Volume 29, Number 10 · June 10, 1982
Last Exit to Nature
By Richard Murphy
New Selected Poems
by Ted Hughes
Harper & Row, 242 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Remains of Elmet
poems by Ted Hughes, photographs by Fay Godwin
Harper & Row, 125 pp., $16.95
Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama
poems by Ted Hughes, drawings by Leonard Baskin
Viking, 63 pp., $14.95
Under the North Star
poems by Ted Hughes, drawings by Leonard Baskin
Viking, 48 pp., $14.95
Moortown
by Ted Hughes
Harper & Row, 182 pp., $10.95
Ted Hughes is surviving. Four volumes of his poetry, and three critical studies of his work,[*] have been published in the last three years. His New Selected Poems has recently appeared. Including all of Selected Poems 1957-1967, and a few good surprises, it draws from seven subsequent volumes, taking more from Remains of Elmet (1979), and Moortown (1980), than from Crow (1971), Gaudete (1977), and Cave Birds (1979). Demons and mythical birds rightly give way to the real creatures of his imagination, from a fox in a 'midnight moment's forest' at the beginning, to a bear eating salmon in an Alaskan 'river of light' at the end. The selection contains some of the supreme poetry of the last two decades, and nothing weak or worthless.
Review, 3202 words
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