Selected Poems 1957-1994

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.

“Whether he wrote poems about the farm, or wild birds and animals, or birthday masques for Royal occasions, Hughes had the same spontaneity of craft which came from some inner joy in the ceremonial powers of poetry.” —John Bayley, The Times Literary Supplement

“Hughes has a great spiritual imagination--he is truly a visionary and a modern primitive.” —Ian Sansom, London Review of Books