom_Stories 3.55 20 996 3.98 2324 315 1995