selected collected essential occasional

books:

2 reviews
Shakespeare

Ecco, 1999

Essential Shakespeare
As a 3rd Year English Student, I highly reccomend this collection. While I already own the Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, this book I find offers a unique way of reading Shakespeare. Ted Hughes offers a brilliant introduction in which he relates how Shakespeare can be read on two very unique levels. Plays in their entirety, and the way that this book offers selections, exerpted speeches ...

Collected Poems

5 reviews
Ted Hughes

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Bury the Hate, Celebrate the Greatness
Ted Hughes has been reviled for over four decades for his part in the life and death of the poet Sylvia Plath. So strong is her mythology that many have relegated Hughes to a minor role, a bit player, in her epic tragedy. Plath was an astonishing and powerful poet. In the end she became one of the best poets of the twentieth century. So did her one-time husband. Ted Hughes evidently had a great ...

Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose

3 reviews
Ted Hughes, William Scammell

Picador USA, 1995

The world in a collection of essays
It is difficult to call to my mind a book that could more thoroughly engage a serious reader, in a reading life that spans three or four decades, than Winter Pollen. Hughes has a way of putting things into a context that the western mind can participate in. He is a wholly erudite man in a time when the world is as "thoroughly departmental" as an ant colony. It is with awe and a total ...

Crow

2 reviews
Ted Hughes

Faber and Faber, 2001

Stark, disturbing, but strangely exhilarating
In this slim but powerful volume of poetry, Ted Hughes creates poems like bare bones, blood-blackened stones, jagged icicles, all that's defiant & frightened & forever struggling against a meaningless Universe & an often malevolent God. Crow is a figure of myth, a hungry, hardscrabble chaos of feathers & dark dreams -- sometimes a trickster, sometimes a victim, sometimes a guide, sometimes a ...

Four Quartets (Audio, Faber)

13 reviews
T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes

Penguin Audio, 1997

T.S. Eliot for Sikhs
I am a deeply religious Sikh living in America. The Four Quartets is to me a shining example of a man of deep understanding of God and reality. I have read this poem many times since I first read it back in college. It speaks directly to my soul. There is no passage, no phrase, which does not work for me. I read some sections to my wife when we were first married, and she thought that it ...

New Selected Poems

3 reviews
Ted Hughes

HarperCollins Publishers, 1982

A collection from the most honest poet around
Philip Levine is an amazing poet and this really is an amazing collection. I recently saw him do a reading and was so floored by the brutal honesty and anger of his poems. I am an 8th English teacher and have given my honors classes some of his poems, which they loved. Philip Levine works on so many levels and can be enjoyed by anyone. Must reads from this collection include: "You Can Have It," ...

The Oresteia

4 reviews
Aeschylus

Farrar Straus & Giroux (T), 1999

Great story, great translation, great read: surprises galore
What a story! What a bloodbath ! It leaves the catsup'y-trite bluster of the typical Hollywood slasher pic in the dust. And it is Hughes who accomplishes this through his translation. Perhaps saying "story by Aeschulus" is not offering the old-timer his due... doubtless, when read in the Greek, the original had the flash and spurt of Hughes' version. But lacking the ancient tongue you'll find ...

Crow

9 reviews
Ted Hughes

Faber and Faber, 1973

Marvelous poetry focused on the remarkable title character
"Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" is a collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The copyright page notes that the book was first published in 1972. This is a remarkable book that often reads like some apocryphal sacred text. The book is dominated by its title character, who is the focus of a significant number of the poems. Crow is a multifaceted character with mythic heft: he is a ...

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

2 reviews
Ted Hughes

Faber and Faber, 1993

The Vision behind the Vision
What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from? And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from? Many of the world's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn to such questions, and more than a ...

Collected Poems

29 reviews
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes

Buccaneer Books, 1998

Collection Tracks the Course of a Genius's Rise and Fall
Anyone who has not discovered Plath's poetry-- distinctly superior to her prose-- would be greatly served to seek out a slim volume called "Crossing the Water." This haunting collection features most of her greatest poems from what I think to be her most creative years: 1957-1959. If these don't grab you, then give up on her altogether. However, the Collected Poems are the inevitable place to ...

Cave Birds

1 review
Ted Hughes

Faber and Faber, 1978

Again, Ted Hughes making leaps and bounds with word
Cave Birds is yet another Hughes work where the English language takes strides and leaps above expected banality. Hughes is not for the light hearted. He always takes bold, often pungent moves with in work, but somehow never alienates his readers. In a Green Mother we get "Why are you afraid?/ In the house of the dead there are many cradles./ The earth is a hive of heavens/" to only be redeemed ...

Remains of Elmet

1 review
Ted Hughes

Faber and Faber, 1979

"Archaeology of the Mouth"
In the prefatory poem that begins "Remains of Elmet", Ted Hughes talks about an "Archaeology of the mouth". For Hughes, this "archaeology" describes a process of excavation and rediscovery which is movingly enacted throughout the volume. While this collection is often labelled as "a book of pretty words and pictures" (which it undoubtedly is, when coupled with Fay Goodwin's extraordinary black ...

Amen

1 review
Yehuda Amichai, Ted Hughes

Milkweed Editions, 1987

More poems by the great master of modern Hebrew poetry
Amichai is the great master of modern Hebrew poetry, whose work can always be read at many different levels. There is a clear surface meaning, and there are layers of implications. The language too is like Agnon rich with religious traditional textual irony. With Amichai the poetry always really means.

New Selected Poems

1 review
Ted Hughes

HarperCollins Publishers, 1982

dark, beautiful, brilliant
I'm a poetry scanner. I pick up poetry books and randomly read the odd line here and there to ascertain whether or not I like the general style of the poet. If I do, I'll usually buy the book. I discovered the genius of Ted Hughes (who I expected to dislike because I'd never liked Sylvia Plath) at a market stall. His work absolutely blew me away. My other favourite poets are ee cummings, TS Eliot ...

By Heart (Faber Poetry)

1 review

Faber and Faber, 2002

An excellent poetry anthology
It's clear that the editor, Ted Hughes, gave this selection a good deal of thought. The selection was a search to find poems of suitable length for and worthy of memorization. So the term "by heart" functions both in the sense of knowing by memory and feeling something deeply. Anyway, you will find many poems you will want to know by heart: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone", "There's a ...

The Mermaid's Purse: poems by Ted Hughes

1 review
Ted Hughes

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2000

Little Purse of Wonder
Ted Hughes has the ability to make the natural world jump at you, alive, off the page. Nowhere is this more evident than in this wonderful cornucopia of sea poems beautifully illustrated by Flora Mcdonnell. There is literally the zing of sea salt from the moment you open the book. For a person, like myself, who does not live by the sea, it is a tribute to Hughes' power that I felt ...

The School Bag

1 review

Faber and Faber, 1997

Glorious
This collection, covering an astonishingly wide range of work from many different historical periods, should be in every library. With as many magical discoveries as old favorites. Not to be missed. (And be sure to find The Rattle Bag as well).

Collected Poems

2 reviews
Ted Hughes

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

A huge, landmark collection from a major poet
This enormous (1300+ pages) collection of Ted Hughes's poetry should cement his reputation as one of the two truly major British poets of the second half of the twentieth century. (The other being the much less prolific Philip Larkin.) This single volume collects ALL of Hughes's published poetry, including the late "Tales From Ovid" and "Birthday Letters," his bestselling book of poems about/for ...

Collected Poems for Children

1 review
Ted Hughes

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007

A must-have collection
Once in awhile a book comes along that's difficult for me to review. Ted Hughes' "Collected Poems for Children," illustrated by Raymond Briggs, is one such book. I just want to tell you: "This book is great. You must buy it." But an imperative does not a review make, so I'll elaborate. Ted Hughes' "Collected Poems for Children" is a book every home, library, and school should own. Containing ...

Ted Hughes Reading His Poetry

2 reviews

HarperCollins Audio, 1996

Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes, poet lauerate of England. His deep toned voice billows out the most fantastic verse with nuanced Yorkshire cadences. The poetry selection for these 2 cds is strong as one might expect. A distinct pleasure to sit back and calmly draw a breath to on an evening when the kids are down, the television is off and there's you and Ted sharing a quiet evening.

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