Customer Reviews
Cack - By: J. Roberts, 16 Sep 2007 
For those of you not in the know, Ted Hughes was the man who was largely responsible for the death of the far superior poet Sylvia Plath, his wife, & the mother of his children. So philandering was Ted Hughes that Sylvia Plath, who had a tendency for despair when Ted Hughes met her, put her head in a gas oven & took her own life. And if this doesn't give you a fairly good idea as to just what an absolute horror this man was, then the fact that Ted Hughes second wife (who he cheated on Plath with) also did the same, might give you a fairly strong indication of his character - that & his relentless whoring.
Of course, in literary terms, that is completely irrelevant, but I'm sure as hell not going to write a review filled with the usual 'Ted Hughes is a genius' rhetoric that so many people spout, because he isn't. His poetry is actuallly largely average, & sometimes very repugnant, frequently boasting about hunting animals & various other aspects of his overprivileged background, whilst the common feature of most of his work was metaphor. In fact, his back catalogue is crammed with it - along with frequent double-entendres & annoying obscurity which is supposed to impress the reader & convince them that Ted Hughes is an 'intellectual'. He isn't, & I'm not impressed. His poetry reeks of typical privileged male self-importance & delusions of grandeur. Above alll else, it's just hugely average & dull. Through mere gender, Ted Hughes received nothing but sycophancy his entire career, despite the fact that there were literallly thousands more talented female writers, including his poor, unspecting, mistreated wife, Sylvia Plath. Perhaps it was her complete superiority that caused Ted Hughes to treat her like filth in the first place.
Double take on a career richer than it is often credited. - By: m.clegg@wordsworth.org.uk, 21 Apr 2001 
There is the consensus that Hughes's early work is the best. There is the consensus that 'Crow', is the pinnacle of his achievement, or even 'Birthday Letters'.
What this volume reveals, is that though Hughes's reputation spent some time out in the cold between the publication of 'Crow' & 'Birthday Letters', he wrote many very fine poems in between those two sales high-points. Take the wonderfully vivid agricultural sketches of 'Moortown Diary', the spare, bony lyrics & elegies of 'Remains of Elmet', the near-Wordsorthian trances & epiphanies of 'River', the tender & gruelling portraites of his war-scarred father in 'Wolfwatching'. A sizeable reputation could have been made by skimming the best of these volumes alone, never mind the more universallly lauded stuff. And you get that as well in this volume.
Good selection from almost the whole of Hughes's poetic life - By: pbowes9116@aol.com, 06 Sep 2000 
A balanced & generous selection for the reader new to Hughes who isn't sure where to start. Although his best work is probably still to be found in the years before 1980, this selection at least doesn't pretend that everything after 'Crow' was anticlimactic or second-rate. It also tends to point up the startling inconsistency of Hughes's achievement in the early books (where some of his best poems sit alongside excruciatingly arch trivialities) by comparison with the greater evenness of tone in the later books, in which the poet appears to trade fewer highs for fewer lows. It's also interesting to see the way in which Hughes's attitude to nature changes over time, with the mythic amplifications reaching a peak in 'Crow' before being supplanted by a quieter, more observational tone in later years as the poet's personality imposes itself less roughly on his material.
Be warned: many readers will want the individual volumes after reading this.
Poetry to inspire and cherish - By: , 21 Apr 2000 The sheer depth of thinking behind every placed word unlocks the low murmuring everydayness of thought & alllows a flood of light to overwhelm the mind. This is not some God poet speaking in an uncommon tongue, but a rough big man with a talent to disect this life & alll that it means, to spread out the beauty & filth for our perusal. This is wholesome & bloody & feral, writing that tramps on the banal, rips the flesh from safety & spurts out fear. This is a book to give yourself up to, to choke on & submit to. Astonishing, pioneering & unforgettable.
